UTILITARIAN SCIENCE 5 



daily act of love and helpfulness, not in the vagaries fostered by the 

 priest or in the spasms of madness which are the culmination of 

 war. To live here and now as a man should live constitutes the 

 ethics of science, and this ideal has been in constant antithesis to 

 the ethics of ecclesiasticism, of asceticism, and of militarism. 



The physical history of the progress of science has been a struggle 

 of thinkers, observers, and experimenters against the dominant 

 forces of society. It has been a continuous battle, in which the 

 weaker side, in the long run, is winner, having the strength of the 

 earth behind. It has been incidentally a conflict of earth-born 

 knowledge with opinions of men sanctioned by religion; of present 

 fact with preestablished system, visibly a warfare between inductive 

 thought and dogmatic theology. 



The real struggle, as already indicated, lies deeper than this. It 

 is the effort of the human mind to relate itself to realities in the 

 midst of traditions and superstitions, to realize that nature never 

 contradicts herself, is always complex, but never mysterious. As a 

 final result all past systems of philosophy, perhaps all possible sys- 

 tems, have been thrown back into the realm of literature, of poetry, 

 no longer controlling the life of action, which rests on fact. 



This conflict of tendencies in the individual has become a con- 

 flict among individuals as each is governed by a dominant impulse. 

 The cause of tradition becomes that of theology ; for men have 

 always claimed a religious sanction for their own individual bit of 

 cosmic philosophy. Just as each man in his secret heart, the centre 

 of his own universe, feels himself in some degree the subject of the 

 favor of the mysterious unseen powers, so does society in all ages 

 find a mystic or divine warrant for its own attitude towards life and 

 action, whatever that may be. 



The nervous system of man, inherited from that of the lower 

 animals, may be regarded as primarily a means of making locomo- 

 tion safe. The reflex action of the nerve centre is the type of all 

 mental processes. The sensorium, or central ganglion, receives 

 impressions from the external world representing, in a way, various 

 phases of reality. The brain has no source of knowledge other than 

 sensation. All human knowledge comes through human experience. 

 The brain, sitting in darkness, has the primary function of con- 

 verting sensory impressions into impulses to action. To this end the 

 motor nerves carry impulses outward to the muscles. The higher 

 function of nerve-action, which we call the intellect, as distinguished 

 from simple reflex action and from instinct, is the choice among 

 different responses to the stimulus of external realities. As con- 

 ditions of life become more complex, the demands of external 

 realities become more exacting. It is the function of the intellect to 

 consider and of the mind to choose. The development of the mind 



