SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY 261 



statement of the world ; democracy refuses a static law. In the field of 

 animal behavior it is a fundamental fact that the simpler the exciting 

 situation, the more direct is the response. If there is but one thing to 

 do there is but one needed reaction, but if there are two possibilities of 

 behavior there arise conflict, hesitation and compromise. This condi- 

 tion, present as an elementary fact in the behavior of the lowest animal 

 organisms, reaches up through the whole conduct of man, rendering his 

 life a continual struggle to meet the conflicting and incompatible stim- 

 ulations of his complex environment. The insistent demand for action 

 leads a man to simplify his world as much as possible. Through a 

 maze of facts and forces he seeks one unitary principle. Every complex 

 situation must be simplified, reduced to its lowest terms. When we do 

 this in chemistry we get the atom ; in biology we get the cell ; in ethics 

 we get goodness; in religion we get faith. 



Wherever men have been thoughtful they have tried to secure a 

 simple unitary formula, not alone for the great departments of life, 

 but for the universe as a whole, including the most distant times and 

 spaces, grouping together into a single system the smallest particle of 

 insensible sand and the most mighty divine being. The Weltanschau- 

 ung, the total world view, the apparent multiplicity of phenomena lost 

 in the unity of eternal forces, this has been the goal of philosophic think- 

 ing. The vision of such a picture stirs and satisfies the needs of men 

 because it gives unity to the world and makes for comfortable thought 

 and conduct. To see the completed picture and then deduce one's own 

 relation to it, gives confidence and security amid confusion. But philo- 

 sophic vision outruns the logic upon which it would rest, and when once 

 a man has announced such a conception he is compelled to spend the 

 remainder of his days constructing the logic to defend it. 



The man who would paint a world picture or construct a closed sys- 

 tem of thought finds little encouragement in science or among scientific 

 men. The achievements of science have been in the direction of making 

 the world more multifarious than it was. Instead of water we have 

 hydrogen and oxygen, and instead of a human soul we have a stream- 

 ing concourse of sensibilities, memories, impulses, thoughts, emotions 

 and decisions. Immersed in the swarming concrete realities of nature, 

 the scientist finds it difficult to discover the single unifying idea. In- 

 asmuch as the progress of research is continually laying bare new 

 realities, he refuses to conclude the case, for the evidence is not all in. 

 He has, besides, a half belief that the most important witnesses may be 

 still in waiting. The things which yet lie hidden may overturn his set- 

 tled beliefs, as the theory of evolution and the discovery of radium 

 have already done. To the uncovering of these hidden truths all the 

 machinery of his craft is devoted. To enrich the already multitudinous 

 world with discovery of as yet unknown facts and forces is his chief aim. 



