“But since I have taken a broad view of the world, since I have seen that all these things are part and parcel of the malignity from which earth is freeing herself in her journey toward the Benign, I have come to hate those things as a man on the road to some brilliant festival might hate the obstacles on his path.” “But since you have no surety that you possess an individual soul, you have no surety of ever reaching the festival.” “I cannot help that. My immediate aim is to keep up with the procession. I leave the rest to chance.” [Sidenote: The Universal Brain] “All that,” said she, “seems true. No one can deny that the world has developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn’t it? With all its brains on the outside.” “Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain developed. “A hundred—or shall we say eighty?—years ago, the brain of the world consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism. “This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there were men in the world—now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of the saurian to the brain of the civilised man? “What do we find?