486 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



centuries, which at last gave him his atom free enough, if not quite free, from the 

 psychism that long prevented the progress of physical science ? 



The more clearly we understand the course of human thought, the more 

 clearly we understand our debt to the first Greek thinkers. Men had to pass 

 through the first unreflective stages of thought when their concepts were, so to 

 speak, produced spontaneously within them as a reaction to impressions from 

 without. Two concepts, in particular, grew up inevitably within their minds : they 

 thought of the primary constituent of material bodies as a vast continuous 

 " mother-stuff," and they took as their fundamental model, which may be the most 

 valuable and fundamental in the final philosophical synthesis, the solid with a soul 

 or mind in it. The Greeks did pioneer work in preparing the way for the 

 mechanical view of matter that was a necessary scientific instrument for progress, 

 though it may be neither all knowledge nor even the last word in chemistry and 

 physics. They crumbled the "mother-stuff" into atoms, and they expelled most 

 of the psychism from them. This is a short summary of a long story, for the 

 Greeks dealt with more problems, even in their Atomic Theories, than can be 

 counted on the fingers of Briareus ; but it is enough to remind us that the Atomic 

 Theory, like most concepts which attain to high status, has grown to maturity 

 from roots deeply imbedded in the past. 



POLITICS AND SCIENCE (Frank H. Perrycoste, B.Sc.) 



I 



For more than a generation past scientific men in this country have been warning 

 their fellows that, unless they learned to appreciate science, to acquire the 

 scientific spirit, and to orient themselves by the scientific pole star of to-day 

 instead of by the ignes fatui exhaled from a decomposing past, they would be 

 punished by the dtb&cle of our commercial supremacy, and by the compulsory 

 resignation of the sceptre to those nations which, like America and Germany, 

 have long since most thoroughly realised that science must now and henceforth 

 lead and rule the world. Such appeals and warnings were necessarily addressed 

 — on account of the hardness of men's hearts, the grossness of their understand- 

 ings, and the almost universal idolatry of lucre — to the Briton's regard for his 

 wealth and his country's commercial and industrial supremacy : but even so they 

 failed lamentably, because an "education" based on centuries-old traditions 

 had so thoroughly diseducated our political and industrial ruling classes that not 

 even arguments levelled down to their own materialistic criteria could penetrate 

 their mental hides. To the explosively shattering and very nearly fatal lessons 

 of the Great War even such hides have proved at last not quite impermeable : and 

 at last even politicians and capitalists are realising, however inadequately, that 

 science must be accorded a larger share than formerly — it could scarcely have a 

 smaller — in national regard. There is now some real respect for, and tardy 

 recognition of, " applied " science ; and naturally scientific men are rubbing in the 

 acid cure where the wound is tenderest and smarts the most ; but they know only 

 too well that, unless this nation will learn to love and pursue science in the spirit 

 of true science — viz., from the love of knowledge as the quest of truth, and for 

 the sake of culture — the victory will not have been achieved. Industrial and 

 military success are among the rewards lavished by science : but actually they 

 are, and should always be regarded as, by-products, as results not of the search 

 for themselves, but of the wholehearted disinterested pursuit of science from the 



