12 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



atmosphere, was much the same. The absence of Christian- 

 ity and especially the extent of slavery would make the social 

 world rather different to our voyager, but for his bodily com- 

 fort he would find that he had lost little in returning to the 

 ancient world. But if the man of today should go back to 

 the world in which Newton was born, he might not find him- 

 self mentally in a remote world, but physically he would be 

 astonished and shocked. The clothing would strike him as 

 primitive; the houses, as crude and uncomfortable. Few 

 would care to live in Wolsey's palace at Hampton Court, and 

 Wolsey was a man who loved luxury. The sights and the 

 smells, the dirt and the vermin of the cities of that time 

 would be most offensive to him. The inconveniences of 

 travel, the unpaved streets, the absence of sanitation, and 

 the appalling disease would make him realize how great a 

 change has come over the ^\ orld. He would soon, of course, 

 become accustomed to the conditions, just as men today be- 

 come accustomed to primitive conditions when they en- 

 counter them. But ho^v inconvenient to be without matches, 

 without any satisfactory water system, and, for those ^vho are 

 inveterate readers, to have a very limited supply of books 

 and no satisfactory system of artificial light! 



These comforts and conveniences, ^vhich are today nor- 

 mally taken for granted, have been achieved by the work of 

 the technologists and scientists of the last three hundred 

 years. Moreover, even the industrial revolution of the nine- 

 teenth century probably produced less change in the life of 

 man than has occurred during the first third of the twentieth 

 century. Many writers on sociology have commented on the 

 recent changes in social conditions and in human relations 

 as being psychological and sociological phenomena; and 

 among these are a number of the most distinguished philos- 

 ophers and thinkers of the present time. A. N. Whitehead, 

 discussing the present as a turning point in the sociological 

 conceptions of western civilization, concludes that through- 

 out the w^hole of the western world "something has come 

 to an end." 



