Out of Their Minds by Clifford D. Simak Page B

human animal, as steam makes an impact upon a mechanism and makes an engine run.
    We might ask, once the steam has made its impact and performed its function, what happens to the steam? I think that it is as logical to ask, once thought has made its impact, what happens to the thought—to that exchange of energy which we are told is necessary to bring about and produce the thought.
    I think I know the answer. I believe that thought, the energy of thought, whatever strange form thought itself might take, streaming unceasingly through the centuries from the minds of billions of men and women, has given rise to a group of beings which in time, perhaps a not too distant time, will supersede the human race.
    Thus the superseding species arises from that very mechanism, the mind, which has made mankind the dominant species of today. This, as I read the record, is the way that evolution works.
    Man has built with his hands, but he builds with mind as well, and I believe better and somewhat differently than he might imagine.
    One man’s thought about a vicious, ghoulish shape lurking in the dark would not bring that lurking shape into actual being. But an entire tribe, all thinking (and afraid) of this same ghoulish shape would bring it, I believe, into actual being. The shape was not there to start with. It existed only in the mind of one man, crouching frightened in the dark. And frightened of he knew not what, he felt he must give shape to this thing of fear and so he imagined it and told the others what he had imagined and they imagined it as well. And they imagined it so long and well and so believed in it that eventually they created it.
    Evolution works in many ways. It works in any way it can. That it had never operated in quite this way before may merely have been because until the human mind developed it never possessed an agency which would allow it to bring about actual entities out of the sheer force of imagination. And not out of imagination alone, not by wishful thinking, but out of the forces and energies which man as yet does not understand and may never understand.
    I believe that man, with his imagination, with his love of story telling, with his fear of time and space, of death and dark, working through millenia, has created another world of creatures which share the earth with him—hidden, invisible, I do not know, but I am sure that they are here and that some day they may come out from their concealment and enter upon their heritage.
    Scattered throughout the literature of the world and through the daily flow of news events are strange happenings too well documented to be mere illusions in each and every case …

6
    The writing ended in the middle of the page, but there were many other pages and when I flipped the sheet over I saw that the next page was crammed with a jumble of what appeared to be a mass of notes. Written in the crabbed calligraphy of my friend, they were jammed into the page as if the sheet of paper had been the only one he’d had and he had schemed and planned to use every inch of it to cram in his fact and observation. The notes marched in a solid phalanx down the center of the page and then the margins of the page were filled with further notes and some of the writing was so pinched and small that there would have been difficulty, in many instances, in making out the words.
    I riffled through the other pages and each one was the same, filled and crammed with notes.
    I flipped the pages back and clipped the note from Philip onto the front of the sheaf of pages.
    Later, I told myself, I would read the notes—read them and attempt to puzzle through them. But for the moment I had read enough, far more than enough.
    It was a joke, I thought—but it could not be a joke, for my old friend never joked. He did not need to joke. He was filled with gentleness and he was vastly erudite and when he talked he had more use for words than to employ them in telling stupid