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-it will be his privilege and glory to sing of the boundless abundance of the stellar spaces, to limn the tiny hidden worlds within the atom, to catch the restless, eager, neverceasing surge of things, to make us pause in wonder before eternal law; his words will tread the measures of the cosmic dance of star with star, and all his utterance will speak forth in moving unison with nature's complex harmonies.

It is to be feared, however, that science stands for little or nothing of this in the mind of the man on the street. To him the scientist is likely to figure either as a strange necromancer who by mysterious manipulations pulls electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes out of his hat, or as an eccentric fellow who potters away at useless tasks, harming nobody, it is true, but doing no one any good. With no sense of the connections joining theoretical and applied science, and with absolutely no sound notions of scientific method-thanks to the forbidding wall of technicality scientists have themselves erected around their magnificent building, when they should have been content with a removable scaffolding the average man has little understanding and much awe of science. Of course, the coinage of science need not be debased in order to enable it to pass current in the market place; but scientists might well consider it a privilege to attempt the translation of their more recondite findings into the common speech. It is a matter for commendation that efforts in this direction have not been lacking, although it must be admitted that comparatively few people are as yet equipped to understand even such a work as the recent Outline of Science.

Even though the average man imperfectly recognizes it, however, he has been affected by pure science, and in two ways-through changes in himself and through changes in his world. The notions of cause and effect that he uses as a matter of course in daily life, as well as many other settled habits and disciplines of his mind, are faint and wavering reflections of the fact that the average man lives in a world that has been stabilized by science. That this is the case can be realized by comparing his stock of notions with those entertained by persons living under a theological rather

than a scientific order. The average man of today may not know that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, but he usually substitutes for the axiom, "The Lord will provide," some view approximating a little more closely to the scientific dictum. He still has his superstitions and his fancies, as has also the scientist himself, but he also does his thinking in terms of notions that are distantly related to the mechanical-mathematical structure of the world elaborated by contemporary science. His contact with the machines that science has placed in his environment also gives him an inkling of the impersonality and indifference to human concerns which modern science attributes to nature. He is more likely to give a horse a personal name than he is to christen an automobile. In many ways, though usually without his knowing it, his world has been depersonalized and otherwise rebuilt more nearly in accord with the ideals of science.

It remains to point out that science has increased man's control over nature. The word "control" here must not be misunderstood; in our sense of the term man controls poison gases if he can make them, even though he insists on using them to destroy his fellows. Whether for good or for ill, the advance of chemical science has put this power in his hands. Bacon was right; knowledge is power-not wisdom, but power. Thanks to the development of science, more power is available to the modern man than to any other man in history. Sometimes it seems as though he commands this power in about the same way that he commands the hurricane that tosses him about.

We owe most of the discoveries which have given us this control over nature to pure science—to science, that is to say, which was engaged in without the thought of practical applications. This is indicated in the following quotation:

Some time ago the votes of the readers of an American periodical-Popular Mechanics-were taken as to what inventions were considered to be the "seven wonders of the modern world." From a list of numerous inventions, seven had to be selected; and those which received the highest number of votes were: wireless telegraphy, the telephone, the aeroplane,

radium, anæsthetics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis, and X-rays. Each one of these things had its foundations in purely scientific work and was not the result of deliberate intention to make something of service to humanity. . . . A scientific investigator working in a laboratory was in every case the originator of the fact or principle utilised in the production of what a consensus of opinion considers to be the seven greatest achievements of modern times. *

The study of conic sections was pursued for nearly two thousand years without the slightest indication of practical applications, until suddenly, in the early days of astronomical science, it became of importance to daily life: 26

The discovery of the conic sections, attributed to Plato, first threw open the higher species of form to the contemplation of geometers. But for this discovery, which was probably regarded in Plato's time [4th century, B. c.] and long after him, as the unprofitable amusement of a speculative brain, the whole course of practical philosophy of the present day, of the science of astronomy, of the theory of projectiles, of the art of navigation, might have run in a different channel; and the greatest discovery that has ever been made in the history of the world, the law of universal gravitation, with its innumerable direct and indirect consequences and applications to every department of human research and industry, might never to this hour have been elicited. †

Faraday was once demonstrating the induction of an electric current in a coil of wire upon its being suddenly introduced into the field of a magnet-the foundation principle of the dynamo or electric generator, with all of its manifold. applications-when a lady asked him, "But what is the use of it all?" Faraday replied, "Madam, will you tell me the use of a new-born child?" Again, on being asked the same question by Gladstone, his answer was, "Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!" Faraday was absolutely right; when the new-born

* Richard Gregory, Discovery, 235-6. Copyright, 1916, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.

