Inspiration as a Business Necessity
Everything created by Man first exists as a universal principle which is perfect in Nature and imperfectly worked out by man. Man is always seeking that perfection which Nature holds up to him as his standard, but he never finds it. His constant search for that perfection is the reason for constant change in every created thing. Inspiration is the basic cause of the urge of Man to seek perfection through constant change.
TECHNIQUE
In business, it is necessary to learn techniques for mastery in every department. Without that super-technique it is as impossible for you to succeed as it is for the musician to be a great master without a similar conquest of technique.
Technique is essential information from outside of yourselves. It includes facts of information regarding this new world into which you have just been born, which you have never yet had. You must take them into your mind and THINK them into being as part of your knowledge, just as you take food into you to become a part of your nourishment.
INSPIRATION
On the contrary my responsibility is to awaken that something within you which comes from the inside, and which you have always had. I refer to your divine inheritance of those nitro-glycerine-like qualities of inspiration, imagination, vision and creative thinking power which measure each man’s greatness to the extent in which he can be stirred into explosive action. I cannot give to you this power which lies behind creative action, but I can make you aware of it; and that is my sole purpose of being here.
Perhaps my meaning would be more clear if I define techniques as a process of integrating you into a greater understanding of your business purpose and products so that your knowledge of the product will intellectually equip you to sell it. My work is just the opposite, that of integrating a greater understanding of business purpose and products into you so that your knowledge of your Self will inspire you to sell the product. They both have the same objective, but one accumulates new knowledge from without, while the other stirs age-old fires from within.
A CREATIVE UNIVERSE
Without the stirring of these fires of inspiration, invention, imagination and vision which radiates enthusiasm and eagerness from within you, you are as nothing, no matter how perfect your training in this school. The technically perfect musician who gives nothing of the inspiration which distinguishes a master-musician cannot hold his audience any more than the technically perfect salesman can hold his prospect. Until one learns that he must give of himself, he has nothing whatsoever to give. This is a creative universe. Creative idea flows out from within. Only the form of the idea comes from without. Inspired creators look to the fountains which effervesce within them for their ideas. They then look outside of themselves for the materials with which to assemble those ideas into form.
Those who are equipped with only outside information are among the great majority who seek defeat and find it, while those who are aware of the limitless thought-power which springs from within themselves are undefeatable.
To the extent in which each of you is able to coordinate your accumulated information which comes to you from the outside with the inherent creative thought-power which comes to you from the inside, to that extent only can you climb to the heights which lead you to whatsoever goal you set for yourself. The limit to which you can climb is the limit of your own knowledge, vision and inspiration, backed by action.
Each man sets his own limitations and each man sets them differently. All thinking is limited to your knowledge of the forces of Nature which you have acquired from the outside or recollected from within. Beyond that line of demarcation, no man can think.
So, also, is all human progress limited to man’s collective knowledge, vision and inspiration, backed by action. Beyond that collective knowledge man cannot progress. So, also, is every product and creation of man limited by his knowledge and application of Nature’s forces. Beyond that line of present knowledge no creation of man can pass.
Every machine made by industry is on that line today, and has been on it each day for the last thirty years, and will be on it each coming day for generations. But that line is moving ahead all the time, moving upward toward greater heights as greater knowledge moves that line forever higher.
Bear in mind that the gradual increase of power which we use to transfer our civilization from its simple forms of past ages to the present is due only to a gradually increasing comprehension of Nature’s power principles.
Egoistic man, proud of his few insignificant discoveries, which at best have but lifted us to where we are as apt to use them for mutual destruction as for mutual blessing, continually boasts of our gradual “conquest of Nature.” Nothing could be more absurd. Man is not conquering Nature, he is but conquering ignorance by becoming aware of Nature, a little fraction of it at a time.
As long as you are ignorant of any blessing which Nature holds out for you, you cannot use it. It is like being in a dark room full of unperceivable things which are unavailable until the light is turned on. Business standards of today are defined by the light of today’s knowledge. Tomorrow there will be more light to lift its standards as yesterday there was less. Run your mind backward down the line of history and all the technical developments and think this over. Consider the aeroplane, radio, telephone and all other commonplace commodities of today which were as impossible yesterday as they were in Julius Caesar’s time.
