Page 124 - English Class 07

ingenious : cleaver original
And they live like this not for fun, but because they are too colossal : immense, huge
poor to afford another room. ensue : follow

A still greater danger comes from war. You might say that all through history they have
been wars and that mankind has survived in spite of them. It has even developed and

become civilised in spite of them. This is true, but unfortunately as part of his development
man has enormously increased his power over nature. He has learned to tap the hidden
forces of our planet and use them for his purposes. Now, if his purposes are those of
destruction, each fresh advance in his mastery of nature only increases the danger from

war, as men learn to destroy one another in ever great number, from ever great distances,
and in ever more varied and ingenious ways. Man has now discovered heat to release the
colossal forces locked up in the atom. In consequence, the leading nations of the world are
now making atom bombs, which if another war came, would almost certainly be widely

used. Nobody knows what the effect of dropping atom bombs on a large scale would be,
but it is quite possible that the total destruction of civilisation might ensue . As somebody
has jokingly remarked, in the next war men will fight with atom bombs and in the war after
that with bows and arrows.

Yet another great defect of our civilisation is that it does not know what to do with its
knowledge. Science, as we have seen, has given us powers fit for the gods, yet we use them

like small children.
For example, we do not know how to manage our machines. Machines as I have already

explained, were made to be man’s servant; yet he has grown so dependent on them they

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