“For, though the universal brain has subordinated the individual, as the whole organism subordinates the cell, the universal brain lives, alone, by the individual, and can only grow through material means. And though the universal brain is better, infinitely, than the individual, it can only exercise its power for good on the individual through material means.
“That an individual brain may participate in the life and light of the brain universal and feed on and increase with that life, and feed and increase that life, it must first of all receive that light and life; and, secondly, it must be in a condition to receive it, and this can only be done by material means. And I will show you what I mean by an instance. The man who is crushed beneath ruinous labour, the man whose poverty condemns him not to think, the man who shivers without a fire, who goes with an empty stomach—all of that vast crowd of what we call the Poor—each one of these is cut off, more or less, from the mind universal and can never receive its light except through material means. Preaching and teaching, dreams and theories are useless to these. To participate in universal thought—which is universal good—they must first have the time to think in, they must be defended from the wolves that prey on thought, Cold and Hunger; they must be preached to practically by the two great Apostles, Wheat-flour and Firewood; they must be treated as Hoe treated the dull steel that made his press—lifted materially.
“Having lifted them thus with food and firewood, let Education have its say, and Eugenics, up to a certain point. But education is as useless to a work-broken or starving man as algebra to an ass. Since Man has awakened to life, he has begun to recognize this. The old religions of men looked on the poor as a necessary evil. “The poor are always with us.” But man, though still only a hundred years old, perceives that the Poor are his disease, that the criminals are his disease, and that the idle are his disease.
“The universal mind rejects Poverty just as it has rejected Hate, and Lust, and Intolerance; and its teaching in this respect is, ‘The poor shall not be always with us.’ That is one of the greatest triumphs of the great good giant born of the fusion of intelligences; even though, as yet, the means toward this great end have not been discovered.”
