UTILITARIAN SCIENCE. 77 



flower of that highest philanthropy of the ages by which not even 

 thought exists for itself alone, but must find its end in the enlarge- 

 ment of human control over matter and force or the amelioration of 

 the conditions of human life. 



The development of all science has been a constant struggle, a 

 struggle of fact against philosophy, of instant impressions against 

 traditional interpretations, of truth against ' make-believe/ For men 

 are prone to trust a theory rather than a fact; a fact is a single point 

 of contact; a theory is a circle made of an infinite number of points, 

 none of them, however, it may be, real points of contact. 



The history of the progress of science is written in human psychol- 

 ogy rather than in human records. It is the struggle of the few 

 realities or present sense impressions against the multitude of past 

 impressions, suggestions and explanations. I have elsewhere said that 

 the one great discovery of the nineteenth century — forestalled many 

 ages before — was that of the reality of external things. Men have 

 learned to trust a present fact or group of facts, however contradictory 

 its teachings, as apposed to tradition and philosophy. From this trust 

 in the reality of the environment of matter and force, whatever these 

 may be, the great fabric of modern science has been built up. Science 

 is human experience of contact with environment tested, set in order, 

 and expressed in terms of other human experience. Utilitarian science 

 is that part of all this knowledge which we can use in our lives, in our 

 business. What is pure science to one is applied science to another. 

 The investigation of the laws of heredity may be strictly academic to 

 us of the university, but they are utilitarian as related to the preserva- 

 tion of the nation or to the breeding of pigs. In the warfare of science 

 the real in act and motive has been persistently substituted for the 

 unreal. Men have slowly learned that the true glory of life lies in its 

 wise conduct, in the 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 mili- 

 tarism. 



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 sys- 

 tem, 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 



