AN IMPERIAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE 68 1 



and which the misses among all the innumerable projectiles 

 by which our attention is solicited. 



But while this extreme can be dangerous, there would seem 

 to be very little danger in England of our running the risks 

 inseparable from experiment and innovation. For the genius 

 of our nation is a practical genius that looks upon the conser- 

 vative way as the better way and makes its changes as slowly 

 as may be by gentle gradient from precedent to precedent. 

 That is the safe and easy way, the way of nature ; and to this 

 preference of fact copied over fancy tried may fairly be ascribed 

 our own constitutional prosperity. We fight shy of the logical 

 conclusions of the doctrinaire, and of the leap in the dark that 

 seems to him so sure and so safe. We prefer to imitate the 

 method of nature, the conservative method of least change. 



Stagnation. — Yet there is danger in every extreme, even that 

 of caution and " safety," and in our case the greater danger 

 would seem to be on the conservative side of the beam, towards 

 stagnation, rather than on the progressive side of innovation 

 and experiment. We have been a most favoured nation in the 

 great development of transport that has characterised the last 

 century of the world's history. We still enjoy the fruits and 

 the satisfactions of our good fortune and of our energy. But 

 one may have too much of a good thing, if satisfaction should 

 be permitted to blunt intellectual initiative, and to relax the 

 practical endeavour to continue to excel. 



We assuredly err on the conservative side in our educational 

 methods. We are educated and governed by the time-honoured 

 methods, of which the keynote and dominant chord are imitation 

 and repetition and dialectics and old customs, to the almost 

 universal exclusion of the most costly, dangerous, yet most 

 valuable ingredient of human life — originality of thought and of 

 enterprise. 



The New Conditions. — These are the most characteristic 

 qualities required by the new conditions of life, where men 

 move in large masses and control large measures of the energy 

 surrounding them. We need in the international struggle for 

 welfare and for existence knowledge and power commensurate 

 with the forces placed in our hands by the modern applications 

 of physical science. 



