464 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



exist because his eye-balls have received a blow, and so he 

 is reaching out his hands part of the time trying to grasp 

 illusions, and yet slowly, painfully learning, bit by bit, 

 that there is an external world, physical and biological, that 

 can be known, that can be counted upon when it has once 

 become known, to act consistently, not capriciously, that 

 there is a law of gravity and that it is not necessary to be 

 covered with bruises all the time because he forgets it, 

 that there is a principle of conservation of energy, and that 

 all constructive and worth-while effort everywhere must 

 henceforth take it into account and be consonant with it, that 

 it is not worth while to spend much time with sentimental- 

 ists who wish that that law did not exist and sometimes 

 try to legislate it out of existence, that again there are facts 

 of heredity that it is utterly futile to enveigh against, that 

 our whole duty is rather to bend every energy to know what 

 they are and then to find how best to live in conformity 

 with them, that, in a single sentence, there is the possibility 

 ahead of mankind of learning in the next billion years of 

 its existence to live at least a million times more wisely 

 than we now live. This is what Pasteur meant when he 

 said, "What really leads us forward is a few scientific 

 discoveries and their applications. " This is what Wells meant 

 when he contrasted the result of the objective method of 

 learning used in the pursuit of science with what he calls 

 "the general thought of other educated sections of the 

 community." The one guesses and acts upon its hunches or 

 its prejudices, the other tries at least to know, and succeeds 

 in knowing part of the time. 



We need science too in education, and much more of it 

 than we now have, not primarily to train technicians for 

 the industries which demand them, though that may be 

 important, but, much more, to give everybody a little glimpse 

 of the scientific mode of approach to life's problems, to 

 give everyone some familiarity with at least one field in 

 which the distinction between correct and incorrect is not 

 always blurred and uncertain, to let him see that it is not 

 always true that "one opinion is as good as another," to 

 let everyone understand that up to Galileo's time it was 

 reputable science to talk about gravity and levity, but that 



