The World Set Free | Page 5

but essentially these
were progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed
fixed for ever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would
have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the
busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle
building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable
feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with
the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of
everything barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at
circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there
was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox
belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the
finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were men to whom
this whisper had come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary
lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once they had heard
this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was as it were a painted

curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had
come to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare
and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable thing,
sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find.
The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and
ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of
them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part
heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamt of
attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood and descent; and the thing
they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a
state of dignified abstraction. His common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and
ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and
Roger Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his kindred. Such a man again in an
earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred
years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse,
and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared. And half
the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have supposed that
men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But they could see nothing of the
sort. They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too
poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not
make instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a purpose as
hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine came.
Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use
their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not
still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic
precursor, he was at best purblind.
Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery,
before they began to influence human lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and forgotten, time after
time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal should be mined and burning with
plenty of iron at hand before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam
was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron

upon a larger scale than