There is a kind of inevitable
logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more
thought and science have been going their own way regardless of the
common events of life. You see--they have got loose. If there had been
no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had
not come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome
the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry
was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin.
But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politics
and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about
the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for
ever,' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning.
It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does
but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which
would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the
commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities
in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its
peace, these great mountains here seem but little things.
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