To-day, man has a cinematographic brain.  A thousand images are impressed daily upon the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as moving pictures in a cinema theatre.  The American Press prints every year over 29,000,000,000 issues.  No one can question its educational possibilities, for the best of all colleges is potentially the University of Gutenberg.  If it printed only the truth, its value would be infinite; but who can say in what proportions of this vast volume of printed matter is the true and the false?  The framers of the Constitution had few books and fewer newspapers.  Their thoughts were few and simple, but what they lacked in quantity they made up in unsurpassed quality.

Before the beginning of the present mechanical age, the current of living thought could be likened to a mountain stream, which though confined within narrow banks yet had waters of transparent clearness.  May not the current thought of our time be compared with the mighty Mississippi in the period of a spring freshet?  Its banks are wide and its current is swift, but the turbid stream that flows onward is one of muddy swirls and eddies and overflows its banks to their destruction.

The great indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work.  The great enigma which it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will solve or be destroyed, is this: 

Has the increase in the potential of human power, through thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the potential of human character?

To this life and death question, a great French philosopher, Le Bon, writing in 1910, replied that the one unmistakable symptom of human life was “the increasing deterioration in human character,” and a great physicist has described the symptom as “the progressive enfeeblement of the human will.”

In a famous book, Degeneration, written at the close of the nineteenth century, Max Nordau, as a pathologist, explains this tendency by arguing that our complex civilization has placed too great a strain upon the limited nervous organization of man.

A great financier, the elder J.P.  Morgan, once said of an existing financial condition that it was suffering from “undigested securities,” and, paraphrasing him, is it not possible that man is suffering from undigested achievements and that his salvation must lie in adaptation to a new environment, which, measured by any standard known to science, is a thousandfold greater in this year of grace than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century?

No one would be mad enough to urge such a retrogression as the abandonment of labour-saving machinery would involve.  Indeed, it would be impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and in large part attributable to, a new mechanical invention.