PRINCETON IN THE NATION'S SERVICE. 269 



PRINCETON IN THE NATION'S SERVICE.* 



By President WOODROW WILSON, 



PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. 



I HAVE no laboratory but the world of books and men in which I 

 live; but I am much mistaken if the scientific spirit of the age is 

 not doing us a great disservice, working in us a certain great degeneracy. 

 Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for the 

 past. It has made us credulous of quick improvement, hopeful of 

 discovering panaceas, confident of success in every new thing. 



I wish to be as explicit as carefully chosen words will enable me to 

 be upon a matter so critical, so radical as this. I have no indictment 

 against what science has done: I have only a warning to utter against 

 the atmosphere which has stolen from laboratories into lecture rooms 

 and into the general air of the world at large. Science — our science 

 — is new. It is a child of the nineteenth century. It has transformed 

 the world and owes little debt of obligation to any past age. It has 

 driven mystery out of the Universe; it has made malleable stuff of the 

 hard world, and laid it out in its elements upon the table of every class- 

 room. Its own masters have known its limitations ; they have stopped 

 short at the confines of the physical universe; they have declined to 

 reckon with spirit or with the stuffs of the mind, have eschewed sense 

 and confined themselves to sensation. But their work has been so 

 stupendous that all other men of all other studies have been set staring 

 at their methods, imitating their ways of thought, ogling their results. 

 We look in our study of the classics nowadays more at the phenomena 

 of language than at the movement of spirit; we suppose the world 

 which is invisible to be unreal ; we doubt the efficacy of feeling and ex- 

 aggerate the efficacy of knowledge ; we speak of society as an organism 

 and believe that we can contrive for it a new environment which will 

 change the very nature of its constituent parts; worst of all, we be- 

 lieve in the present and in the future more than in the past, and deem 

 the newest theory of society the likeliest. This is the disservice scientific 

 study has done us; it has given us agnosticism in the realm of phi- 

 losophy, scientific anarchism in the field of politics. It has made the 

 legislator confident that he can create, and the philosopher sure that 

 God cannot. Past experience is discredited, and the laws of matter are 

 supposed to apply to spirit and the make-up of society. 



* Concluding part of the oration at the Princeton Sesquicentennial Exer- 

 cises. Reprinted from The Forum for December, 1896. 



