n they had ever had
before to think of other and more important things. It was the
disappointment of his life that his invention, instead of being used
creatively, used to free men from fighting and make men think of things,
had been used largely as an arrangement for making people so afraid of
war that they could not think of anything else. Whichever way he turned
he saw the world in a kind of panic, all the old and gentle-minded
nations with their fair fields, their factories and art galleries, all
hard at work piling up explosives around themselves until they could
hardly see over them. As this was the precise contrary of what he had
intended, and he had not managed to do what he had meant to do with
making his money, he thought he would try to see if he could not yet do
what he had meant to do in spending it. He sat down to write his Will,
and in this Will, writing as an inventor and a man of genius, he tried
to express, in the terms of money, his five great desires for the world.
He wished to spend forty thousand dollars a year, every year forever,
after he was dead, on each of these five great desires. There were five
great Inventors that he wanted, and he wanted the whole world searched
through for them, for each of them, once more every year, to see if they
could be found. Mr. Nobel expressed his desire for these five Inventors
as people often manage to express things in wills, in such a way that
not everybody had been sure what he meant. There seems to have been
comparatively little trouble, from year to year, in awarding the prizes
to some adequate inventor in the domain of Peace, of Physics, of
Chemistry, and of Medicine; but the Nobel Prize Trustees, in trying to
pick out an award each year to some man who could be regarded as a true
inventor in Literature, have met with considerable difficulty in
deciding just what sort of a man Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set
aside his forty thousand dollars for when he directed that it should
go--to quote from the Will--"To the person who shall have produced in
the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic
tendency."

Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in Stockholm, invented
and published a book four years ago, called the "New Word," which was so
idealistic and distinguished a book, and so full of new ideas and of new
combinations of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in
England who did not instinctively recognize it