e cave to the electric light is the
way that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to say, the way
of free and fearless thinking, free and fearless experiment, organised
exchange of thoughts and results, and patience and persistence and a
sort of intellectual civility.

And with the development of philosophical and scientific method that
will go on with this great increase in man's control over himself,
another issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses of
ignorance and difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It has
been the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that men
have bred their dogs and horses and left any man or woman, however vile,
free to bear offspring in the next generation of men. Still that goes
on. Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasure
in the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seems
designed to perpetuate mediocrity. A day will come when men will be in
possession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable them to master
this position, and then certainly will it be assured that every
generation shall be born better than was the one before it. And with
that the history of humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase which
will be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a child as yet
unborn.

THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with
destiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; and
when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to
extinction Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates the
exhaustion of Nature's kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself. Last
of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He
dispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps
the sceptre of the world. Before man the great and prevalent creatures
followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of
the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the
land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged
reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals,
the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle
dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last
comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being
again.

There is nothing else in