It was at the same period that the whole race breasted back the darkness. There came at times in their history an age of exceptional advance, that made the preceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had they yet been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily. It was easy enough to say that such and such exceptional men lived then, and that they produced the phenomenon. But that was only reasoning in a circle; they were as much a product of the time as their fellows; whence did they get the inspiration which spurred them on, or the plastic material in which they could work? They would have been nothing without their conditions and circumstances. They surprised themselves with their powers and successes, as they strode forth into the primeval darkness and illuminated it. It all appeared very simple when once accomplished. They had been gazing for generations into the darkness, where now there was a blaze of light. An imaginative pioneering book had long ago suggested that the impulse came from outside the round of the earth. And one of the most brilliant discoveries of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof of this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu or will-telegraph had made it easy, by localising the new thrill of expectation, and revealing that it came from no terrene source. Out of what seemed the profound inane such inspirations issued, and if they found a soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient outlook and industrious collection of materials, they fertilised the period into exceptional efflorescence and fruition. Many an impulse comes out of the blue and falls unavailing in that no nation or race or period is fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see, was one of the falsest of ideas; because no matter patent to the human sight fills it, the interstellar space was believed to be the wilderness of the universe, cold, bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be the home of all supersensuous life, crowded with an energy that needed no stellar matter or atmosphere to support it, that never appealed to any but the highest and latest-developed senses of man. The Limanoran couriers out on the verge of the earth’s atmosphere had been the first to feel this new flash that lit up such a vast region of the infinite darkness; they came back inspired with new resolution and made the first of the discoveries; they gave a magnetism to their fellow-workers in the same line, and soon the leaven spread through the whole people. The fervour of originality became the order of the day. To decipher the unknown handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its hardest problems, to make new inventions and discoveries, to push out into the darkness that surrounds the world,--these became the ambitions of all.