5. The Role and Power of Humans over Nature

What a Wonder Humanity Is! It is a very healthy and stimulating thing to turn aside every now and again from the monotonous humdrum of life with its routine of little things to contemplate what an amazingly wonderful thing the human race is. We could think in the first place of the nobility, grace and beauty, harmony and proportions of the ideal human form which sculptors and artists have so enthusiastically and tirelessly represented for our admiration, and which Leonardo da Vinci analysed so stunningly. But the wonder of humanity is seen especially in the way humans have used their intelligence, their imagination, their sense of purpose, their urge to progress, their engineering skills, their artistic flair, their power of organisation, to develop the earth, to explore and maximise its resources and potentials, to understand and then harness the forces of nature, to impose order on their environment and to create things of beauty and indeed of majesty. True, there have been periods, sometimes very long periods, when the sheer daily labour of getting enough food to live on has consumed all humanity’s time and strength. But rarely, even then, have men and women been content with th...