10 Introduction 



The French mathematician, Henri Poincare, once remarked, "I do 

 not say, Science is useful because it helps us to build better machines; 

 I say. Machines are useful because as they work for us they will leave us 

 someday more time for scientific research." Unfortunately, these hopes 

 of his have not yet materialized; the machines have perhaps enslaved 

 more men than they have freed. This suggests another score against 

 Science; many who greeted her with blessings dismissed her with curses. 

 It would seem easy to ward ojff those maledictions. It suffices to dis- 

 tinguish between men of science and even technicians on one side, and 

 business men, industrialists, men of prey on the other. The inventors 

 cannot be held responsible; they themselves would protest, for the crimi- 

 nal abuses which have been made of their inventions. This type of con- 

 troversy has reached a dramatic climax recently apropos of the atomic 

 bomb; if the latter were used for the destruction of mankind should we 

 condemn or exonerate the physicists and chemists who brought it into 

 being? 



That question is too difficult to be solved here. Instead of that let 

 us see what could and should be done to vindicate the spirit of science, 

 to purify it, and to make sure — or bring nearer — its redemption and ours. 



We have recalled at the beginning of this lecture that science is the 

 most powerful agency of change not only in the material world but also 

 in the spiritual one; so powerful indeed that it is revolutionary. Our 

 Weltanschauung changes as our knowledge of the world and of ourselves 

 deepens. The horizon is vaster as we go higher. This is undoubtedly 

 the most significant kind of change occurring in the experience of man- 

 kind; the history of civilization should be focussed upon it. 



At any rate, that is what I have been repeating ad nauseam for the 

 last thirty years. May I confess, that without having lost any part of 

 my zeal, I am not as full of confidence today as I was before; I have 

 never been very dogmatic ( and therefore am a very poor propagandist ) , 

 but I am less dogmatic now than I ever was. There are other ap- 

 proaches to the past than mine; there may be better ways (at least for 

 other people) of describing the creativeness of the past and of appre- 

 ciating our heritage from it — such as the history of religions, the history 

 of arts and crafts, the history of philosophy, the history of education, the 

 history of laws and institutions. Each of those histories is an avenue 

 of approach. Which is the best? And for whom? The history of sci- 

 ence has, it is true, a kind of strategic superiority; scientific discoveries 

 are objective to a degree unknown and even inconceivable in other 

 fields; as they are largely independent of racial and national conditions, 

 they are the main instruments of unity and peace; these discoveries are 

 cumulative to such an extent that each scientist can so-to-say begin his 

 task where his predecessors left oflF ( artists and religious men must al- 

 ways begin da capo and their labors are Sisyphean ) ; it is only from the 

 point of view of its scientific activities that the comparison of mankind 

 with a single man, growing steadily in experience, is legitimate, and this 

 evidences once more and more emphatically than anything else the unity 

 of mankind; it is only in the field of science that a definite and continuous 



