“In their brief primitive phase, the Fifth Men, like so many other races, sought to console themselves by unreasoning faith in a life after death, They conceived, for instance, that at death terrestrial beings embarked upon a career continuous with earthly life, but far more ample, either in some remote planetary system, or in some wholly distinct orb of space-time. But though such theories were never disproved in the primitive era, they gradually began to seem not merely improbable but ignoble.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

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Olaf Stapledon 113
British novelist and philosopher 1886–1950

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