The Starting Point
Chapter I
1937 — 2017
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Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty.
Preface (p. 3)
The Earth; The Starting Point
Chapter I
1937 — 2017
Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty.
Preface (p. 3)
The Earth; The Starting Point
The Earth; The Starting Point
Preface (p. 3)
Preface (p. 3)
No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.
gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06
Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from one another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the cosmos could no longer bridge the gulf between them.
But I, with imaginative vision, retained sight of them all. It was as though some other, some hypercosmical and instantaneous light, issuing from nowhere in the cosmical space, illuminated all things inwardly.
Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from one another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the cosmos could no longer bridge the gulf between them.
But I, with imaginative vision, retained sight of them all. It was as though some other, some hypercosmical and instantaneous light, issuing from nowhere in the cosmical space, illuminated all things inwardly.
Edition: 1
Language: English
Language: English
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Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
Date First Posted
June 2006
June 2006
Date most recently updated:
November 2017
Once more, but in a new and cold and penetrating light, I watched all the lives of stars and worlds, and of the galactic communities, and of myself, up to the moment wherein now I stood, confronted by the infinity that men call God, and conceive according to their human cravings.
I, too, now sought to capture the infinite spirit, the Star Maker, in an image spun by my own finite though cosmical nature. For now it seemed to me, it seemed, that I suddenly outgrew the three-dimensional vision proper to all creatures, and that I saw with physical sight the Star Maker.
I, too, now sought to capture the infinite spirit, the Star Maker, in an image spun by my own finite though cosmical nature. For now it seemed to me, it seemed, that I suddenly outgrew the three-dimensional vision proper to all creatures, and that I saw with physical sight the Star Maker.
I saw, though nowhere in cosmical space, the blazing source of the hypercosmical light, as though it were an overwhelmingly brilliant point, a star, a sun more powerful than all suns together.
It seemed to me that this effulgent star was the center of a four-dimensional sphere whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos. This star of stars, this star that was indeed the Star Maker, was perceived by me, its cosmical creature, for one moment before its splendor seared my vision. And in that moment I knew that I had indeed seen the very source of all cosmical light and life and mind; and of how much else besides I had as yet no knowledge.
gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06
June 2006
It seemed to me that this effulgent star was the center of a four-dimensional sphere whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos. This star of stars, this star that was indeed the Star Maker, was perceived by me, its cosmical creature, for one moment before its splendor seared my vision. And in that moment I knew that I had indeed seen the very source of all cosmical light and life and mind; and of how much else besides I had as yet no knowledge.
gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06
June 2006
The Starting Point (17-18)
Chapter II
Chapter II
On the Other Earth
pp. 25-26
Interstellar Travel
Chapter I
Interstellar Travel (pp. 17-18)
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Chapter III
Desert of darkness and fire
Chapter I
Interstellar Travel (pp. 17-18)
Chapter III
Desert of darkness and fire
A Busy World (30-31)
The new invention
1937 — 2017
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The Other Earth
2014
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The Diversity of Worlds
2017 — 2019
The new invention
1937 — 2017
The Other Earth
2014
The Diversity of Worlds
2017 — 2019
stimulus to nationalism2014
Prospects of the Race
2017 — Libero
Worlds Innumerable — Mankinds
It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos.
We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
Star Maker — Stapledon
1-85798-807-8 ISBN
The ideologies of the super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway.In civilized regions the super-tribes and the overgrown natural tribes created an astounding mental tyranny. In relation to his natural tribe, at least if it was small and genuinely civilized, the individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination.
Chapter V
Worlds Innumerable; Strange Mankinds
20142015
2016
The Diversity of Worlds
(p. 56)
(p. 56)
When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.