UNDERSTANDING NATURE’S FORCES
All the power in the universe is yours as you replace ignorance with knowledge of that power which Nature freely offers you without any necessity of conquering her. Your own progress is based upon your increasing awareness of Nature’s forces within and without you, and that is as true of every other man in the world, individually and collectively, as it is of you. And it is also true that the only way to get that power and to use it, is to THINK and ACT.
The thoughts and actions of all the ages since the dawn of man have brought us to this present day and stage in world progress. The education of each one of you, since the day you were born, has been to review the thoughts and actions of all men since the dawn of man so you can know what they have done and start from there.
EXPRESSING GENIUS
That is where each one of you stands at the present moment. You have chosen to express that extent of genius which each one of you has become aware of within you.
However, your technical education is not enough. You may know all the mechanism of all the machines to perfection; you may know all the processes and methods; still you may be unworthy of your high inheritance until the fires of your own inspiration are awakened. Whatever your knowledge may be, only mediocrity awaits you until you become aware of the creative spirit within you and learn how to use and direct this inner power.
Everyone knows that a close association with superiors is the greatest ladder upon which one may climb. In my student days I advanced more by ten minutes inspirational talk with the great masters of my profession than I did from weeks of technical grind. During sixteen weeks of association with President Theodore Roosevelt, while I was painting his children, I absorbed something into my life from his majestic personality which transformed me quite entirely.
ASSOCIATION WITH GREAT MINDS
It may not be possible for you to have constant close personal association with great minds, but you can have the equivalent of it in reading all that is recorded of their wisdom and listening very carefully to what they say. Then you should go into meditative seclusion for long hours to THINK the spirit of great souls into you. If you will study the literature that now exists, you will soon catch the spirit of great people and great institutions.
You may feel that you are at the tail end of progress and in a hopeless position, unable to catch up. This is a natural feeling, but it is a negative one which is so full of doubts and fears that you must root it out of you. I had it myself as a student when I saw the great work of such masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian and a host of others. I rooted that thought out of me by substituting the following thought:
“All the thoughts, inspirations and works of all the great artists since the world began are but a preparation for my foundation. Their inspirations are my inheritance. I shall be worthy of my inheritance, and shall build upon it strongly, that I may be as strong a foundation for those who follow me.”
That positive, constructive thought got rid of the negative, destructive one. Fears and doubts about my chances in the world disappeared before the veritable tornado of ecstasy which stormed within me. I have never got over that feeling. Each day, as I enter my studio, I reawaken within me the thought of reverence for my great opportunity in carrying on the work which the world’s great masters have prepared for my inheritance. That has always kept me in the state of being a student beginner whose great work in life is just beginning this very day. I, therefore, reconsecrate myself each day with humility.
You must find that spirit and THINK it into you, for whatever you THINK is what you become. That is the surest thing in life.
CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE
Give great thought, therefore, to the kind of Thinkers whose foundation is built on sincerity and truth. Then begin at once to build your inspirational life, that life in which you express your creative Self, as a supplement to the knowledge you acquire through outer learning.
Cast out all doubts and replace them, as I did, with this thought: “All the thoughts and works of all the ages of man have been but to prepare a beginning in greater glory for me. I shall be worthy of my inheritance and glory in my responsibility.”
UNIVERSAL POWER
You may not realize what power there is in that kind of thinking. Fix it in your minds daily until the light of it shines in your countenance as you see it shine in those above you who have that light. Fix also in your minds the fact that Nature’s guarded secrets are gradually yielding to man’s increasingly greater comprehension. However, what has been given is only a fraction of that which shall come. Man is still in a very primitive state compared with what each generation from now on shall develop. Certain discoveries have made possible more progress in the last generation than in the previous two thousand years. Yet, we have but just begun.
Let me drive this idea into your thinking for keeps by describing one product. The tabulating machine is a good example. With your student eyes focussed upon today you see it as a finished and perfect thing. With our eyes focussed also upon today, but our vision reaching ahead into tomorrow’s unknown, we see it already obsolete. Across the street in the Engineering Building, tomorrow’s tabulating machine is always being built but can never be finished.
Let me kindle your imagination regarding its next probable great stage of growth. But first let us review the whole idea of the tabulating machine’s position in our civilization as we older ones see it. The I.B.M. Tabulating and Recording System is a necessary product born of the times, and appropriate to this day and age. It belongs to a complex electric age which began its complexing about thirty years ago.
