races.
Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continually
neutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanity
today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elemental
fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was a
feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down to
be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities of
earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended sea
from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmised
in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger.
But it was all a dream--a dream, we suspect, about the earth as well
as about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations on
society, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond question
or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matter
and we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must be
immortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never be
less powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world.
There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of
elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time
these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of
them we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, with
a greater strength than man's, has yet been trained to be his servant,
and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of
its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we may
hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break
out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope
that man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be to
wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more
and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of
the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one
harmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use the
scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.

Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict
with each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them
opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal
strength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will make
headway. Let them unite toget