THE WORLD MACHINE 



CHAPTER I 



IMAGO MUNDI 



( A toi) 



SOME morning afield, when you seem peculiarly alive, a mind all 

 open to the clamour of sensations, impressions, ideas, let your 

 eye range the sky it is taciturn ; the hills they are cryptic ; 

 the sea, if it be there its murmuring voice is confused. Re- 

 flect then a little on what could be our ideas of creation, what 

 sort of a " world image " we could form, if we had found no 

 supplements or aids to the primitive senses with which we are 

 born, if we had no miracle-working lenses and prisms, no angle 

 measures, no strange magnetic needles, no Euclid, no long line 

 before us of explorers and discoverers to write that ample page 

 of knowledge which the pressed types make now the universal 

 heritage of the race. As it would be to us, so it was to men 

 and minds like yours and mine, ten, twenty thousand years ago. 



In ten or twenty thousand years, we may imagine, the face 

 of the earth has changed but little. The sky, the monotonous 

 wash of the sea, the hills, the plains, the yellow wastes of the 

 desert, must have looked very much to the cave-dwellers as 

 they do to us. The human animal, too, has not varied greatly 

 his dress, his speech, his social relations, a little ; the main 

 activities of his daily life, his pleasures, his moral and economic 

 problems, the struggle for existence, the ceaseless round of birth 

 and death, remain much the same. What has so wonderfully 

 changed in these ten or twenty thousand years is the human 

 mind and its outlook on the world. 



The transformation has been immense how immense we 

 have learned but recently, through the larger development of 

 anthropology, to know. The earlier ideas of mankind were 

 almost pure fancy. The earth rested serenely upon the back of 