† J. J. Sylvester, in Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica, 104. Copyright, 1914, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.

child of theory becomes a grown-up man, he is often taxed for the benefit of a once unappreciative world. 27

REFERENCES

1 F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London, Arnold, 1907), ix-x. 2 Among the more easily available histories of science, W. T. Sedgwick and H. W. Tyler, A Short History of Science (N. Y., Macmillan, 1917), and Walter Libby, An Introduction to the History of Science (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1917) may be singled out for mention. F. W. Westaway, Scientific Method, Its philosophy and its practice (2 ed., London, Blackie, 1919), contains interesting historical chapters on scientific method.

* For an example (from Oliver Goldsmith), see F. B. Strong (ed.), Lectures on the Methods of Science (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1906), 38-39.

Quoted in William James, The Principles of Psychology (N. Y., Holt, 1890), Vol. 2, 640-641.

'Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science (N. Y., Science Press, 1921), 362 (from Book I, Chap. 1, of Science and Method).

Poincaré, 128 (from Science and Hypothesis, Chap. 9).

7A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (N. Y., Macmillan, 1926), 31-32.

8 W. S. Jevons, The Principles of Science, A treatise on logic and scientific method (N. Y., Macmillan, 1874), Vol. 2, 162–164.

9 Quoted in Sedgwick and Tyler, 200-201.

10 Sedgwick and Tyler, 257.

11 A. D. Ritchie, Scientific Method, an inquiry into the character and validity of natural laws (London, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923), 3−4.

12 Ritchie, 104.

13 Jevons, Vol. 2, 236–237.

14 Jevons, Vol. 2, 222–223.

15 A. W. Duff, College Physics (N. Y., Longmans, Green, 1925), 221.

16 H. A. Bumstead, in L. L. Woodruff (ed.), The Development of the Sciences (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1923), 60.

17 F. J. Teggart, Theory of History (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1925), 162. 18 Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II (in J. M. Robertson's ed. of Bacon's philosophical works, London, Routledge, 1905, 425).

19 Frederick Soddy, Science and Life, Aberdeen addresses (London, Murray, 1920), 2-3.

20 International Encyclopedia (2 ed., N. Y., Dodd, Mead, 1917), Vol. 19, 215-216. 21 F. S. Marvin (ed.), Science and Civilization (Oxford Univ. Press, 1923), 14. 22 Ritchie, 14.

23 J. A. Thomson, Introduction to Science (N. Y., Holt, 1911), 101.

24 Francis Thompson.

25 Richard Gregory, Discovery, or The spirit and service of science (N. Y., Macmillan, 1916), 235-236.

26 J. J. Sylvester in R. E. Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica, or The philomath's quotation-book (N. Y., Macmillan, 1914), 104.

27 These anecdotes are from Gregory, 2-3. Pasteur used the former story in his 1854 inaugural address at Lille, crediting it to Benjamin Franklin; see René ValleryRadot, The Life of Pasteur, trans. by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire (N. Y., Garden City Publ. Co., 1926), 76.

Chapter XVIII

RELIGION

Diverse components of the religious life

Although few persons have been entirely denied firsthand acquaintance with the great complex of forces and attitudes we call religion, it is not easy to see clearly how the various components of the religious life are related to each other. We know, for example, that Christianity goes back, through a long and varied past in which it has meant many things to many men, to a certain individual who once lived in Palestine, and from whom it gets its name; but we realize that this individual was not totally cut off from all connection with the past of his people that, in fact, he claimed to be the bearer of a new testament which had been foretold and prepared for in the old. We run over his gospel in our minds, and in it we see much that assimilates it to the thought of his time and place, although he undoubtedly was a religious genius of the first order. What then, we are forced to ask, is the relation between the religious genius and traditional religion?

Or again, we bethink ourselves of the religious attitudes and beliefs of the average Christian, and compare them with the well articulated doctrines of systematic theology; we rapidly call before our minds the child repeating, "Now I lay me down to sleep" with his mother, the ascetic disciplining his body to purge his soul, the philosopher proving God, freedom, and immortality, the saint quaffing deep of the bounty of the Lord, the prophet castigating a backsliding people, the priest making his rounds, the layman living a life in the world that is not of the world, the sinner panting for remission from his sins; we think of all the Christian churches with their rituals and ceremonials, their hymns and prayers, their holy days, their priests and other officers, their activities both to order this world aright and make

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