At that time business was so simply conducted that a few clerks could leisurely record all events, and business heads could visualize their conditions as a whole for they knew all the elements in every transaction.
This electric machine age caused such a change from simplicity to complexity that it became necessary for men to extend their recording principles to keep pace with the vast extensions which giant mergers, standardization, and the multiplication of demand that cheapening of production made possible.
The more we know of the electric force which is transforming all mankind and its shrinking continents into neighborhoods, the more complex all of man’s operations become; also, the more simple his life becomes as he learns how to liberate his body by the use of that universal power.
Life does not complex with speed and multiplicity of man’s actions. On the contrary, it simplifies. The machines which man has invented to extend his power have liberated his body from the tasks of performing the labor which they perform for him, but they have not liberated him from the machine. Liberation from the labor has but shortened his hours and multiplied his results.
Electric machines are as much a part of a man as his hands are, for the body of a man is itself but an electric machine to do his bidding. When the hands of man reached their limit of action, and his back the limit of burden bearing, and his legs the limit of speed, he multiplied the power of these feeble tools by executing his electric will into the electric nerve system of machine extensions of himself, controlled by his body. This enabled him to multiply his actions, lift his greater burdens, and fly the earth through mental effort alone.
MULTIPLE PRODUCTIVE POWER
Electric machines are liberators of men’s bodies and set up transformers of men’s minds. The greater our knowledge of our use of electricity and its direct connection with our electric bodies and minds to the mechanical extensions which are possible to attach to our bodies, the greater will become men’s power, freedom and leisure.
That is the complex age of multiple productive power and fast pace which we are coming into, but that multiplicity of physical exertion is confined to the mechanical extensions of our bodies and not to our bodies themselves. We may relax and meditate in luxury while our mechanical extensions transport our bodies at hundreds of miles per hour. This anticipates the coming cultural age of freedom for mental evolution which such products are making possible.
UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE
Everything created by man first exists as a universal principle which is perfect in Nature and imperfectly worked out by man. Inspiration is the basic cause of the urge of man to seek perfection through constant change.
Inspiration is more necessary in business than knowledge itself, for knowledge can be hired like a chattel, but inspiration cannot.
A super-intellectual board of directors who lack imagination can quickly render their business obsolete as the pace of life’s unfolding rushes past them. No business will be at the static top without that quality of vision, inspiration and imagination.
Considering again the tabulating machine, the Universal Creator runs a vast and complex business, and records everything which happens in that industrial organization called “Nature” simultaneously with its happening. Nature’s most microscopic event is as accurately recorded at the time of its happening as its greatest ones. Every thought of yours is electrically recorded in you at the precise instant of its happening. It immediately becomes a part of you. More wonderfully still, it is also repeated throughout the universe in every smallest part of it.
This is a repetitive electric universe in which every happening anywhere, happens everywhere. Every electron, atom, planet, star and galaxy in the entire universe is connected with every other one by pairs of invisible electric threads through which every happening is universally telegraphed.
So delicate is this universal electric communicating system that the tossing of a ball by a child moves the whole earth and all the stars in adjustment to that tossing. That particular event is tabulated and recorded in the farthermost galaxy of space.
It is a majestic thought to realize that the whole universe sways with the swaying of the rose in my garden. It is a still more majestic thought to realize the perfection of Nature’s recording system which omits not one thing and never errs.
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam forcefully expressed this relentless perfection of Nature’s tabulating machine in the following immortal words:
“The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
The Bible refers to Nature’s perfection by asserting that even the hairs of our heads are numbered. We are also assured that not even a sparrow’s fall is unrecorded by the Universal One.
Not even an electron, turning in its microscopic orbit, is unrecorded by the Universal One, nor is its movement independent of the movement of any other electron in the Universe.
NATURE’S RECORDING SYSTEM
What is this recording system of Nature for? What is the principle back of it? Why does Nature need to record everything? And, why does a business need to record everything?
The answer is that the record of a thought or thing is the pattern of the idea of that thing. It is creation itself. Thoughts are things, and those things are the records of the thoughts. Nature could not continue to create one event after another unless it recorded their patterns. That record is the form of the whole idea, just as the record of all your life thought forms you into what you are.
