6 THE WORLD MACHINE 



truth, their voyages have penetrated to the remotest corners 

 of the earth and reached out among the stars. Magicians and 

 sorcerers to tribal man ; philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, 

 when Hellenism rose ; discoverers and men of science Galileos, 

 Newtons now civilisation is their work ; the modern world 

 is in some sense their creation. Amid the destruction and decay 

 that attends all else from human hands, their achievements 

 remain. The fabrics of the kingdoms melt away ; where Accad 

 and where Carthage stood, no broken pillar lifts its lonely form 

 to mark the spot amid the desert silences. The dust and dreams 

 of Caesar mingle with the forgotten ashes of his slaves. But 

 Archimedes' lever and Thales' magic stone, the theorems of 

 Euclid and Hipparchus' starry sphere, the magnetic compass 

 of the dynasty of Tsin, and the black powder of Berthold 

 Schwartz and his forerunners, the pendulum of Ibn-Junis and 

 Hans Lippershey's far-reaching, near-drawing tubes, the presses 

 of Gutenberg and Coster, the balance and retorts of Lavoisier, 

 James Watt's labouring giants of steam, Volta's pile, and 

 Faraday's whirling magnets, are possessions imperishable while 

 civilisation, their fruit, survives. 



Thanks to five or ten thousand years, perhaps a still greater 

 period, of tolerably connected and consecutive effort, there has 

 been built up a considerable stock of knowledge which, deftly 

 fitted together in an orderly way, has become our one sure 

 guide in this weird journey through the wilderness. Supported 

 by this slowly wrought fabric of fact and logical theory, it is 

 possible now to give at least a partial answer to some of the 

 primitive human problems. Relative to the rest of the cosmos, 

 we know to some extent what we are, we know to some extent 

 where we are, we have some slight idea as to whence we have 

 come, we are beginning to perceive dimly whither we are going. 



Much of this is very new. In nature there is a certain 

 tendency to the dramatic, some little also in the progress of 

 knowledge. In some sense, it seems as if we had attained to a 

 sort of climax. This may be but an illusion, born of the 

 natural inability of the mind to see beyond its own day and 

 time. It may be that the astonishing advance of the last 

 three hundred years will continue without check, and perhaps 

 with accelerated pace. Yet we know that such a dramatic 

 moment came at the opening of the seventeenth century, with 

 the establishment of our ideas of the solar system. So it may 



