which force mortal intelligence to
recoil upon itself at every fresh attempt to pass the barrier of the
Knowable. Were that barrier unexpectedly pushed back,--were knowledge
to be suddenly and vastly expanded beyond its present limits,--perhaps
we should find ourselves unable to endure the revelation....

* * * * *

Mr. Percival Lowell's astonishing book, "Mars," sets one to thinking
about the results of being able to hold communication with the
habitants of an older and a wiser world,--some race of beings more
highly evolved than we, both intellectually and morally, and able to
interpret a thousand mysteries that still baffle our science. Perhaps,
in such event, we should not find ourselves able to comprehend the
methods, even could we borrow the results, of wisdom older than all
our civilization by myriads or hundreds of myriads of years. But would
not the sudden advent of larger knowledge from some elder planet prove
for us, by reason, of the present moral condition of mankind, nothing
less than a catastrophe?--might it not even result in the extinction
of the human species?...

The rule seems to be that the dissemination of dangerous higher
knowledge, before the masses of a people are ethically prepared to
receive it, will always be prevented by the conservative instinct; and
we have reason to suppose (allowing for individual exceptions) that
the power to gain higher knowledge is developed only as the moral
ability to profit by such knowledge is evolved. I fancy that if the
power of holding intellectual converse with other worlds could now
serve us, we should presently obtain it. But if, by some astonishing
chance,--as by the discovery, let us suppose, of some method of
ether-telegraphy,--this power were prematurely acquired, its exercise
would in all probability be prohibited.... Imagine, for example, what
would have happened during the Middle Ages to the person guilty of
discovering means to communicate with the people of a neighboring
planet! Assuredly that inventor and his apparatus and his records
would have been burned; every trace and memory of his labors would
have been extirpated. Even to-day the sudden discovery of truths
unsupported by human experience, the sudden revelation of facts
totally opposed to existing convictions, might evoke some frantic
revival of superstitious terrors,--some religious panic-fury that
would strangle science, and replunge the world in mental d