One can tell at a glance what kind of a person you are by seeing you as the record of your life’s thoughts and actions. Just so with business recording. The product itself is the form of its recorded thoughts, actions and processes. Every machine manufactured is the total record of itself. One can tell at a glance the state of a business, or its condition, by examining its recorded thoughts, actions and processes. At every moment of your life, your entire physical appearance is the sum total of your recorded thoughts and actions.
I will conclude this talk by drawing one last parallel between the perfection of the Cosmic System of recording and the evolution of machines, to suggest to you the vast possibilities which still lie ahead of us.
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
Our recording system is a series of events which takes place subsequent to the action. Nature’s records take place simultaneously with the action. We have a vast field ahead in which to tie our machines more closely to our operations in order to make a larger percentage of simultaneous automatic records instead of subsequent automatic ones. I can envision our machine as more of the nuclear center of an interconnecting automatic recording system within an industry than as a separate machine functioning extraneously and subsequently.
I can envision our recording system as a gatherer of twenty times the actions of business that are now tabulated, and assembling the facts of these actions as the machine ready for classification and use by the operator. Photoelectric cells, and all sorts of new counting and weighing devices can record these multiple events simultaneously and tabulate them for the operator. I can even visualize the recording of alloys and their separate costs during their conversion into metal parts.
The more completely a plant can automatically and simultaneously record its material and labor costs, and all the necessary facts for executives to act upon, during the process of manufacture, the more accurately its executives can visualize the state of the business. Also, its executives will find greater liberation from the drudgery of business detail and have more time to THINK of its essentials.
As one thing always leads to another, our sales methods would necessarily become simplified by selling comprehensive and inclusive systems instead of separate machines. Instead of selling a machine, we will be selling a long-term comprehensive plan for establishing appropriate recording systems for complex businesses. Also, our engineering department would multiply its possibilities by the designing of interdepartmental recording systems focussing within our machines as the nerve systems of our bodies focus in nerve ganglions.
These things, I will admit, are for future unfoldment as and when our discoveries of what is unknown today become known.
As I want you to fix in your minds this one idea upon which this talk is based, I will close by again repeating it: Everything created by Man first exists as a universal principle which is perfect in Nature and imperfectly worked out by man. Man is always seeking that perfection which Nature holds up to him as his standard, but he never finds it. His constant search for that perfection is the reason for constant change in every created thing. Inspiration is the basic cause of the urge of Man to seek perfection through constant change.
TECHNIQUE
In business, it is necessary to learn techniques for mastery in every department. Without that super-technique it is as impossible for you to succeed as it is for the musician to be a great master without a similar conquest of technique.
Technique is essential information from outside of yourselves. It includes facts of information regarding this new world into which you have just been born, which you have never yet had. You must take them into your mind and THINK them into being as part of your knowledge, just as you take food into you to become a part of your nourishment.
INSPIRATION
On the contrary my responsibility is to awaken that something within you which comes from the inside, and which you have always had. I refer to your divine inheritance of those nitro-glycerine-like qualities of inspiration, imagination, vision and creative thinking power which measure each man’s greatness to the extent in which he can be stirred into explosive action. I cannot give to you this power which lies behind creative action, but I can make you aware of it; and that is my sole purpose of being here.
Perhaps my meaning would be more clear if I define techniques as a process of integrating you into a greater understanding of your business purpose and products so that your knowledge of the product will intellectually equip you to sell it. My work is just the opposite, that of integrating a greater understanding of business purpose and products into you so that your knowledge of your Self will inspire you to sell the product. They both have the same objective, but one accumulates new knowledge from without, while the other stirs age-old fires from within.
A CREATIVE UNIVERSE
Without the stirring of these fires of inspiration, invention, imagination and vision which radiates enthusiasm and eagerness from within you, you are as nothing, no matter how perfect your training in this school. The technically perfect musician who gives nothing of the inspiration which distinguishes a master-musician cannot hold his audience any more than the technically perfect salesman can hold his prospect. Until one learns that he must give of himself, he has nothing whatsoever to give. This is a creative universe. Creative idea flows out from within. Only the form of the idea comes from without. Inspired creators look to the fountains which effervesce within them for their ideas. They then look outside of themselves for the materials with which to assemble those ideas into form.
Those who are equipped with only outside information are among the great majority who seek defeat and find it, while those who are aware of the limitless thought-power which springs from within themselves are undefeatable.
