SCIENCE SHAPING AMERICAN CULTURE — COMPTON 179 



need of transportation; but eventually the refinements come that 

 add to life's enjoyment. 



Our older habits no longer fit the new conditions of life, and 

 we have not yet learned how best to use the new possibilities placed 

 at our disposal. Nor as long as such rapid changes in our social 

 life continue can we hope to make a completely satisfactory adapta- 

 tion of our mode of life. For as one aspect of the problem becomes 

 solved, changes will lead to maladjustment somewhere else. It would 

 for this reason be futile to hope to attain within the next generation 

 an art of living in a technological world that can compare in re- 

 finement with the classic culture initiated by the Greeks and developed 

 through centuries of such tradition as that carried on by European 

 and English society. In course of time, though it may require 

 centuries, we may expect the development of science to approach 

 a new plateau of knowledge and invention. Then we may hope again 

 to refine our mode of living to fit precisely the conditions of our 

 greater world. 



Does this prospect of generations of incomplete adaptation, with 

 resultant discontent and hardship seem discouraging? One is 

 reminded of the legend in which the people complain to Daedalus 

 that the steel sword he has given to King Minas will bring not happi- 

 ness but strife. Daedalus replies, "I do not care to make man happy, 

 but to make him great." For those who have courage, the new pow- 

 ers thus given by science present a challenge to shape man's life on a 

 more heroic scale. Here is a vision of a new world which only the 

 brave may enter. 



Yet we can thus appreciate the dread felt by those who have 

 followed the tradition of classic culture as the life they have loved 

 and whose values they have cherished is threatened by the advance 

 of technology. They see science replacing the human interests pres- 

 ent in literature, art, and music with technological developments in 

 which the human factor becomes less and less significant. The most 

 fundamental values of morality and religion are ruthlessly shaken, 

 with the implication that their value is negligible. It is just because 

 so many scientific men seem blind to these human difficulties that one 

 feels the greater concern lest in following science mankind may lose 

 its soul. 



There is a passage in Plato's Phaedo in which Socrates describes 

 his early interest in physics and how he had found that physics fails 

 to account for the important things in life. Thus, he explained, 

 Anaxagoras would say that Socrates sat on his cot waiting to drink 

 the hemlock because of certain tensions of tendons acting on his 

 bones. The true reason was rather because he had been condemned 

 by the people of Athens, and as a man of honor he could not creep 

 stealthily away. Such moral forces as honor were not to be explained 



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