VI FOREWORD 



a livelier sense of the range of forms the history of science may 

 take, and of the values that may be expected from it. They show 

 by varied and lucid examples, both topical and biographical, that 

 it is no narrow specialty but a liberating approach to human cul- 

 ture as a whole. 



They are linked, moreover, by certain recurring themes: 7he 

 unity of mankind; 7he unity of knowledge; 7he international 

 character of science; 7he kinship of artists, saints, and scientists 

 as fulfillers of human destiny, as creators and diffusers of spiritual 

 values; Jhe history of art, religion, and science as the essential 

 history of mankind, which has so far been largely "secret history" , 

 Science as progressive in a way in which art and religion are not; 

 7he dependence of other forms of progress upon scientific prog- 

 ress; 7he history of science as, therefore, the leading thread in 

 the history of civilization, the clue to the synthesis of knowledge, 

 the mediator between science and philosophy, and the keystone 

 of education. The reader learns to recognize and welcome the 

 variations on these themes. They end by becoming signposts 

 for his own thinking. 



Since reading these essays in proof, I have been turning over 

 again the pages of the thirty-eight volumes of Jsis, and re-reading 

 Dr. Sarton's contributions to them — especially his prefaces. In an 

 essay, 'The Faith of a Humanist/' which did duty in 1920 as 

 preface in Volume III, he quoted a sentence from the classical 

 scholar Gilbert Murray: "One might say roughly that material 

 things are superseded but spiritual things not; or that everything 

 considered as an achievement can be superseded, but considered 

 as so much life, not." Dr. Sarton added : 



It is true that most men of letters, and, I am sorry to add, not a few sci- 

 entists, know science only by its material achievements, but ignore its 

 spirit and see neither its internal beauty nor the beauty it extracts con- 

 tinually from the bosom of nature. Now I would say that to find in the 

 works of science of the past, that which is not and cannot be superseded, 

 is perhaps the most important part of our quest. A true humanist must 

 know the life of science as he knows the life of art and the life of religion. 



