Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/18

 moral nature will have been not merely revolutionised, but recreated, just as our own morality has been recreated during the last hundred years, not so much by the influence of material environment or the march of invention, as by the regeneration of human conscience.

In no way will the acceleration of the speed of progress be more apparent than in the thoughts and emotions of men. But to say this is not to belittle the progress which science and invention have in store for the new age. In applying a sort of imaginative telescope to the mental eye it will be necessary to keep constantly in view the utter inconceivableness of modern achievement by the civilised world of the past, When electricity was no more than a sort of scientific plaything—when notions of its possible uses were (as in Davy's time) far less substantially imagined than, for instance, the possible uses of radium are to-day, even scientific thinkers, endowed with what Huxley so luminously applauded as scientific imagination, had no rudiment of the materials for conceiving such inventions as the electric telegraph—far less the possibilities of transmitted and picked-up wave energy. And here, at the beginning of wireless telegraphy, we are no less in the dark as to what will develop from it and what will supersede it. The nineteenth century progressed, almost from first to last, on the strength of the discovery of how to utilise