SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY 263 



world of matter, it has also brought to light moral facts, and problems 

 unknown to the framers of the American constitution. In order that 

 these newer living issues may have their day in court, the democrat is 

 willing to tolerate a less fixed and stable government than is your 

 cavalier, your tory, your man of comfortable surroundings who doesn't 

 like to be disturbed. 



Further, we are coming to see that the flexible government is not 

 dangerous, that we may move on to a larger justice easily and smoothly 

 without imperiling the goods we already have. That this new vision 

 is becoming real to us is due to two causes. One of these is our ex- 

 perience in undergoing political changes; the other is our experience 

 with science. Science is not destroyed by new discoveries and inven- 

 tions. Eadium and bacteria may alter certain highly important hypoth- 

 eses, but they do not destroy our faith in science or make it a less service- 

 able instrument to men. It has become quite a matter of course to ex- 

 pect revolutionizing discoveries, and science is at heart disposed to read- 

 justment and revision. This attitude has taken hold of the general 

 social mind through the popularization of science, and society at large 

 has acquired a faith in a mobile, growing body of truth. It is probably 

 true that twentieth-century society has no more vital faith than this, 

 and it would be strange if it had not affected our ideas of government 

 and politics. 



For the infusion of scientific conceptions into other fields of thought 

 we are not without splendid precedent. President Wilson has shown 

 how the American constitution was a reflection of the prevailing New- 

 tonian physics, and all of us know how thoroughly the concept of evolu- 

 tion has interwoven itself into every specialized department of modern 

 thought. In like manner, the growing receptivity of men's minds to 

 new interests in society, to the rights of the laboring classes, to the 

 claims of dependent peoples, to the widening interests of women and 

 children, has been greatly accelerated by the diffusion of science and 

 scientific ways of thinking. Men have become accustomed to changing 

 their minds, to having their beliefs unsettled, to feeling the good that 

 comes with a new order of things. 



Finally, and in the most subtly penetrative way, the kinship of 

 science and democracy appears in their attitude toward the future. 

 To both, the present is but a cross section of an advancing stream whose 

 source is in a distant and indefinite past, whose current has gathered 

 momentum in its progress hitherward and which is pouring itself into 

 the future with a rapidly accelerating force. To neither is the past of 

 this stream so interesting or important as its future, and the present 

 is but a point of vantage for the movement forward. There is a type 

 of mind to whom this way of thinking is difficult or even offensive. To 

 it the good things were the possession of former peoples, and to those 



