“But you have indicated one point I would like to dwell on. The absolute essentiality of material objects and conditions now in the advance of the ‘spiritual’ and intellectual world, and the absolute necessity of discarding dreams and fallacies. In the last great advance, Hoe’s machine has done what all the doctrines could never have done, yet Hoe’s object was not to construct a machine for the improvement of ethics. He was, in his labours, a materialist, pure and simple; his object was the improvement of a machine for the rapid production of printed stuff. He did not work at all in the matter with an eye to great and abstract improvements. He just did his little job well and with all his energy.
“Stephenson, Watt, Wheatstone,—and ten thousand of others, including the whole army of Science, Invention, and Labour—whose combined work has produced the Universal Mind, who have, in fact, created Man, each one of these had only one object: the extension of material knowledge and the improvement of certain material objects and conditions. They were not idealists, they were not teachers; they laboured to produce no doctrines or airy formulæ. They were honest workmen in the cause of material progress, each with his eye fixed on his job.
“Contrast with these the preachers and teachers—all excellent, mind you, and making, in their way, for good, yet all, by their combined efforts, useless for the great uplift that was coming and that could only come through the work of Scientific men in the field of Science, and Mechanicians in the field of material improvement.
“And this fact is a perfect lamp for all who would join in the work of world development. _He who would assist in the development of the world must work not in the field of dreams and theories, but in the field of matter._ That is the doctrine of the spirit of the world whose great hands laboured to make the hills and seas, and flung the moon to the skies for a lamp and a tide-maker, who moulded the chimpanzees into men, and men into civilised men. Dreams and theories and doctrines, preachers, transcendental philosophers and teachers, and even priests—we want all of them, but they are by-products. The work of the world remains the essential thing, and the pioneers of the world are the workers, not the dreamers.