HUMAN history stands for humanadvance. There never has been, there never can be, a backward step.Emergence is the fiat of life. Life without aspiration could not be life, for its end is dust. Every human step in all time has been an effort at betterment. No man ever did evil in evil's name, but always in the name of good. Though his steps were misdirected and the proposed good were but selfish consideration, nevertheless it was his idea of good—of gain, of acquisition. Terrible blunders have been committed, and "by his mistake a man is often instructed" (Science and Health, p. 403). Were men entirely at peace, satisfied in every demand of their nature, they would not so ceaselessly pursue these divergent and haphazard lines of effort. But it is because human thought and action are subject to a limitation obviously inconsonant with an unquenchable and basic demand for liberty, that men daily cast aside that which has failed to satisfy, and pursue their weary wanderings through the empty desert of human hopes.
Long experience has established the proposition that mankind accomplish their emergence from subservience to material forces to their comparative mastery, through discovery of the laws which govern them, —e.g., the great conveniences resulting to modern life from latter-day applications of electricity have resulted from the discovery of a law that the various lines of electrical force could be exerted in a rotary field. Yet all the known laws of electricity have failed to make it anything but a refractory and treacherous servant. Every new law seeming to meet new requirements for public safety but gives rise to new and critical exigencies. It is evident, then, that the world has made next to no progress in discovering the law which governs in absolute finality electricity or anything else in the material world the use of which subjects us to its material limitations and contingent fears.
It is further evident that material sense has no laws at all upon which to depend. A law, to be law, must be "supreme, absolute, and final" (Science and Health, p. 219). Such law cannot be broken. If it be broken in one jot or tittle, it is no more law. It must be without appeal in infinite phase and presentation. Mortal man has sought out many inventions, but all such must lie in the dead and arid plane whose promised oases are but the sad delusions of thirsty and thwarted sense. In the irony of it all, it would sometimes seem that hate and diabolism control the compass. These so-called laws, too often but the handmaid of disaster, have ever received the plaudits of the world as the great discoveries of the ages, the boon of civilization, etc.
