When a new invention
has been made, we ask ourselves, Why was it not thought of before? The
discovery seems obvious, and the invention simple, after we know them.
Now that speech itself can be sent a thousand miles away, or heard a
thousand years after, we discern in these achievements two goals toward
which we have been making, and at which we should arrive some day. We
marvel that we had no prescience of these, and that we did not attain to
them sooner. Why has it taken so many generations to reach a foregone
conclusion? Alas! they neither knew the conclusion nor the means of
attaining to it. Man works from ignorance towards greater knowledge
with very limited powers. His little circle of light is surrounded by a
wall of darkness, which he strives to penetrate and lighten, now groping
blindly on its verge, now advancing his taper light and peering forward;
yet unable to go far, and even afraid to venture, in case he should be
lost.
To the Infinite Intelligence which knows all that is hidden in that
darkness, and all that man will discover therein, how poor a thing is
the telephone or phonograph, how insignificant are all his 'great
discoveries'! This thought should imbue a man of science with humility
rather than with pride.
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