“We find that the development of the universal brain has followed in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth century. “To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the train—that is to say, by the universalisation of thought. “A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages. Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless. Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part of the universal brain. “What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris. The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town. A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence. And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth from fire, and of life from earth. “There have been, in fact, three creations. The creation of the material earth; the creation of life, which reached its ultimate form in men; and the creation of Man from the scattered tribes of men. Man the giant (whose brain extends to China and Peru, and which will eventually include China and Peru), and who feels in the London part of his brain a pain that exists in the Congo or Putumayo part of his brain. Man, who, though a giant, is still in his infancy and who, when he has reached his teens, will be a much more perfect being than he is now. “Ah, but will he?”