To the extent in which each of you is able to coordinate your accumulated information which comes to you from the outside with the inherent creative thought-power which comes to you from the inside, to that extent only can you climb to the heights which lead you to whatsoever goal you set for yourself. The limit to which you can climb is the limit of your own knowledge, vision and inspiration, backed by action.
Each man sets his own limitations and each man sets them differently. All thinking is limited to your knowledge of the forces of Nature which you have acquired from the outside or recollected from within. Beyond that line of demarcation, no man can think.
So, also, is all human progress limited to man’s collective knowledge, vision and inspiration, backed by action. Beyond that collective knowledge man cannot progress. So, also, is every product and creation of man limited by his knowledge and application of Nature’s forces. Beyond that line of present knowledge no creation of man can pass.
Every machine made by industry is on that line today, and has been on it each day for the last thirty years, and will be on it each coming day for generations. But that line is moving ahead all the time, moving upward toward greater heights as greater knowledge moves that line forever higher.
Bear in mind that the gradual increase of power which we use to transfer our civilization from its simple forms of past ages to the present is due only to a gradually increasing comprehension of Nature’s power principles.
Egoistic man, proud of his few insignificant discoveries, which at best have but lifted us to where we are as apt to use them for mutual destruction as for mutual blessing, continually boasts of our gradual “conquest of Nature.” Nothing could be more absurd. Man is not conquering Nature, he is but conquering ignorance by becoming aware of Nature, a little fraction of it at a time.
As long as you are ignorant of any blessing which Nature holds out for you, you cannot use it. It is like being in a dark room full of unperceivable things which are unavailable until the light is turned on. Business standards of today are defined by the light of today’s knowledge. Tomorrow there will be more light to lift its standards as yesterday there was less. Run your mind backward down the line of history and all the technical developments and think this over. Consider the aeroplane, radio, telephone and all other commonplace commodities of today which were as impossible yesterday as they were in Julius Caesar’s time.
UNDERSTANDING NATURE’S FORCES
All the power in the universe is yours as you replace ignorance with knowledge of that power which Nature freely offers you without any necessity of conquering her. Your own progress is based upon your increasing awareness of Nature’s forces within and without you, and that is as true of every other man in the world, individually and collectively, as it is of you. And it is also true that the only way to get that power and to use it, is to THINK and ACT.
The thoughts and actions of all the ages since the dawn of man have brought us to this present day and stage in world progress. The education of each one of you, since the day you were born, has been to review the thoughts and actions of all men since the dawn of man so you can know what they have done and start from there.
EXPRESSING GENIUS
That is where each one of you stands at the present moment. You have chosen to express that extent of genius which each one of you has become aware of within you.
However, your technical education is not enough. You may know all the mechanism of all the machines to perfection; you may know all the processes and methods; still you may be unworthy of your high inheritance until the fires of your own inspiration are awakened. Whatever your knowledge may be, only mediocrity awaits you until you become aware of the creative spirit within you and learn how to use and direct this inner power.
Everyone knows that a close association with superiors is the greatest ladder upon which one may climb. In my student days I advanced more by ten minutes inspirational talk with the great masters of my profession than I did from weeks of technical grind. During sixteen weeks of association with President Theodore Roosevelt, while I was painting his children, I absorbed something into my life from his majestic personality which transformed me quite entirely.
ASSOCIATION WITH GREAT MINDS
It may not be possible for you to have constant close personal association with great minds, but you can have the equivalent of it in reading all that is recorded of their wisdom and listening very carefully to what they say. Then you should go into meditative seclusion for long hours to THINK the spirit of great souls into you. If you will study the literature that now exists, you will soon catch the spirit of great people and great institutions.
You may feel that you are at the tail end of progress and in a hopeless position, unable to catch up. This is a natural feeling, but it is a negative one which is so full of doubts and fears that you must root it out of you. I had it myself as a student when I saw the great work of such masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian and a host of others. I rooted that thought out of me by substituting the following thought:
“All the thoughts, inspirations and works of all the great artists since the world began are but a preparation for my foundation. Their inspirations are my inheritance. I shall be worthy of my inheritance, and shall build upon it strongly, that I may be as strong a foundation for those who follow me.”
