PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY 



Knowledge of Necessity.^ These considerations have an important 

 bearing on the concept of the ideal human society. It ought to be so 

 rationally constructed, based so soundly on the ascertained nature 

 and needs of human beings, that though it would be open to anyone 

 to question the foundations of it, or of a large part of it, the chances 

 of the substantiation of a need for a radical reconstruction of it would 

 be extremely small. Since it is only by the scientific method that such 

 a society could be formed in the first place, we see a further significance 

 in the phrase "scientific socialism" adopted by the earliest exponents 

 of marxist theory. The phrase was used because this form of socialism 

 was based, not on Utopian hopes, but on a conviction of the continuity 

 of social with biological evolution, and hence a conviction of the 

 inevitability of higher forms of social organisation than those we 

 now possess. But it acquires a further significance when we realise 

 that the society of the future must be one so founded on reason that 

 its rulers can afford tlie luxury, hitherto unattained by any rulers, of 

 being open to conviction. A rational social system, as the world co- 

 operative commonwealth would be, would have nothing to fear from 

 the upwelling of its own irrational contradictions, but would be open, 

 just as the system of science is to-day, to proposals for change. Let 

 any comer better the system, if he can. 



Let us now return to the historical origins of science in western 

 Europe, and particularly to the seventeenth century, the age of the 

 foundation of the Royal Society, from whose archives A. V. Hill 

 fetched his useful phrase. 



The political background of the early Royal Society. 



Modern historical research has established beyond question that 

 the great movement of science which, though extending back 

 into the fifteenth century, achieved its most magnificent victories 

 and attained its maximum rate of progress in the seventeenth, 

 was one of a number of vast social processes all taking place 

 at about the same time. The transition from the period of 

 mediaeval stagnation in science paralleled the economic transition 

 from feudal, social and economic forms to those of capitalism, 

 and this involved a general shift of emphasis from agricultural 



^ Is it not interesting that we find in early Chinese thought a premonition of this ? 

 In tlie Kuan-tze, a philosophical work of about loo B.C. (ch. i8) we find: "The sage 

 follows after things, in order that he may control them." (Sheng-rjeng ying chih, ku 

 nang ch'ang chih.) 



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