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One of the many paradoxes of this book is that it rouses the spirit like a militant hymn tune, yet it is not emotionally tinged but a logical juxtaposition of scientific observations. Though its bold originality and lucidity typify the author, it could hardly have been
written without the work of many other people. We glimpse the author surveying the lonely crowd with Riesman, gazing on to the end of time with Stapledon, following animal drives and the learning process with Holt, comparing art and visual experience with Arnheim, and experimenting in the paranormal with Carrington.
Most striking is the paradox with which the book opens. The author lists some of our present perils, cold war, possible hot war, 'seething new nationalism over half the world, almost universal problems of poverty and disease, … the struggle for power … [and] great instability in each momentary power aggregation'. Yet despite these threats, he points out, according to historical precedent, 'in and through the crises of today, and tomorrow … potentialities may find fulfilment… Potentialities are not just incompleteness, but radically new kinds of human nature, and bearing the relation of acorn to oak tree … of ovum to adult.' And in conclusion, 'Human potentialities are given by the action of what sleeps within us upon the unformed potentialities of the world'.
The delineation of a potential is delicate as it can only be seen in terms of its fulfilment when it is no longer potential but actual. The author therefore explores the matrix in which these seeds of the future may be found and hints at or hopes for their occurrence. This matrix contains the 'three human natures': the first, concomitant to physiology and the product of evolution; the second, the reaction to culture; and the third, 'the creative thrust of understanding'. As for the first, mutations and economic improvements are changing it today. What may they not, with ever-increasing acceleration, evolve tomorrow? The an