Biological Possibilities in the Next Ten Thousand Years 
least some of the leading passages, so many-dimensional art will 
make analogous demands. It is possible that this art would 
reveal a set of objective truths, as the arts of counting and draw- 
ing revealed the truths which we call arithmetic and geometry. 
One of the senses which seems to be much better developed in 
some other animals, notably migrating birds, than in ourselves, 
is that of time. We rely so much on the sun, and now on our 
watches, that we have largely lost this sense, and those who 
perhaps possessed it in an abnormal degree, like Bergson and 
Proust, seem to me to have written a good deal of nonsense. The 
negative aspect of time, of which death is the most striking 
feature, might cease to oppress us if we could realize human life 
as a finite pattern in time, capable of all degrees of perfection. 
No doubt the drugs which alter our perception of time would 
help in this research, though I must confess that I find Cannabis 
preparations very disappointing, perhaps because I cannot 
express my experience in words or other symbols. 
I think that even as soon as ten thousand years in the future 
there will be a real prospect of our species dividing into two or 
more branches, either through specialization for life on different 
stars or for the development of different human capacities. To 
me this seems a terrible danger, as such species could fail to 
understand one another even worse than I fail to understand a 
human being in the stage of savagery, an orchestral conductor, 
or an abstract painter. And such misunderstanding can gene- 
rate quarrels and even war. But this may be a short-sighted 
view. Our descendants will be in a better position than we to 
weigh the advantages and drawbacks of speciation. 
It may take a thousand years or so before we have a know- 
ledge of human genetics even as full as our present very incom- 
plete knowledge of organic chemistry. Till then we can hardly 
hope to do much for our evolution. However as our fastest 
aeroplanes can move about 300 times as fast as a human walker, 
we may hope that our descendants 10,000 years hence may have 
evolved as much as our ancestors did in three million years. I 
think that the fact of genetic homoeostasis will reduce this 
figure to about half a million, which, however, is thought to 
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