IV, — ^ SUNNY PROGRESSIVISM AND THE SHADOW OF WAR 



This attitude follows naturally from the demand of true scientific 

 work for individual concentration and isolation. The sequence, however, 

 is not necessary or laudable. Your isolated and concentrated scientist 

 must know what has gone before, or he will waste his life in doing 

 what has already been done, or in repeating past failures. He must know 

 something about what his contemporaries are trying to do, or he will 

 waste his life in duplicating effort. The history of science is so vast and 

 contemporary effort is so active that if he undertakes to acquire this 

 knowledge by himself alone his life is largely wasted in doing that his 

 initiative and creative power are gone before he is ready to use them. 

 Occasionally a man appears who has the instinct to reject the negligible. 

 A very great mind goes directly to the decisive fact, the determining 

 symptom, and can afford not to burden itself with a great mass of un- 

 important facts; but there are few such minds even among those capable 

 of real scientific work. All other minds need to be guided away from 

 the useless and towards the useful. That can be done only by the appli- 

 cation of scientific method to science itself through the purely scientific 

 process of organizing effort. It is a wearisome thing to think of the mil- 

 lions of facts that are being laboriously collected to no purpose what- 

 ever, and the thousands of tons of printed matter stored in basements 

 never to be read — all the product of unorganized and undirected scien- 

 tific spirit. . . . The solitary scientist . . . needs chart and compass, sug- 

 gestion, direction, and the external stimulus which comes from a con- 

 sciousness that his work is part of great things that are being done. 



This relation of the scientific worker to scientific work as a whole 

 can be furnished only by organization. It is a very interesting circum- 

 stance that while the long history of science exhibits a continual protest 

 against limitations upon individual freedom, the impulse which has 

 called in the power of organization to multiply the effectiveness of scien- 

 tific and industrial research to the highest degree is the German desire 

 for military world dominion, supported by a system of education strictly 

 controlled by government. All the world realizes now the immense value 

 in preparing for the present war, of the German system of research ap- 

 plied at Charlottenburg and Grosslichterfelde. That realization is plainly 

 giving a tremendous impetus to movements for effective organization of 

 scientific power both in England and in the United States, — countries 

 whose whole development has rested upon individual enterprise. It re- 

 mains to be seen whether peoples thoroughly imbued with the ideas and 

 accustomed to the traditions of separate private initiative are capable of 

 organizing scientific research for practical ends as effectively as an 

 autocratic government giving direction to a docile and submissive people. 

 I have no doubt about it myself, and I think the process has been well 

 begun in England under the Advisory Council of the Committee of the 

 Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and in the United 

 States under the National Research Council. I venture to say two things 

 about it. One is that the work can not be done by men who make it an 

 incident to other occupations. It can be encouraged of course by men 

 who are doing other things, but the real work of organization and re- 

 search must be done by men who make it the whole business of their 



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