Work and Discovery 145 



I mi Lack i>< 



lion. During all these centuries few people could 



1 or wr : much ol" the knowledge wit 



hurled because it could not be understood except 

 by t very few *' vho constantly endeavored 



to piece it together. So the progress in discos 

 wtt slow, because the people cmiKi not take full 

 advantage of the experience of the past. For 

 example: The Chinese had known the art of 

 printing ne.i thousand years and yet Europe 



had not discovered it, because there was no com- 

 munication between the Chinese and the Euro- 

 peans. After the discovery of printing in Europe, 

 and the discovery of how to make cheap paper, it 

 became easy to print books showing what people 

 had learned in the past. More people found out 

 how to read and write and more and more people 

 Studied what had gone before, so that the past 

 experience became available to more and more of 

 the population. 



Here again it was the necessities of work which 



f the great educational factors. All the dis- 

 coveries in science, in the making of machincrv. 

 in the improvement of communications, and in 

 the other physical surroundings of man, have been 

 made possible, because we learned how to use the 

 past experience which had been recorded for us 

 in books, how to put our imagination to work on 

 the job of improving that past experience. We 

 re then enabled to do our work so much more 



klv and so much more advantageously that we 

 were in a position to make thousands of products 

 where one or two had been made before 



