Such is the truth of human possibility and our necessities as I
perceive it, and that is the way man must live if our species is to
survive and pass on to greater destinies. I set down the truth as it is
given me to see it; for me there can be no other truth. On every hand
about us all is the darkness of the unknown, but the light we have,
when we have used our eyes to their utmost, must be our guide. Because
of obtuseness and prepossessions, I may but run beside the realities
I imagine I express. Necessarily reality which goes on all over the
universe and for every instant of time, is infinitely more intricate
and wonderful than any statement, teeming with possibilities still
unsuspected. All the more do we need compass and map and plans to keep
our direction through the jungle of its manifest marvels and dangers.
That this presentation of the current phase of human life as the
occasion for an Open Conspiracy to establish a world commonweal will
seem to many an extreme simplification of our circumstances, should
not condemn it. The value of a map lies in the fact that it is not a
model nor a picture of reality but a reduced abstraction, sufficiently
clear and sufficiently true to essentials and sufficiently free from
irrelevancies to guide.
This scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control over
the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers,
uncertainties and miseries, is offered here as an altogether
practicable one, subject only to one qualification, that sufficient men
and women will be willing to serve it. That there is no foretelling.
It is clear that the whole growth is dependent upon the appearance of
those primary groups, sustaining and spreading its fundamental ideas.
Those ideas have to become the mental substratum of constructive
effort. If those ideas can find sufficient vigorous, able and devoted
people for their establishment, the rest will follow. There is need
of much leadership, not indeed the leadership of a single leader, for
the days of spiritual monarchies are over, nor for the leadership of
exaggerated figureheads, but for the energetic initiatives of many
co-operating personalities. I will not speculate where these leaders
are now, in universities, in laboratories, in studies, in factories, in
mines, in technical schools, but I have a firm belief that they will
come to the call of our mighty opportunities.
For my generation, the rôle of John the Baptist must be our extreme
ambition. We can proclaim and make evident the advent of a new phase
of human faith and effort. We can point out the path it has been
our lifework to discover. We have struggled through the thought and
bitter experiences of our time. We have hammered out our instinctive
individualism on the anvil of socialism; we have witnessed the
apocalypse of the Great War; we have been misled, we have stumbled
through depths of despair, we have learnt. “Here,” we say, “is what
we have made of it all. Here is the basis for a new world.” In the
few years remaining to us we can hope to do no more than that. It
is for you to say whether you will set your feet in this direction
and go along with us and go further. Upon you--individually and
multitudinously--the future rests. Here and there chance may correct
and supplement the efforts of our race and save us from the full
penalties of our mistakes and negligences, but saving the impact of
some unimagined disaster from outer space, the ultimate decision of the
fate of life upon this planet lies now in the will of man.