That positive, constructive thought got rid of the negative, destructive one. Fears and doubts about my chances in the world disappeared before the veritable tornado of ecstasy which stormed within me. I have never got over that feeling. Each day, as I enter my studio, I reawaken within me the thought of reverence for my great opportunity in carrying on the work which the world’s great masters have prepared for my inheritance. That has always kept me in the state of being a student beginner whose great work in life is just beginning this very day. I, therefore, reconsecrate myself each day with humility.
You must find that spirit and THINK it into you, for whatever you THINK is what you become. That is the surest thing in life.
CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE
Give great thought, therefore, to the kind of Thinkers whose foundation is built on sincerity and truth. Then begin at once to build your inspirational life, that life in which you express your creative Self, as a supplement to the knowledge you acquire through outer learning.
Cast out all doubts and replace them, as I did, with this thought: “All the thoughts and works of all the ages of man have been but to prepare a beginning in greater glory for me. I shall be worthy of my inheritance and glory in my responsibility.”
UNIVERSAL POWER
You may not realize what power there is in that kind of thinking. Fix it in your minds daily until the light of it shines in your countenance as you see it shine in those above you who have that light. Fix also in your minds the fact that Nature’s guarded secrets are gradually yielding to man’s increasingly greater comprehension. However, what has been given is only a fraction of that which shall come. Man is still in a very primitive state compared with what each generation from now on shall develop. Certain discoveries have made possible more progress in the last generation than in the previous two thousand years. Yet, we have but just begun.
Let me drive this idea into your thinking for keeps by describing one product. The tabulating machine is a good example. With your student eyes focussed upon today you see it as a finished and perfect thing. With our eyes focussed also upon today, but our vision reaching ahead into tomorrow’s unknown, we see it already obsolete. Across the street in the Engineering Building, tomorrow’s tabulating machine is always being built but can never be finished.
Let me kindle your imagination regarding its next probable great stage of growth. But first let us review the whole idea of the tabulating machine’s position in our civilization as we older ones see it. The I.B.M. Tabulating and Recording System is a necessary product born of the times, and appropriate to this day and age. It belongs to a complex electric age which began its complexing about thirty years ago.
At that time business was so simply conducted that a few clerks could leisurely record all events, and business heads could visualize their conditions as a whole for they knew all the elements in every transaction.
This electric machine age caused such a change from simplicity to complexity that it became necessary for men to extend their recording principles to keep pace with the vast extensions which giant mergers, standardization, and the multiplication of demand that cheapening of production made possible.
The more we know of the electric force which is transforming all mankind and its shrinking continents into neighborhoods, the more complex all of man’s operations become; also, the more simple his life becomes as he learns how to liberate his body by the use of that universal power.
Life does not complex with speed and multiplicity of man’s actions. On the contrary, it simplifies. The machines which man has invented to extend his power have liberated his body from the tasks of performing the labor which they perform for him, but they have not liberated him from the machine. Liberation from the labor has but shortened his hours and multiplied his results.
Electric machines are as much a part of a man as his hands are, for the body of a man is itself but an electric machine to do his bidding. When the hands of man reached their limit of action, and his back the limit of burden bearing, and his legs the limit of speed, he multiplied the power of these feeble tools by executing his electric will into the electric nerve system of machine extensions of himself, controlled by his body. This enabled him to multiply his actions, lift his greater burdens, and fly the earth through mental effort alone.
MULTIPLE PRODUCTIVE POWER
Electric machines are liberators of men’s bodies and set up transformers of men’s minds. The greater our knowledge of our use of electricity and its direct connection with our electric bodies and minds to the mechanical extensions which are possible to attach to our bodies, the greater will become men’s power, freedom and leisure.
That is the complex age of multiple productive power and fast pace which we are coming into, but that multiplicity of physical exertion is confined to the mechanical extensions of our bodies and not to our bodies themselves. We may relax and meditate in luxury while our mechanical extensions transport our bodies at hundreds of miles per hour. This anticipates the coming cultural age of freedom for mental evolution which such products are making possible.
UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE
Everything created by man first exists as a universal principle which is perfect in Nature and imperfectly worked out by man. Inspiration is the basic cause of the urge of man to seek perfection through constant change.
Inspiration is more necessary in business than knowledge itself, for knowledge can be hired like a chattel, but inspiration cannot.
A super-intellectual board of directors who lack imagination can quickly render their business obsolete as the pace of life’s unfolding rushes past them. No business will be at the static top without that quality of vision, inspiration and imagination.
