Hitherto Man was using matter to serve his needs. Now he has succeeded in seizing and manipulating the sources commanding the very origins of matter.
The greatest of Man’s scientific triumphs happens also to be the one in which the largest number of brains were enabled to join together in a single organism, the most complex and the most centrated, for the purpose of research.
Nothing in the universe can resist the converging energies of a sufficient number of minds sufficiently grouped and organised.
Is not every kind of effect produced by a suitable arrangement of matter? And have we not reason to hope that in the end we shall be able to arrange every kind of matter, following the results we have obtained in the nuclear field?
Man, pursuing the flight of his growing aspirations, taught by a first success to be conscious of his power, finds himself impelled to look beyond any purely mechanical improvement of the earth’s surface and increase of his external riches, and to dwell upon the growth and biological perfection of himself.
For millions of years a tide of knowledge has risen ceaselessly about Man through the stuff of the cosmos; and that in him which he calls his ‘I’ is nothing other than this tide atomically turning inward upon itself.
The first phase was the creation of mind through the obscure, instinctive play of vital forces. The second phase is the rebounding and acceleration of the upward movement through the reflexive play of mind itself, the only principle in the world capable of combining and using for the purposes of Life, and on the planetary scale, the still-dispersed or slumbering energies of matter and thought.
Today there exists in each of us a man whose mind has been opened to the meaning, the responsibility, and the aspirations of his cosmic function in the universe.
The great enemy of the modern world, ‘Public Enemy № 1,’ is boredom. So long as Life did not think, and above all did not have time to think—that is to say, while it was still developing and absorbed with the immediate struggle to maintain itself and advance—it was untroubled by questions as to the value and interest of action. Only when a margin of leisure for reflection came to intervene between the task and its execution did the workman experience the first pangs of taedium vitae.
Despite all appearances, Mankind is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our troubles. We no longer know what to do with ourselves. Hence in social terms the disorderly turmoil of individuals pursuing conflicting and egoistical aims; and, on the national scale, the chaos of armed conflict in which, for want of a better object, the excess of accumulated energy is destructively released.
Our future action can only be convergent, drawing us together in an atmosphere of sympathy. I repeat, sympathy, because to be ardently intent upon a common object is inevitably the beginning of love.