So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs
would double in force and number every ten years.
Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had
fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he
had seen four impossibilities made actual -- the ocean-steamer,
the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor
could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to
come. He had seen the coal-output of the United States grow from
nothing to three hundred million tons or more. What was far more
serious, he had seen the number of minds, engaged in pursuing
force -- the truest measure of its attraction -- increase from a
few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many thousands in 1905,
trained to sharpness never before reached, and armed with
instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and
accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature
herself had never known it to be, making analyses that
contradicted being, and syntheses that endangered the elements.
No one could say that the social mind now failed to respond to
new force, even when the new force annoyed it horribly. Every day
Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with
enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing
at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but
never for a single instant could stop.
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