Page:Science and War.djvu/14

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effect something which is beyond his unaided powers. Thus, step by step, he has increased his capacities to an almost limitless extent. Gifted with only mediocre vision the telescope enables him to see the almost immeasurably distant and the microscope to see the almost immeasurably small. In spite of his little strength he can shatter in pieces the hardest rocks and lift the most stupendous weights. If we would learn to what he can attain in speed we must look to his skates, his cycles, his motors and his aeroplanes. The whole world is not too big for his powers of communicating instantaneously with his fellow man either by sign or speech. In short, although there is little ground for thinking that a man comes into the world endowed in any wise differently from his ancestors of many thousand years ago, the accumulated gifts of Science have opened out to the adult civilized mind of to-day the possibility of a life which covers a realm and which is endowed with powers wholly transcending those for which Nature framed him as an individual.

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