lacing the poets in one star, the novelists in
another, the scientists in a third, the mechanicians in a fourth, and in
each I imagined a Utopia. A very little mature thought and the most
ordinary observation of plain men, men who at 20 have far more practical
sense than I possess to-day, would have demonstrated the hopelessness of
this arrangement, and the deplorable social chaos it would have led to.

I think, however, that along this line of feeling I grew more and more
in sympathy with my father's dimly expressed hopes to achieve something
tangible in the way of interstellar or planetary communication. So that
gradually he, by reason of a desire that slowly invaded every emotional
recess of his being, and I, through the vagaries of an imaginative mind
reached successively an intense conviction that we should work in this
direction.

There was much in our scientific work also that encouraged a certain
high mindedness and liberty of speculation, a careless audacity before
the most difficult tasks. The resolution of matter into a phase of
energy, the interpretation of light as an electric phenomenon, the
mysteries of the electric force itself, the peculiar hypotheses about
the force of gravitation, lead men, studying these subjects, and endowed
with speculative tendencies to conceive, moved also by a quasi
sensational desire to reach new results, that the most extravagant
achievements are possible to science.

With us, regarding the physical universe as a unit, recognizing the
notes of intelligence of a deep coercive and comprehensive plan involved
throughout, feeling that our human intelligence was the reflex or
microcosmic representation of the planning, upholding mind, that if so,
no conceivable limitation could be placed upon its expansion and
conquests, that further it would be incomprehensible that the colonizing
(so to speak) of the central mind occurred only on one sphere, when it
doubtless might be embodied in other beings, on hundreds or thousands or
millions of other spheres; that continuance of life after death was a
truth; feeling all this, their concomitant influence was to make us
positive that the human mind in an intelligent, satisfactory,
self-illuminating way some day would reach mind everywhere in all its
specific forms; and that the abyss of space would eventually thrill with
the vibrations of conscious communion between remote worlds.

With feelings of this sort excited and reinforced by my fat