The Universal Brain
“ALL that,” said she, “seems true. No one can deny that the world has developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn’t it? With all its brains on the outside.”
“Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain developed.
“A hundred—or shall we say eighty?—years ago, the brain of the world consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism.
“This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there were men in the world—now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of the saurian to the brain of the civilised man?
“What do we find?
“We find that the development of the universal brain has followed in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth century.
“To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the train—that is to say, by the universalisation of thought.
“A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages. Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless. Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part of the universal brain.
“What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris. The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town. A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence. And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth from fire, and of life from earth.