Wilhelm Ostwald

“ Would anybody be the loser if they were to give up their frontiers? No. On the contrary, everybody would be the gainer. The same is true of all lands. Each artificial boundary is necessarily a thief of energy. To maintain a boundary line requires an expenditure of energy; so it does to cross a boundary line. And that energy might be applied to much better purposes.
Then, pray, why do we keep up boundary lines? For the same reason that a tailor sews two buttons on the tails of every man's dress-coat. The two buttons don't button anything. There are even no buttonholes to match. ”

“ On the whole the flight will be accomplished without considerable expenditure of energy, yet very swiftly. As a result, our standards of distance will change. Men will be able to live more scattered, and so in conditions worthier of them. The wounds that the development of machinery in its early stages produced, the horrible misery of the great cities, a higher stage of technical development will surely heal.
We saw that in keeping with the physical character of the air travel through the air will greatly facilitate and augment diffusion between nation and nation. ”

“ That old chicken-hearted poet, Horace, even in his day, centuries on centuries later, was still aghast that a man could have had the idea to embark on the open waters. Contrast that with the present, when a trip across the Atlantic is so safe and pleasant that I, for my part, would far rather spend two weeks on the sea than two clays in a railroad coach. A sea trip is cleaner—and safer. ”

“ Yet we are constantly witnessing the fall of one artificial barrier after the other. Universal mail service will lead irresistibly to a universal stamp, and next to universal money. The German Empire in its formation ripped off one of the useless buttons when it abolished customs duties among the states composing it. ”

“ But man raises artificial differences, differences energetically unproductive, and maintains them with the same devotion with which the tailor defends the position of the two buttons on the dress-coat against anyone who would dare to question it. ”

“ This is essentially man's condition at present on earth, especially upon the solid part of the earth, on which boundary lines can easily be drawn. The same cannot be done on the watery parts. Consequently the ocean is a powerful agent for setting men free and joining them together. Just as water has the power to dissolve some solids, so the ocean acts as a solvent on the rigid political forms into which men are divided, and which keep them apart. A process of diffusion among the various human groups was brought about by travel on the seas. ”

“ The sum and substance of my observations is that the opening up of the third dimension to travel is a fundamental cause of a fundamental change in our social conditions in so far as these are affected by the mutual relations of the great political states. ”

“ Because he uses his energy as mere raw energy. And an ox can do the same. But I have the sincerest respect for the man at a switchboard. He requires but little energy to move the levers, yet on occasion his presence of mind and rapidity of judgment will prevent incalculable misfortune.
We are wont to lay many evils at the door of technical progress. But now we see that to compensate, it in the end raises human worth by opening up activities to man more in keeping with his character. Future man will be as different from men nowadays as the chauffeur from the cabby. ”

“ SCIENTISTS have reason to believe that the solar system was first a gaseous sphere, which slowly turned into a fluid, and finally became a solid. After this, life sooner or later appeared on the different planets, and scientists connect man's appearance with that state of the earth in which it consists of a solid framework partly covered by the fluid ocean and entirely surrounded by the gaseous atmosphere. It was on the solid parts that man first moved. He required an incalculably long period of technical development to obtain some degree of power over the fluid element. ”

“ The reason that conservative sentiment has as yet scarcely been aroused is that the consequences of the introduction of the flying machine are not yet easy to foresee. Besides, the conservatives do not fully believe in the reality of such things as flying machines, and so fortunately lose the chance of using the power they have to nip aviatory enterprise in the bud. In fact, history is playing one of its ironic tricks upon the conservatives. There are conservatives who are advocates of war, and war is a remnant of an earlier, coarser state. ”

“ Those of us who have at heart man's liberation from unnecessary ills do not venture to confide our dream to our neighbors. They will accuse us of chasing chimeras. But intercourse in the third dimension is inevitably realizing our dream. Boundaries that cannot be maintained in practice are doomed to disappear. ”

“ There has been a constant development tending to the internationalization of a larger and larger number of affairs hitherto considered private to each nation. One example is science, which has been almost completely internationalized. The conquest of the air will suddenly add vastly to the sum of international values and interests. This will set free for cultural purposes enormous stores of energy previously consumed in maintaining frontiers. Energies latent in the wide masses of the people will be made available for all mankind by appropriate cultivation and development. ”

“ Such beings are points on a line, or whole lines, and all they can do is move forward and backward on a line. If two points A and B move on a line, they can meet but never pass each other, and no change can take place in this, their spacial relation. That relation can no more be altered than we can alter our time relations. If your wife happens to be older than you there is no possibility by any operation of which man is capable of making her younger or you older. ”

“ The use of the bicycle has made workmen much keener and readier. Similarly, we may expect that the flying machine will produce a comparatively even greater advance in the typically human characteristics.
The flying machine has already counted its scores of victims, pioneers ready to risk death. And it will produce many more before a flight in the air will signify as little as a bicycle ride. But the beings that will soar in the air will and must be a superior race. ”

“ The beings confined to a space of two dimensions, however, are able to avoid contact with one another. But if one of them or a group of them is hemmed in by a line that cannot be crossed, they are held captive. They cannot get out. ”

“ Nerves, sinews, and muscles must be of the highest type in order to cope with the new demands, and the most careful economy of one's powers will be a self-understood condition of life, since the failure of them for the fraction of an instant will involve risk to life. ”

“ Now, these conservative partisans of war are eagerly furthering the perfection of the flying machine, which stands for man's technical progress, because they expect that the conquest of the air will produce an extremely effective mode of warfare in the future. ”

“ It is to be expected that man will learn to fly like the sea-gulls. Sea-gulls can dart through the air at tremendous speed without a single movement of their wings. That is, the motor will be needed only at the start, for certain turns, and for rising. ”

“ In keeping with its gaseous character, its influence upon diffusion will be incomparably greater. The inevitable result will be an entirely new relation between the individual and society.
Surfaces are separated by lines, spaces by surfaces. Our countries are surfaces, and hitherto it has been comparatively easy to separate them by linear confines, and so preserve tariffs and military and linguistic boundaries. But after the third dimension has become accessible it will be absolutely impossible to maintain these divisions. Every country would have to be surrounded by walls as high as Mt. ”