PHYSICS MILLIKAN. 171 



Now, that a supine fatalism results from such a philosophy is to 

 be expected, for according to it everything that happens is the will 

 of the gods, or the will of some more powerful beings than ourselves. 

 And so, in all the ancient world, and in much of the modern also, 

 three blind fates sit down in dark and deep inferno and weave out 

 the fates of men. Man himself is not a vital agent in the march 

 of things, he is only a speck, an atom which is hurled hither and 

 thither in the play of mysterious, titanic, uncontrollable forces. 



Now, the philosophy of physics, a philosophy which was held at 

 first timidly, always tentatively, always as a mere working hypothe- 

 sis, but yet held with ever-increasing conviction from the time of 

 Galileo, when the experimental method may be said to have had its 

 beginnings, clear up to the present time, is the exact antithesis of 

 the above. Stated in its most sweeping form it holds that the uni- 

 verse is ultimately rationally intelligible, no matter how far from a 

 complete comprehension of it we may now be, or indeed may ever 

 come to be. It believes in the absolute uniformity of nature. It views 

 the world as a mechanism, every part and every movement of which 

 fits in some definite, invariable way, into the other parts and the 

 other movements; and it sets itself the inspiring task of studying 

 every phenomenon in the confident hope that the connections between 

 it and other phenomena can ultimately be found. It will have 

 naught of caprice in nature. It looks askance at mysticism in all its 

 forms whether put forth by Dionysius in Greece in 300 B. C. or by 

 the devotees of Bergson in Paris in 1915. That is the spirit, the 

 attitude, the working hypothesis of all modern science, and let me 

 say that this philosophy is in no sense materialistic, because good, 

 and mind, and soul, and moral values, which is only another word 

 for God, these things are all here just as truly as are any physical 

 objects, and with that kind of a creed they must simply be inside and 

 not outside of this matchless mechanism. 



Second, as to the method of science, it is a method practically 

 unknown to the ancient world, for that world was essentially sub- 

 jective in all its thinking and built up its views of things largely 

 by introspection. The scientific method, on the other hand, is a 

 method which is completely objective. It is the method of the work- 

 ing hypothesis which is ready for the discard the very minute it 

 fails to work. It is the method which believes in a minute, careful, 

 wholly dispassionate analysis of a situation ; and any physicist or 

 engineer who allows the least trace of prejudice or preconception to 

 enter into his study of a given problem violates the most sacred duty 

 of his profession. This present cataclysm which has set the world 

 back a thousand years in so many ways, has shown us the pitiful 

 spectacle of scientists who have forgotten completely the scientific 



