(From The Mensa Journal, issue #151, November, 1971, Silver Jubilee Edition celebrating Mensa's twenty-fifth anniversary.)

...But science had given us one tool:  a crude and approximate but effective sieve by which we could sort out those men and women of every type and class who have at least the power to think for themselves, the poser to reach with their minds a little beyond the confines of the orthodoxies and dogmas in which most are stuck fast....

Let there be, I thought, at least one group of able men and women who do not assemble to adore one god or dogma (not even the provisional dogma of science); a group without fixed ideas, whose thinking is provisional and whose aims are flexible.  
 

Mensa's real achievement cannot be told, because it is too widespread, too diffuse, and unknowable.

Let there be one group, I said, who, being without pre-set ideas, are free to generate long-term aims valid for humanity as a whole.  Bring such a group together, I thought, and put them into communication and, out of their interchange, sooner or later, will come a new ethos, a new morality for mankind, one which will ensure his future and the future of the space-ship Earth.  This was my stupid dream for Mensa, and how absurdly grandiose it sounds when measured against the realties, the day-to-day life of Mensa!

Yet...yet; if we look with a visionary's eye we can see the misty outlines of a future form, a form which may not be so different from my dream.  Mensa's real achievement cannot be told, because it is too widespread, too diffuse, and unknowable.  It lies in the arrival in twenty thousand homes a few times a month of pieces of paper from intelligent humans all over the world; in excitedly talking, laughing groups in many lands, in a comprehending welcome to travelers and an incessant buzz of intercommunication.  We have built a think-link, a brain-skein round the fat world.  It is interdisciplinary, non-factional, unbiassed, uncommitted, anti-racial; and that means just one thing:  it is free; a world agora, an agorasphere; free of all constraint, free to grow into something the world needs but does not yet know it needs....  For, undisciplined and divided, man has thought his way to the threat of hell on earth.  Now, united and guided by disciplined intelligence he must patiently, painfully, think his way out to a promise of better things.

My dream was, and still is, that Mensa can play a modest part in this process.  I believe it already does; I believe it will continue to do so.

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