Considering again the tabulating machine, the Universal Creator runs a vast and complex business, and records everything which happens in that industrial organization called “Nature” simultaneously with its happening. Nature’s most microscopic event is as accurately recorded at the time of its happening as its greatest ones. Every thought of yours is electrically recorded in you at the precise instant of its happening. It immediately becomes a part of you. More wonderfully still, it is also repeated throughout the universe in every smallest part of it.
This is a repetitive electric universe in which every happening anywhere, happens everywhere. Every electron, atom, planet, star and galaxy in the entire universe is connected with every other one by pairs of invisible electric threads through which every happening is universally telegraphed.
So delicate is this universal electric communicating system that the tossing of a ball by a child moves the whole earth and all the stars in adjustment to that tossing. That particular event is tabulated and recorded in the farthermost galaxy of space.
It is a majestic thought to realize that the whole universe sways with the swaying of the rose in my garden. It is a still more majestic thought to realize the perfection of Nature’s recording system which omits not one thing and never errs.
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam forcefully expressed this relentless perfection of Nature’s tabulating machine in the following immortal words:
“The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
The Bible refers to Nature’s perfection by asserting that even the hairs of our heads are numbered. We are also assured that not even a sparrow’s fall is unrecorded by the Universal One.
Not even an electron, turning in its microscopic orbit, is unrecorded by the Universal One, nor is its movement independent of the movement of any other electron in the Universe.
NATURE’S RECORDING SYSTEM
What is this recording system of Nature for? What is the principle back of it? Why does Nature need to record everything? And, why does a business need to record everything?
The answer is that the record of a thought or thing is the pattern of the idea of that thing. It is creation itself. Thoughts are things, and those things are the records of the thoughts. Nature could not continue to create one event after another unless it recorded their patterns. That record is the form of the whole idea, just as the record of all your life thought forms you into what you are.
One can tell at a glance what kind of a person you are by seeing you as the record of your life’s thoughts and actions. Just so with business recording. The product itself is the form of its recorded thoughts, actions and processes. Every machine manufactured is the total record of itself. One can tell at a glance the state of a business, or its condition, by examining its recorded thoughts, actions and processes. At every moment of your life, your entire physical appearance is the sum total of your recorded thoughts and actions.
I will conclude this talk by drawing one last parallel between the perfection of the Cosmic System of recording and the evolution of machines, to suggest to you the vast possibilities which still lie ahead of us.
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
Our recording system is a series of events which takes place subsequent to the action. Nature’s records take place simultaneously with the action. We have a vast field ahead in which to tie our machines more closely to our operations in order to make a larger percentage of simultaneous automatic records instead of subsequent automatic ones. I can envision our machine as more of the nuclear center of an interconnecting automatic recording system within an industry than as a separate machine functioning extraneously and subsequently.
I can envision our recording system as a gatherer of twenty times the actions of business that are now tabulated, and assembling the facts of these actions as the machine ready for classification and use by the operator. Photoelectric cells, and all sorts of new counting and weighing devices can record these multiple events simultaneously and tabulate them for the operator. I can even visualize the recording of alloys and their separate costs during their conversion into metal parts.
The more completely a plant can automatically and simultaneously record its material and labor costs, and all the necessary facts for executives to act upon, during the process of manufacture, the more accurately its executives can visualize the state of the business. Also, its executives will find greater liberation from the drudgery of business detail and have more time to THINK of its essentials.
As one thing always leads to another, our sales methods would necessarily become simplified by selling comprehensive and inclusive systems instead of separate machines. Instead of selling a machine, we will be selling a long-term comprehensive plan for establishing appropriate recording systems for complex businesses. Also, our engineering department would multiply its possibilities by the designing of interdepartmental recording systems focussing within our machines as the nerve systems of our bodies focus in nerve ganglions.
These things, I will admit, are for future unfoldment as and when our discoveries of what is unknown today become known.
As I want you to fix in your minds this one idea upon which this talk is based, I will close by again repeating it: Everything created by Man first exists as a universal principle which is perfect in Nature and imperfectly worked out by man. Man is always seeking that perfection which Nature holds up to him as his standard, but he never finds it. His constant search for that perfection is the reason for constant change in every created thing. Inspiration is the basic cause of the urge of Man to seek perfection through constant change.
