“Contrast with these the preachers and teachers—all excellent, mind you, and making, in their way, for good, yet all, by their combined efforts, useless for the great uplift that was coming and that could only come through the work of Scientific men in the field of Science, and Mechanicians in the field of material improvement.
“And this fact is a perfect lamp for all who would join in the work of world development. He who would assist in the development of the world must work not in the field of dreams and theories, but in the field of matter. That is the doctrine of the spirit of the world whose great hands laboured to make the hills and seas, and flung the moon to the skies for a lamp and a tide-maker, who moulded the chimpanzees into men, and men into civilised men. Dreams and theories and doctrines, preachers, transcendental philosophers and teachers, and even priests—we want all of them, but they are by-products. The work of the world remains the essential thing, and the pioneers of the world are the workers, not the dreamers.
“For, though the universal brain has subordinated the individual, as the whole organism subordinates the cell, the universal brain lives, alone, by the individual, and can only grow through material means. And though the universal brain is better, infinitely, than the individual, it can only exercise its power for good on the individual through material means.
“That an individual brain may participate in the life and light of the brain universal and feed on and increase with that life, and feed and increase that life, it must first of all receive that light and life; and, secondly, it must be in a condition to receive it, and this can only be done by material means. And I will show you what I mean by an instance. The man who is crushed beneath ruinous labour, the man whose poverty condemns him not to think, the man who shivers without a fire, who goes with an empty stomach—all of that vast crowd of what we call the Poor—each one of these is cut off, more or less, from the mind universal and can never receive its light except through material means. Preaching and teaching, dreams and theories are useless to these. To participate in universal thought—which is universal good—they must first have the time to think in, they must be defended from the wolves that prey on thought, Cold and Hunger; they must be preached to practically by the two great Apostles, Wheat-flour and Firewood; they must be treated as Hoe treated the dull steel that made his press—lifted materially.
“Having lifted them thus with food and firewood, let Education have its say, and Eugenics, up to a certain point. But education is as useless to a work-broken or starving man as algebra to an ass. Since Man has awakened to life, he has begun to recognize this. The old religions of men looked on the poor as a necessary evil. “The poor are always with us.” But man, though still only a hundred years old, perceives that the Poor are his disease, that the criminals are his disease, and that the idle are his disease.
“The universal mind rejects Poverty just as it has rejected Hate, and Lust, and Intolerance; and its teaching in this respect is, ‘The poor shall not be always with us.’ That is one of the greatest triumphs of the great good giant born of the fusion of intelligences; even though, as yet, the means toward this great end have not been discovered.”
Socialism
“What about Socialism?”
“Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism are as yet the most obtrusive results of this universal-mind disturbance, due to recognition of the evils that affect the body of Man. The giant, on opening his eyes, is furious at his rags and tatters, and the sores which they disclose. Man, newly awakened, is disgusted at his general condition—and that disgust is at the bottom of all the ‘revolutionary’ unrest which we see to-day in the western world.
“I spoke to you of set-backs. Should that unrest develop into a storm, the progress of the world would receive one of the set-backs it is well accustomed to.”