In such a slow-breeding creature as man educational adaptation is beyond all comparison a swifter process than genetic adaptation. His social life, his habits, have changed completely, have even undergone reversion and reversal, while his heredity seems to have changed very little if at all, since the late Stone Age.
A mechanical unification of the world has been demanding (and still demands) profound moral and ideological readjustments. It is, for example, being realized, slowly but steadily, that the fragmentary control of production and trade through irresponsible individual ownership gives quite lamentably inadequate results, that the whole property-money system needs revision very urgently, and that the belated recrudescence of sentimental nationalism largely through misguided school-teaching and newspaper propaganda, is becoming an increasing menace to world welfare. The old ideological equipments throughout the world are misfits everywhere.
We want a reconditioned and more powerful Public Opinion. In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas, in a closer synthesis of university and educational activities, in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain, operating by an enhanced educational system through the whole body of mankind, a World Brain which will replace our multitude of uncoordinated ganglia—our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures—with a purpose, national educational systems, and the like; in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs, any hope of an adequate directive control of the present destructive drift of world affairs. We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.
It really does not enhance the natural variety and beauty of life to have all the clocks in a town keeping individual times of their own, no charts of the sea, no timetables, but trains starting secretly to unspecified destinations, infectious diseases without notification, and postmen calling occasionally when they can get by the picturesque footpads at the corner.
Such an Encyclopaedic organization could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious cooperating unity, and a growing sense of their own dignity, informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny.
The mental forces now largely and regrettably scattered and immobilized in the universities, the learned societies, research institutions, and technical workers of the world could be drawn together in a real directive world intelligence.
Without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men’s minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles. As mankind is, so it will remain, until it pulls its mind together. And if it does not pull its mind together then I do not see how it can help but decline. Never was a living species more perilously poised than ours at the present time. If it does not take thought to end its present mental indecisiveness, catastrophe lies ahead. Our species may yet end its strange eventful history as just the last, the cleverest of the great apes. The great ape that was clever—but not clever enough. It could escape from most things but not from its own mental confusion.
Today we can go all round the world in the time it took a man to travel from New York to Washington in 1800, we can speak to any one anywhere so soon as the proper connections have been made, and in a little while we shall be able to look one another in the face from the ends of the earth. In a very few years now we shall be able to fly in the stratosphere across the Atlantic in a few hours with a cargo of passengers, or bombs, or other commodities. There has in fact been a complete revolution in our relation to distances. And the practical consequences of these immense approximations are only beginning to be realized.
Our interests and our activities interpenetrate more and more. We are all consciously or unconsciously adapting ourselves to a single common world.
Man was slower and feebler beyond comparison a century or so ago than he is today. He has become a new animal incredibly swift and strong—except in his head.
The problem of reshaping human affairs on a world-scale, this World problem, is drawing together an ever-increasing multitude of minds. It is becoming the common solicitude of all sane and civilized men. We must do it—or knock ourselves to pieces.
The most hopeful line for the development of our racial intelligence lies in the direction of creating a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing, and release of knowledge.
These innovators—who may be dreamers today, but who hope to become very active organizers tomorrow—project a unified, if not a centralized, world organ to “pull the mind of the world together,” which will be not so much a rival to the universities, as a supplementary and coordinating addition to their educational activities—on a planetary scale.
There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas, and achievements—to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind.
The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual.
It is dawning upon us that this work of documentation and bibliography is in fact nothing less than the beginning of a world brain, a common world brain. What you are making me realize is a sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which (when it is fully developed) will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the entire human race.