30 PHYSICAL FORCE 



been emancipated and his place taken by his tireless 

 competitor. But it will be less familiar to some of 

 you that this energy can not only displace, it can 

 replace animate energy, and as time goes on it will 

 more and more replace it. Conceivably, some future 

 race of men, instead of sitting down to dinner, will 

 attach themselves to something akin to an electric 

 lamp-socket and draw thence from the public mains 

 the supply of pure physical energy required for the 

 day's work without any necessity of absorbing at the 

 same time the useless husks the material wrappings 

 in which this energy is done up that constitute our 

 present food. 



Now, though less generally appreciated at its true 

 human significance than other scientific developments 

 of the nineteenth century, this is probably the most 

 fundamental and important. The doctrine of organic 

 evolution cut away some of our most cherished 

 notions about ourselves on the biological side. 

 Fallen man a discredited creature with eyes ever 

 turned backwards into his alleged more glorious past, 

 a feeble and ineffective imitator of bygone days, 

 dressed up by myth and poetic fancy to appear 

 divine, gave place to the truer and more robust 

 conception of man ascending from the animal world, 

 a creature of hope and promise, with eyes ever 

 forward on the future, and with reason gradually 

 growing and developing to the point of comprehend- 

 ing the terms on which he stands with universal 

 nature. Simultaneous with this profound reversal 

 of mental outlook came the realisation that the 

 physical strength in which he gloried was, even less 

 than his body, of divine origin, but was borrowed 

 from the inanimate world and could be augmented 

 therefrom- without the agency of life at all. Never 

 before in his long history had any fundamental factor 

 of his existence so suddenly and completely changed. 



