The Greeks of old believed that the world started with chaos, and that out of the chaos came the cosmos. They were optimists, because in their theory coordination, order, and beauty were evolved out of hideous disorder. There are many pessimists to-day who prophesy the opposite course of development of this, in their opinion, most wicked world. Modern science confirms the ancient belief of the Greeks in a remarkable manner. Nothing else so resembles that chaotic start of the world which the ancients conceived as does the activity of a young star, because nothing more completely illustrates lack of order and coordination. Each one of its pulsating atoms is indifferent to the white-heat activity of the myriads of neighboring atoms, and each one of them pours out its energy in an unconcerned and most prodigal manner into the energy-hungry space. Consider our sun, as an illustration. Tiny energy units are projected from myriads and myriads of its atomic guns in haphazard fashion, apparently without any definite aim. These energy units are propagated through space in a perfectly chaotic fashion, without a definite object in view so far as science can tell. But their fate and destiny are fixed and determined as soon as they arrive on mother earth and are caught by the leaves, the blossoms, and the ripening fruit of the fields, meadows, and orchards, and by the endless nets of the all embracing oceans. The chaotic, non-coordinated energy-swarms are thus imprisoned and made to work together with a definite aim and for a definite purpose. The joys and beauties of our annual seasons will tell you the story of this wonderful transformation of primordial energy from the chaos of the young stars, white hot with joy of life, to the cosmos of the old, cold, and moribund earth. The principal lesson of this story is the great physical fact that terrestrial organisms have instrumentalities with which they coordinate the non-coordinated, thus bringing the order of old age out of the disorder of youth, final cosmos out of primordial chaos. Is not the existence of these instrumentalities the fundamental guiding principle in the development of terrestrial life? Does not all our experience teach us that progress means more complete coordination of all natural activities, the activities of the atoms in the burning stars as well as of the cells in our terrestrial bodies? Call this progress evolution, or anything else you please, it certainly is there, and it leads to a more beautiful and a more perfect order of things. The most nearly perfect product of these coordinating instrumentalities is man—after man, what? Yes, a superman; but what will that superman be? The present man, with his physical and mental faculties more highly developed?—or the superman as represented by what I call ideal democracy? Carty, guided by his life experience and by the opinion of some biologists and philosophers, favors the latter view. There certainly is something in the evolutionary progress of the world which favors the view that the coordinating instrumentalities which guide the activities of every organism, and which are very powerful in man, may enable us some day to find a way of coordinating the non-coordinated activities of the many millions of individuals of a great community like these United States, and thus of creating an ideal democracy. I see in the organization of the National Research Council the first step in that direction.

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

October 14, 1922.

My dear Doctor Pupin:

I accept with regret your resignation as a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In doing so I want to express to you the thanks of the Government and people of the United States of your services as a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics since its organization in 1915.

I take this occasion to record recognition and appreciation of the fact that, as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Aircraft Communications, during the World War you undertook to develop a reliable means of communication between aircraft in flight, and that, by virtue of experiments conducted and directed in your own laboratory, you were successful in contributing in an important respect to the development of one of the great marvels of our age, the radio telephone.

I regret that you cannot continue to devote your talents to the scientific study of the problems of flight as a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Most sincerely yours,

Dr. Michael I. Pupin,
Columbia University,
New York City.

Facsimile of Letter from President Harding

Ideal democracy, if attainable at all, will certainly be attainable in our country, whose traditions are gradually eliminating racial hatreds and suspicions and making them unknown human passions on this blessed continent. If I have ever contributed anything substantial to the progress of this splendid movement, whether as an immigrant or as an inventor, it has been most amply rewarded by the generous spirit of the letter on the opposite page, written by a man whom I had the honor of knowing personally and who to me always represented the ideal type of a genuine American.

These few concluding lines I wrote on the day when this good American breathed his last. His memory will always encourage us in the belief that our blessed country is destined to become the first ideal democracy of the world.

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