When the first armed man transferred a method employed by nature into a new medium, and derived his armour from the outer world instead of growing it in his own organism, he took a step which led to many similar re-interpretations. One of the most important of such steps was Organization. The very word recalls its “organic” origin. The organs of the human body form an interdependent community with a common interest. The organs again are composed of tissues, and the tissues of individual cells having, as many biologists believe, a rudimentary consciousness of their own. All these—some millions of millions of millions—form a vast and closely-organized community consisting of many more distinct individuals than there are human beings on earth. The human race is such an organized community. A swarm of bees is another, but while the latter only deals with “natural” food-supplies and housing materials, the human community, thanks primarily to the use of fire, gathers its resources from realms utterly inaccessible to the ordinary animal, and establishes an unassailable superiority. Thus the human army, consisting of Pathfinders, Organizers, Rank and File, and Stragglers, with a trail of Vultures behind, presses ever forward on its victorious march of progress.
Its general procedure may be represented as follows:
The Pathfinders are in front, seeking out new avenues of advance. They may discover a new coal mine or oil well or mineral deposit; a more economical method of lighting and heating; an improved method of weaving or printing; a new medicine; a new formula for expressing numerical relations; an improved method of transmitting news; or merely a simplified method of mending socks. Whatever it may be, the new discovery is passed on to the organizers, the captains of industry, the capitalists and financiers, and the trade unions. In a well-organized community, the discovery or invention is given every opportunity of proving its value. Where vested interests and monopolies stand in the way, either in the camp of the capitalists and property holders or in the ranks of labour, much opposition may be encountered, and the community may be deprived of the advantages of the new discovery. But if there is no such opposition, the work incidental to the utilization of the discovery is distributed by the organizers among the rank and file, consisting of mechanics, clerks, and small investors. As soon as the industry is successfully established, the Vultures begin to hover round. Some of them seek to drive the industry into a corner where it can only exist by serving the interests of the Vultures. Other Vultures endeavour to corner the labour trained by the pathfinders and pioneers and hold the new industry to ransom. But in a well-organized community these nefarious activities are kept within bounds. The pathfinders, the organizers, and the rank and file are given their due credit and reward, and the community reaps the full benefit of the discovery.
And now let us examine the activities of the Pathfinders. In classical times the most audacious and renowned of these were the Phœnicians, who, armed with their shields and corselets of “oak and triple bronze,” sailed through the Pillars of Hercules out from the tideless Mediterranean into the unknown terrors of the Atlantic. Their ships were seen in the Baltic, trading woven purple garments for amber, and on the British coasts in search of tin. At the request of an Egyptian Pharao, they circumnavigated Africa, and brought back wildly improbable but, nevertheless, true stories about new constellations and the sun culminating in the north.
In Egypt itself explorers and discoverers of another kind were busy. The science of Chemistry was born there, and named after “Chem,” the native name of Egypt. In Greece and its colonies the science of Geometry attained a high standard, while Syracuse stands out as the home of Archimedes, one of the greatest mathematicians, physicists, and inventors of all time. These Pathfinders enriched humanity with priceless gifts. They surveyed the field of possible discovery from a high altitude, and their clear vision traced out the paths to higher achievement, to be trodden by their successors.
Had they lived in better-organized communities, their labours would have been turned to greater advantage, and would have benefited a greater number of their fellow men. But the day of capitalism and mass-production had not yet come. The splendid achievements of an Archimedes only served to benefit a tyrant, and his single-handed scientific fight against the Romans ended in disaster to his beloved city.
In Greek and Roman days, owing to the lop-sided organization of human society, scientific discoveries could only benefit a few powerful people. The downtrodden underlings were unaffected by the work of the Pathfinders. They had to await the dawn of the Industrial Age before they could take part in the progress of the élite. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Hieros, the Medicis, and the greater of the Bourbon and Stuart Kings that they fostered the advancement of science and protected the Pathfinders from the persecution of ecclesiastical and other vultures.
The invention of gunpowder laid low the chivalry of the Middle Ages. The Hobbling God triumphed over the mail-clad monopolist on horseback. The Sudden Fire armed the foot-soldier with a winged shaft of death. The stone-thrower had became the unerring sharp-shooter. The range of human power increased apace. The glass-blower with his fiery furnace produced cunning contrivances of glass which increased the range of the human eye twenty or thirty-fold. A free philosopher like Spinoza could discourse of the fundamental substance without fear or favour, since the grinding of optical glasses assured him an independent livelihood. Then came the French Revolution with its clarion call to a wider organization of humanity, which was eventually brought about, not by speeches and pamphlets, but by the harnessing of coal to inaugurate the Mechanical Age.
The nineteenth century saw the fulfilment of the dream of an organized Humanity, a human world unified, not by the spread of humanitarian philosophies, but by the material bonds of progress.
Some of my critics have ridiculed my “robust” belief in the reality of progress through invention and the use of machinery. I see no reason to modify my view. A generation ago, Ruskin deplored the spread of railways which scored their lines through “bleeding landscapes.” To me a railway line is a thing of beauty, wherever it may be found. It is a symbol of a higher will and of a purpose transcending the puny sphere of the individual. To see the rails is as if the sinews and muscles of some supernatural being were made visible and accessible to me. And who shall say that I am wrong in that feeling? A railway is an organization superior to man. “Societies,” says Edward Carpenter,[3] “not only of bees (as Maeterlinck has shown), but of all creatures up to man, have, qua societies, a life of their own, inclusive of and superadded to that of their individual members.” And so a railway appears to me as an individual of a higher order, closely organized and endowed with a life of its own. Its mental equipment is its personnel, its directors, clerks, drivers, guards and porters. Its body consists of rails, bridges, tunnels, stations and rolling stock. It has a soul and a living purpose. It has a power of self-maintenance and self-preservation and a rudimentary memory.