They had reduced themselves to motion in a universe
of motions, with an acceleration, in their own case of
vertiginous violence. With the correctness of their science,
history had no right to meddle, since their science now lay in a
plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could
follow its mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously,
and even wireless telegraphy or airships might require the
reconstruction of society. If any analogy whatever existed
between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on
the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so
violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new
equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation
altogether, like meteoroids in the earth's atmosphere. If it
behaved like an explosive, it must rapidly recover equilibrium;
if it behaved like a vegetable, it must reach its limits of
growth; and even if it acted like the earlier creations of energy
-- the saurians and sharks -- it must have nearly reached the
limits of its expansion. If science were to go on doubling or
quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics
would soon succumb. An average mind had succumbed already in
1850; it could no longer understand the problem in 1900.
Fortunately, a student of history had no responsibility for the
problem; he took it as science gave it, and waited only to be
taught.
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