108 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



not base its industry and its agriculture upon an advancing 

 knowledge of science is doomed. 



The sublime confidence in the knowledge of the practical 

 man, which distinguished British and also American industry 

 throughout the nineteenth century, was doubtless bred of 

 the fact that practical, self-made men were mainly instru- 

 mental in giving England, and later America, their initial 

 positions as industrial nations. It was German scientists 

 and German industrial laboratories, more than German 

 commercial aptitude that challenged British supremacy 

 in world-trade during the closing decades of the nineteenth 

 century. There is a oneness, to scientific knowledge, which 

 makes the distinction between the practical and the theoret- 

 ical of no avail, and this fact is gradually becoming acknowl- 

 edged even among hardheaded men of affairs. In the future, 

 new industries are likely to be created by advances in pure 

 science, such as the discovery of radio-activity or of new 

 methods of electrical transmission, rather than by rule-of- 

 thumb inventions. 



Thus, the outstanding feature of modern industrial prog- 

 ress has been the control of nature by means of scientific 

 knowledge. This was and is the general formula for the 

 material prosperity of western nations. In the physical 

 sciences, we have reached a point where this formula is 

 patent to all thinking men, who recognize that the evolution 

 of mechanical devices and of industry begins and ends with 

 scientific knowledge. There has even grown up a popular 

 faith that inventors, like Edison and Marconi, who for the 

 man in the street are the great scientists, can accomplish 

 anything if given time. This belief may not be warranted, 

 but the material progress effected through science during 

 the recent centuries has been so continuous that such a 

 belief is not unnatural. 



The western world has developed a culture that is ob- 

 sessed with the idea of science as an instrument of material 

 progress, because the practical and theoretical phases of 



