200 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



longings, seek to understand why things happen; or he can seek to 

 improve the material welfare of mankind by asking how things happen 

 so that he can utilize the knowledge to make tools or commodities. 

 In his last work on Cosmology, E. A. Milne quoted the song of the 

 angels, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of 

 good will," as the definition of these two objectives of science.'^ 



Although the advances of science toward the second objective are 

 those that have caught the popular imagination by raising our mate- 

 rial standards of life to unprecedented heights, it is the paradox of 

 history that those who sought the first objective, who labored to find 

 understanding, have, in the long run, done more to enrich the material 

 as well as the esthetic phases of human life than those who set out 

 directly to supply immediate material needs. Thus, in science, as in 

 other phases of human life, the first and great commandment exhorts 

 devotion to the unseen, to that which transcends current understand- 

 ing. The uneasiness we have noted springs, therefore, from very 

 profound sources ; it is the reaction of a corporate conscience to the 

 realization that the major commandment is being transgressed. All 

 our deep-rooted instincts demand that we must nurture scientific re- 

 search for reasons that transcend material considerations. The uni- 

 versities and the privately endowed institutions have inherited the 

 privilege and the responsibility of cultivating pure science as an in- 

 tellectual pursuit, the quest for understanding. This is a responsi- 

 bility they must and can discharge regardless of what other activities 

 they must foster in the service of their generation. If they fail, a new 

 dark age will be the result, an age described by Isaiah, "It is a people of 

 no understanding ; therefore, He that made them will not have mercy 

 on them, and He that formed them will show them no favor." If the 

 universities discharge these responsibilities with the breadth and lib- 

 erality of true education, we can expect generations of research scien- 

 tists, scholars, and professional men who are imbued with a thirst for 

 intellectual satisfaction that leads them to extend the range of valid 

 human experiences, and order them in patterns that make the myster- 

 ies of nature communicable to all who wish to know them ; that will, 

 in short, inspire them to search for truth. In this spirit, the quest for 

 understanding through basic scientific research results in much more 

 than the foundation of tomorrow's technologies; it becomes a disci- 

 pline fundamental to civilized life. 



Even in the reahn of problems of value, in moral philosophy, we 



may apply the ideas of circuits or closed loops which we have used 



in describing natural philosophy. In figure 3, I show the basic 



reciprocal relations between truth, freedom, civilization, and the 

 — ^-^— ^— . ^ 



* An Interesting review of this work Is given by G. B. Hutchinson In American Scientist, 

 vol. 40, p. 509, 1952, 



