364 THE WORLD MACHINE 



of ten thousand vast globes like the earth, each with its many 

 continents, its white and black and yellow races, its Seven 

 Wonders, and a wearisome line of Alexanders and Caesars, of 

 Tamerlanes and Kubla Khans. Let us then come a little closer, 

 pursue our fancy further. 



Conceiving our civilisation as dating back ten thousand 

 years, if there be ten thousand planets of about the same degree 

 of mental development as earth's humankind, it follows that 

 there is at least one wherein the concourse of human history 

 might be exactly parallel to our own. Somewhere in the distant 

 ways, we might imagine a planet which, like our own, has just 

 attained to a knowledge and use of electricity, just found the 

 means of lightening its burdens by the employment of steam, 

 just developed the art of painting, just found its Beethoven 

 and its Wagner, just begun to agree to settle the differences 

 among peoples by compromise or by arbitration, instead of 

 by appeal to the bludgeon or to the largest number of bullets 

 and bombs and fools to shoot them. 



For that matter, the fanciful mind might even reflect upon 

 an even closer possible parallelism, upon some planet distant 

 so far that even the light of its central sun is shut from our 

 eyes a parallelism of each of our human lives. Even upon 

 our own earth, it is only our lack of imagination, conditioned 

 in the very narrow limits of human intercourse, that hinders 

 us from realising that, among the billion or billion and a 

 half of folk who tread this ancient earth, each one of us must 

 have hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of alter egos. 



The human pattern is not so diverse. There are few among 

 us who have known a hundred persons so closely and intimately 

 as to penetrate the inner working of their lives. Even in a 

 hundred we discover innumerable traits and actions close akin 

 to our own. In a hundred thousand the parallelism would 

 become closer. In fifteen hundred millions undoubtedly it 

 would coincide in multiplied instances. Our human pride bids 

 each of us deem that he is in some sense unique, and that 

 he orders his life after an especial fashion of his own. Could 

 we visualise the reality, we should discover that we are, each 

 one of us, but one of a thousand or one of ten thousand whose 

 ideas, ambitions, dreams, and daily lives are, in all essential 

 ways, identical. 



