“And if there is no field beyond?”
“Then this whole business would be as senseless as a farce by M. Crebillon the younger—whom I hope you have never read.”
PART II
THE HOME AS THE HIGHEST POINT YET REACHED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD
The Advance on Material Lines
“I CANNOT deny the truth of what you have told me,” she said. “I can see clearly the different steps up which the world has come, but does it not seem that this new universal mind which is the latest great stage in the advance of the world has, according to you, been produced by purely material causes? It is as much as to say that the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine have created Good—that they, surely, never could do?”
“They have not; they have only circulated thought; they have only created the platform for thought to spread on. They have only created conditions favourable to collective thinking. Collective thought, infinitely more powerful and complex than individual thought, has worked purely on the material given to it by individual brains. It had no other origin or food. Had that material been essentially evil, or if the evil in it had been excessive in comparison with the good, the printing-press, the telegraph, and the steam-engine would have increased the evil in the world.
“But you have indicated one point I would like to dwell on. The absolute essentiality of material objects and conditions now in the advance of the ‘spiritual’ and intellectual world, and the absolute necessity of discarding dreams and fallacies. In the last great advance, Hoe’s machine has done what all the doctrines could never have done, yet Hoe’s object was not to construct a machine for the improvement of ethics. He was, in his labours, a materialist, pure and simple; his object was the improvement of a machine for the rapid production of printed stuff. He did not work at all in the matter with an eye to great and abstract improvements. He just did his little job well and with all his energy.
“Stephenson, Watt, Wheatstone,—and ten thousand of others, including the whole army of Science, Invention, and Labour—whose combined work has produced the Universal Mind, who have, in fact, created Man, each one of these had only one object: the extension of material knowledge and the improvement of certain material objects and conditions. They were not idealists, they were not teachers; they laboured to produce no doctrines or airy formulæ. They were honest workmen in the cause of material progress, each with his eye fixed on his job.