550 THE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL POWER
and other forms of punishment that arouse them to greater action.
Other minds wither away and die under punishment, but grow to
unbelievable heights when provided with the opportunity to use their
imaginative forces in a creative way.
Understand the evolution of transportation and you will observe
one outstanding aspect worth remembering: The whole story has been
one of development and advancement that grew out of necessity.
Throughout the past, the urge to change was based on necessity.
In the present the urge has been a combination of both necessity
and the desire to create. In the future the strong desire to create will
be the sole urge that will drive the human mind on and on to heights
as yet undreamed of.
It is a long distance from the days of the man-drawn cart to the
present, when we have harnessed the lightning of the clouds and made
it turn machinery that will perform as much service in a minute as
ten thousand workers could perform in a day. But if the distance has
been long, the development of man's mind has been correspondingly
great, and that development has been sufficient to eventually do the
work of the world with machines operated by Nature's forces and not
by human muscles.
The evolutionary changes in the methods of transportation have
created other problems for our minds to solve. The automobile drove
us to build better roads and more of them. The automobile also claims
thousands of lives annually. The human mind must now respond to the
urge of necessity and meet this emergency.
If you have a highly imaginative mind, you may be the one who
will create the solution and collect the royalties from its sale. The
value to you, of this suggestion, lies in the possibility of thought that
you may devote to it, thereby developing and expanding your own
mind. Remember, the purpose of this essay is to give you merely the
seed of suggestion; not the finished product of an invention ready to
set up and render service.