140 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



social, educational, economic conditions, which are operating un- 

 favorably upon their civilizations every day of the year. 



We may well inquire what it is that bears a nation onward and 

 upward to greater things. It is unquestionably the spirit of idealism 

 radiating from its various activities. It is the idealism in commer- 

 cial life: that part of every man's affairs which is conducted with 

 full respect for the rights of others; that part of every man's busi- 

 ness which would not, through its publication, injure his good name. 

 It is the idealism of the transportation system, which interchanges 

 commodities to mutual advantage, and acquaints one section of the 

 world with the good things of other sections. It is idealism in bank- 

 ing, in farming, in the honest day's labor at an honest wage. It is 

 idealism in the intellectual life: reverence for the truth, a desire to 

 know the truth, and to live in harmony with the truth in one's 

 surroundings. 



A pessimist would to-day, as always, receive short shrift, yet I 

 venture to say the world was perhaps never more urgently in need 

 of the biblical advice, " Prove all things ; hold fast that which is 

 good." This expression of great wisdom has never been surpassed 

 as a statement of the principles which govern men of science in their 

 search for the truth. 



The chief value of scientific method and accurate knowledge lies 

 not in their worship by the intellectual few, not in their applications 

 to industry, but in their influence upon the daily life of the people. 

 The remarkable advance in civilization within the leading nations 

 in recent centuries has been due to the daily and hourly influence ot 

 the scientific spirit, more than to any other element. Those nations 

 which possess it are forging ahead by leaps and bounds, and those 

 which do not are dropping out of the race. The unscientific nations 

 are threatened with absorption by their more scientific neighbors, 

 not so much because they do not invent or perfect the most powerful 

 cannon, the sturdiest dreadnaught, the speediest airplane, or the 

 subtlest submarine, but because the scientific nations are forging 

 ahead of them in the arts of peace, in the modes of thought, in the 

 affairs of daily life. The unscientific nations are without serious 

 influence in the world, not because they are unwarlike — the Turks 

 and essentially all Mohammedans are warlike enough to suit every- 

 body — but because they are lacking in the vision and the efficiency 

 which accompany the scientific spirit. 2 



History affords no more remarkable phenomenon than the retro- 

 grade movement in civilization which began with the decline of the 

 Roman power and continued through more than a thousand years. 



- This and the following paragraph have been taken, with but few changes, from one 

 of my earlier addresses. — W. W. C. 



