Bush’s “As We May Think” proposes that the post-war vocation of science should move from the multiplication of destructive force towards the refinement of intellectual instruments capable of organising humanity’s expanding record of knowledge. Written against the background of wartime scientific mobilisation, the essay argues that civilisation is increasingly threatened not by a shortage of information but by the inadequacy of its methods for storing, selecting and retrieving it. Bush’s central claim is that inherited systems of classification are too rigid because they depend upon artificial alphabetical or numerical indexing, whereas the human mind works through association, moving from one idea to another by intricate trails of relevance. His imagined solution, the memex, is a private mechanised library in which books, records, notes, images and communications could be compressed through microfilm, rapidly consulted on screens, annotated, and, most importantly, linked into durable trails. The illustrative case of the scholar studying the Turkish bow demonstrates how knowledge would no longer be encountered as isolated documents, but as a navigable web of connections, side paths and interpretative sequences. This anticipates later hypertextual and digital knowledge systems by treating memory not as passive storage but as an active architecture of retrieval, recombination and shared intellectual labour. Ultimately, Bush concludes that science must help humanity wield its collective record wisely, for only through better instruments of selection can modern civilisation avoid being paralysed by the very abundance of knowledge it has produced.
