the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as
moving pictures in a cinema theatre. The American Press prints every
year over 29,000,000,000 issues. No one can question its educational
possibilities, for the best of all colleges is potentially the
University of Gutenberg. If it printed only the truth, its value would
be infinite; but who can say in what proportions of this vast volume of
printed matter is the true and the false? The framers of the
Constitution had few books and fewer newspapers. Their thoughts were few
and simple, but what they lacked in quantity they made up in unsurpassed
quality.

Before the beginning of the present mechanical age, the current of
living thought could be likened to a mountain stream, which though
confined within narrow banks yet had waters of transparent clearness.
May not the current thought of our time be compared with the mighty
Mississippi in the period of a spring freshet? Its banks are wide and
its current is swift, but the turbid stream that flows onward is one of
muddy swirls and eddies and overflows its banks to their destruction.

The great indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is
that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work. The great enigma which
it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will
solve or be destroyed, is this:

_Has the increase in the potential of human power, through
thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the
potential of human character?_

To this life and death question, a great French philosopher, Le Bon,
writing in 1910, replied that the one unmistakable symptom of human life
was "the increasing deterioration in human character," and a great
physicist has described the symptom as "the progressive enfeeblement of
the human will."

In a famous book, _Degeneration_, written at the close of the nineteenth
century, Max Nordau, as a pathologist, explains this tendency by arguing
that our complex civilization has placed too great a strain upon the
limited nervous organization of man.

A great financier, the elder J.P. Morgan, once said of an existing
financial condition that it was suffering from "undigested securities,"
and, paraphrasing him, is it not possible that man is suffering from
undigested achievements and that his salvation must lie in adaptation to
a new environment, which, measured by any standard known to science, is
a thousandfold greater in this year