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With Watt's utilization of steam vapour as a motive power, man suddenly passed into a new and portentous chapter of his varied history. Thenceforth, he was to multiply his powers a thousandfold by the utilization of the invisible powers of Nature such as vapour and electricity. This prodigious change in his powers, and therefore his environment, has proceeded with ever-accelerating speed.
It may be likened to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented catastrophe. As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.
A well-fed reasonably healthy body usually has enough stored nutrition to fast for quite a bit longer than it takes to "clean house." While house cleaning is going on the body uses its reserves to rebuild organs and rejuvenate itself. Rebuilding starts out very slowly but the repairs increase at an ever-accelerating rate. The "overhaul" can last only until the body has no more reserves.
With ever-accelerating velocity the machine tooled forward down the long stretch, while Beatrice stood gazing after it in rapt attention. Then all at once, when it had sped some three hundred feet, Stern rotated the rising plane; and suddenly the machine lifted.
To this we owe the elasticity of the instrument. Its vitality is due to the fact that, by usage, judicial interpretation, and, when necessary, formal amendment, it can be thus adapted to the ever-accelerating changes of the most progressive age in history, and that a people have administered the Constitution who, in the process of such adaptation, have generally shown the same spirit of conservative self-restraint as did the men who framed it.
Improvement there has been during the historical period: with goodwill and clear thought Huxley looked for ever-accelerating improvement, though contemporary civilizations seemed neither to embody any worthy ideal nor even to possess the merit of stability.
If, indeed, it were ignorance, stupidity, and destitution, instead of mental and moral development, that were the sterilizing influences, then the improvement of the race would go on swimmingly, and in an ever-accelerating ratio. But since the conditions are exactly reversed, how should not an exactly opposite direction be pursued? The answer to Mr. Greg's inquiry is obvious.
"Into no State," he continues, "were greed and luxury so long in entering; in these late days avarice has grown with wealth, and the frantic pursuit of pleasure leads fast towards a collapse of the whole social fabric; in our ever-accelerating downward course we have already reached a point where our vices and their remedies are alike intolerable."
Yet already it has transformed the world, and its success proceeds with ever-accelerating velocity.
Professor Cook has said that "the movement of English diction, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was on the whole away from the Bible, now returns with ever-accelerating speed toward it." If the phrases went out, they came back.
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