Let us
look forward to that era, perhaps not so distant as we believe, when the
great adventures in the enchanted realm of the arts and sciences may no
longer be the privilege of a gifted few, but the rightful heritage of
a race of genius. In such a world men and women would no longer seek
escape from themselves by the fantastic and the faraway. They would be
awakened to the realization that the source of life, of happiness, is to
be found not outside themselves, but within, in the healthful exercise
of their God-given functions. The treasures of life are not hidden; they
are close at hand, so close that we overlook them. We cheat ourselves
with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and women of the future will not
seek happiness; they will have gone beyond it. Mere happiness would
produce monotony. And their lives shall be lives of change and variety
with the thrills produced by experiment and research.
Fear will have been abolished: first of all, the fear of outside things
and other people; finally the fear of oneself. And with these fears
must disappear forever all those poisons of hatreds, individual and
international. For the realization would come that there would be no
reason for, no value in encroaching upon, the freedom of one another.
To-day we are living in a world which is like a forest of trees too
thickly planted. Hence the ferocious, unending struggle for existence.
Like innumerable ages past, the present age is one of mutual
destruction.
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