Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/501

Rh may not be able to solve it. But we find ourselves possessed of a certain power to mould our fate and to mould to a high degree the forms of nature about us. The world is plastic to the human will. In the last century, Hegel sounded this true note of human conquest, obscured as was his message by a fanciful metaphysic. Heine had the same thought when he spoke of "liberating the imprisoned energies of the human spirit." More recently, a whole group of writers, like Ibsen, for instance, have proclaimed their belief in a glad trust in nature and in human instincts. In America, William James, in his remarkable essay on "The Energies of Men" has shown the almost unlimited powers of accomplishment possessed by the human mind and the human body. In France, Bergson is showing to eager hearers from every part of the world that nature is a vital, not a mechanical, process, and that creation is something which we experience in ourselves in the freedom of action. Politically we see the same spirit exhibited in the twentieth century movements for freedom in Turkey, Portugal, Persia, Mexico, and even in China, where new and more liberal forms of government have been gained or demanded.

We may, then, say that the present epoch represents the emergence of consciousness as a determining and self-conscious factor into the progress of evolution, able in some measure to direct the evolutionary movement itself to the advantage of mankind and able to an indefinite extent to mould the forces of nature to the same end.

The directions in which this powerful conscious force is operating to further human well being are threefold.

First, it improves our material environment by the control and management of natural forces. In this direction tremendous advance is now being made in the invention of new machinery, in the discovery and utilization of new forms of energy, in improved methods of agriculture, in renewing impoverished soils by bacterial agencies, in creating new plants bearing useful fruits, in reclaiming arid lands by great systems of irrigation, in facilitating transportation by digging great canals, in making the air as well as the land and water viable, and in many other familiar ways.

Second, it is attempting with apparent success to improve the human constitution, both physical and mental, by intelligent use of the forces both of heredity and of environment. For instance, both the cause and the cure of tuberculosis have been discovered and we have hopes of eliminating entirely this cruel disease. Other diseases which in former times devastated whole regions have been practically conquered, while still others are now in process of control. Mortality has been lessened and longevity definitely increased, so that the population of nearly every country has risen, even where the birth rate has remained stationary or declined. Furthermore, consciousness itself has been made