The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born and live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant’s phase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives.  It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion and achievement.  In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased to be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars, and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we clamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the air, learn how to overcome the malaria that barred our white races from the tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred such agents of death.  Our old cities are being rebuilt in towering marble; great new cities rise to vie with them.  Never, it would seem, has man been so various and busy and persistent, and there is no intimation of any check to the expansion of his energies.

And all this continually accelerated advance has come through the quickening and increase of man’s intelligence and its reinforcement through speech and writing.  All this has come in spite of fierce instincts that make him the most combatant and destructive of animals, and in spite of the revenge Nature has attempted time after time for his rebellion against her routines, in the form of strange diseases and nearly universal pestilences.  All this has come as a necessary consequence of the first obscure gleaming of deliberate thought and reason through the veil of his animal being.  To begin with, he did not know what he was doing.  He sought his more immediate satisfaction and safety and security.  He still apprehends imperfectly the change that comes upon him.  The illusion of separation that makes animal life, that is to say, passionate competing and breeding and dying, possible, the blinkers Nature has put upon us that we may clash against and sharpen one another, still darken our eyes.  We live not life as yet, but in millions of separated lives, still unaware except in rare moods of illumination that we are more than those fellow beasts of ours who drop off from the tree of life and perish alone.  It is only in the last three or four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods of expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and with incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has felt its way towards its undying being in the race.  Man still goes to war against himself, prepares fleets and armies and fortresses, like a sleep-walker who wounds himself, like some infatuated barbarian who hacks his own limbs with a knife.