Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/228

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Studies in Socialism

a presentiment of the future harmony of submissive nature and sovereign mind: "Their ships went afar off, swift and true as the flight of thought." Now it was the air-ship that went, not yet afar off, but swift and true like thought. Marvellous intuition of the Greek poet, making the harmony of thought the ideal measure of all motion.

That is the aim of man, that is the object of life eternally carried on by the species: to subdue all nature to the harmonious law of mind. And human society will come under the same sway, for it too is still but a part of nature, it is blind and unconscious as she is and composed of brutal and obscure forces at war with each other and controlled by no one.

And those phenomena that we call crises, what are they if not a revelation of the chaotic and rebellious nature that still forms the basis of human society? We can never have a "human" society or humanity, in the true sense of the word, until men have learned to govern social phenomena as they are learning to govern natural phenomena. In that frail balloon moving deliberately toward its goal I see a part of the immense human problem. I might express it in this way: to make life, social life as well as natural life, a thing that can be steered, and to confide the management of it to humanity itself, a humanity that shall be free, self-conscious, and united. Thus