THE PROSPECTUS
We are on the threshold of the aeronautic age. What mankind, up to the present time, and especially in the last two or three decades, has accomplished in the realm of technic is simply fabulous—is the triumphant annihilation of the antiquated concept “Impossible.”
And this is to go on in constantly accelerating progress. How feeble in their first beginnings, how widely separated from one another in time and space have been the great inventions and discoveries. And now! Scarcely a day passes without some technical improvement being simultaneously achieved in different places. The rapidity of progress results in one marvel making another possible. Thus, to take only one example, the dirigibility of the air-balloon was attained only because automobilism had created the light motor.
The intellectual and moral uplift of humanity has not kept up with the technical. This is plainly seen in a single paragraph the reading of which gave me the impulse to make the proposed experiment. The paragraph read: “The dirigible balloon is destined to become the chief weapon in wars to come.”
This is equivalent to saying: “We will use the latest triumph of victorious civilization for the confirmation of the most antiquated barbarism.”—This must not be!
What the physicists, the chemists, the engineers have given us, one depending on another, each building a little higher on the discoveries of his predecessors, what they have done through comprehending and controlling the forces of nature and making them our servants, is on the point of changing one half—the material half—of our world into a realm of magic.
But how does it stand with the spiritual half, the immaterial half? The unhappiness of men, the wickedness of men, the mutual hatreds of men,—these ghastly things give the answer to the above question: the spiritual half is still far, far behind. The everlasting forces which rule in this other half, and which, when they come to be known, controlled, and made useful, would be able to change this half also into a realm of magic: at the present time they are as yet concealed and inactive.
The engineers, mechanicians, and technicians of the moral forces are the poets and prophets, the philosophers and artists; they are the dynamic agents of thought, the leaders of intellect, the pathfinders in the jungles of social institutions, the aviators in the eternal sphere of ideas! Yet they are scattered through the centuries, scattered in space. One lives in New York; another in Paris; the third at Yasnaya Polyana; their names go from the élite in one land to the élite in other lands, but do not reach the masses. How much more powerful their work would be if it were coördinated, if the knowledge of their doctrines, the glory of their names, the magic of their art, proceeding from one central point, should radiate in all directions. Motors and propellers have taught us that power must be concentrated and compressed, in order—by explosions—to drive the vehicle.