Article August 30, 1913 Issue

MIND'S ADVANCING CONQUEST

HARRY FRANKLIN PORTER.

The history of mankind is the history of the overcoming of material limitation: first, men learned to make fire and thus conquered climate; they then learned to sail and thus to command the sea; then to avail themselves of the energy of gases, or rarefied matter, and thus to shoulder on mechanical power the burden of work and to dreak down all barriers of terrestrial distance, on the sea and under the sea, on top of the earth and underneath, from the arctics to the tropics and from the Occident to the orient. Then began a further onslaught on time and distance in the harnessing of that most subtle and mysterious of material forces, electricity, which gave men first transmission of thought by wire, and within the present decade without any apparent material medium.

Thus has the great, round earth grown smaller, and the nations of the earth been brought into closer and closer union, until today the ignorance bred of isolation and the prejudice bred of ignorance, from which unnumbered human discords have come, are fast being disannulled, and the song, "On earth peace, good will toward men," sung by the angelic choir of old, is becoming the watchword of progress. Now the conquest of the realims above the earth has begun, and ultimate. man's fancy has attempted to compass the end and ultimate. Some say aerial navigation will never become practical,—but these are few in this age will move in the upper space as rapidly as they now move on the earth; still others, more imaginative, more prophetic in their insight, predict that it will be possible to move as fast as the earth itself revolves, in other words, a thousand miles an hour. How—by what practical means—it remains for the future to disclose.

All real progress, since the dawn of time, has been by way of overcoming, removing, disannulling limitation. Startling as the wonders of today may seem in comparison with the triumphs of the past, they are but humble precursors of the wonders to be. The present awkward attempts to soar will seem as the feeble flutterings of the fledgling to the strong, majestic flight of the eagle. Indeed, this simile is woefully inadequate to express the vast difference inevitable between the present and the future; for mankind's ultimate flight will partake little of the bird likeness, marvelous as this bird flight now seems. Aviologists have long sought, but in vain, to reach a satisfactory explanation of the performance of certain species of birds on their migratory journeys; how for days and days enormous flocks of feathery life will glide along at high speed and at great heights apparently without appreciable effort. The only adequate explanation essayed, and it is afforded no counterpart in the experience of natural scientists, is that these creatures, deemed by man so vastly his inferior in thought-power, have in some manner acquired the ability to induce levitation; that is, to control or neutralize the influence of gravitation. Here, then, is a cue to the future of human progress, but the real solution of the problem lies in man's learning to understand the potency that holds the earth in its orbit and guides "Arcturus with his sons."

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