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Recent Developments in European Thought by Various
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hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the
end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the
contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current
of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get
right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream
may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were
insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and
capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.

The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders--the
motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not
sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent
upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather
than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying,
but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine
that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought
together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the
individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the
two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of
engineering as our own Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the
steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday,
Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913,
before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was
telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming
one in an altogether new sense.... More than four centuries ago the
discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the
European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the
earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our
disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in
each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in
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