I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns
to evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those
last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to the
world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and
sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless
possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would not suffer
open speech, they would not permit of education, they would let no one
be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are younger cannot
imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we
who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
before atomic energy came....
'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real
belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant
nothing to them....
'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared
it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work--a pitiful
handful.... "Don't find out anything about us," they said to them;
"don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
fearful shaft of understanding.
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