Description
There is an irresistible urge back of everything to create, to express life; there is an emotional craving for self-expression in everything. The hen wants to lay an egg and she wants to set on it – the egg wants to produce a chicken and the chicken wants to lay another egg and produce more chickens. The seed wants to multiply itself; it wants to become a tree in which birds shall roost. The birds want to build their nests in the tree and hatch out their young. The lion, the wolf, the dog, you and I, and everything in nature, have an irresistible desire, and impulsion, to create.
I used to know Joseph Strauss, a man who builds some of the biggest things in the world. He was of small physical stature and as a boy he couldn’t play football or compete in athletics. So he made up his mind that some day he would build the biggest things that had ever been built by man. The Golden Gate Bridge is a testimony, not only to his engineering skills and his technical knowledge, but to the emotional craving he had to create.
One of the leading radio entertainers of our day, a girl I know, was brought up in the country in a mid-western state. She just couldn’t help writing songs and singing them. She never had any technical training, but she had an irresistible urge to express herself, and she just kept right on doing the thing she knew how to do. Then finally she met up with the thoughts we all are considering and came to realize that the thing that was working through her was a universal force, it was something bigger than she was, but it was intimate and close to her, it was real to her thought and feeling and imagination. Today she sings to the world and they love it.
Now where does all this come from? The Bible says there is a River of Life which flows through everything. Both Henry Ford and Thomas Edison believed that we are surrounded by divine ideas, as though the ethers were filled with them, and they believed that these ideas were pressing against them, seeking self-expression. And so they followed the impulsion of these ideas and produced what seemed impossible.
Charles Schwab, the great steel master, believed this. At one time he purchased fifty thousand copies of a book which dealt with the subject we are talking about, and gave them to his employees. He wanted to stimulate a feeling in them that they were backed up by a Power greater than they were, and that they could use it.