Essay On Knowledge Is Power
If we wish to have a striking instance of the truth of this-let us compare for a moment modern London with the state of affairs that Caesar found when he visited the banks of the Thames two thousand years ago.
In muscular strength the ancient Britains, who fought in vain against the Roman legions, were probably equal or superior to modern Englishmen. Yet how little could their bodily powers achieve without the guidance of knowledge! They could extract out of the earth a little iron, which was so rare and valuable that they used it as a material for money and ornaments.
Their clothes were made of skins, and they knew how to doctorate their bodies with blue wood. They crossed the Thames by swimming, or in small boats which they constructed of wicker-work and covered with skins. Their towns were protected by stockades and morasses, consisted of huts in which a single aperture served the purpose of door and window.
Imagine the feelings with which one of these ancient Britains would contemplate modern London. He would see the same sky and sea and river, and would meet men of the same stature as himself, but all else would appear to have undergone a magical' transformation. What were in his time undergone a magic a transformation.
What were in his time desolate mud banks are now defended against the river by embankments of solid masonry beyond which, on either side, he would see the churches, railway stations, factories, hotels and private dwellings of a mighty city. He would wonder at the great bridges with which the broad river is spanned, and at the iron ships coming in from the sea against wind and tide without the help of sail or air.
Wherever he turned he would be struck dumb by the power over Nature exercised by human beings closely resembling himself, except for the one material difference of superior knowledge.
For the superior power which raise the modern civilised man no far above his barbarous contemporaries and predecessors, is all derived from increase of knowledge. By learning the properties of the magnetic needle, the mariner has acquired the power of traversing the ocean in the darkest night, when there are no stars visible. Knowledge of the properties of saltpetre and dynamite enables the engineer to cut a path through the solid rock, so that the locomotive may pass under the Alps or climb the mountain barrier of the Ghauts.
By studying the properties of steam, modern inventors have learned to construct engines by means of which distant parts of the earth have been brought into close communion with each other; and knowledge of electricity is like to produce in the future still greater progress in the same direction.
Object-lessons illustrating the power acquired by knowledge crowd in upon the eyes in boundless profusion, as we pass through the thickly populated centres of modern civilisation, and see how human industry has transformed the face of Nature. All the changes that man has effected by working upon Nature are due to knowledge; and if the knowledge now possessed by civilised men were suddenly lost, the whole world would release into barbarism.
Fortunately, knowledge has fortified herself against the possibility of such a catastrophe by the invention of the art of printing, which secures future generations against the danger of losing the results of the scientific discoveries of their predecessors.
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