’Think what we are.  It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and died.  Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been.  Life was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished.  And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars....  Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen.  All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left behind.’

‘But Love,’ said Kahn.

’I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons.  And that is what you mean, Kahn.’

Karenin shook his head.  ’You cannot stay at the roots and climb the tree,’ he said....

‘No,’ he said after a pause, ’this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it.  So far literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself.  Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five.  You, too, Kahn!  There are endless years yet for you—­and all full of learning....  We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it.  We do free ourselves from it.  We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life.  You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight.  Turn it to delight.  That may be one way out.  In a little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater things.  The old religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things.  Let them suppress.  If they can suppress.  In their own people.  Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.’

‘But incidentally,’ said Rachel Borken; ’incidentally you have half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—­for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.’