Adventures in the Far Future & Tales of Outer Space — page 231: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

halted. You likened it to a kind of entropy ... | don’t understand, Lya. I-” “There is a thing that blesses us all with Life, Mr. Latham. You call it God. We have our own term. But throughout the Universe, it is the same, and the term is but a matter of semantics, of concept. “There is a force to this Life—a complex of forces—that Is beyond our Knowledge. Beyond yours, as Earthmen, and beyond ours, as Martians who have reached the epitome of scientific learning. We know of it, and that is the extent of our knowledge, save that in knowing of it, we have been able to understand its effects, and, in a sense, to measure it. It is common throughout the Universe, Mr. Latham; each race, as each individual, has its share, as each has his share of Life itself. “There is no word in your language for it. You have come close—you Nave said ‘soul,’ and that Is a part of it. You have Said ‘spirit’ and ‘being’ too, and you have known of ‘mind’ and ‘heart.’ They are all a part of it. “You have written of love and of hatred, of courage and weakness, of cruelty and compassion ... they are a part of It. “But all added together they still do not finish for us the complete sum that is Life, for there is more that Is not given us to know. Yet we recognize these forces, this half-under- Stood complex of—of Life-stuff, and we know that as it Sustains our drive for survival, as it makes us perpetuate ourselves through so many countless todays and tomorrows —as it makes us rise from the primal state to the very apex of our being, it is being used. Not limitless, not infinite— God-given, but not God-like! “When we are young, it makes of us aggressive, competitive, social cannibals. AS we grow older—as we use it —it helps us to perpetuate ourselves into the full blossom of our being; matured, full-grown, truly civilized. And it is then CORniclooo SS CO