36 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
loved. The call is for the consistent development of an Ameri- 
can Kultur, of a unification of all our aims, ideals, methods, 
with the purposive intent of producing a democracy as efficient 
as any autocracy, yet with space for the growth of individual 
initiative. 
Can we organize our democracy for an “offensive” peace? To 
develop such a democracy we need at least two things; first, 
the knowledge, and second, the “will to live” as a free people. 
This brings me to the point of this paper. We need scientific . 
knowledge in America. We need it most, not as a knowledge 
of the past, but of the present, for the rules of the past help us 
very little today. We need to know our world as it is today. 
We need that knowledge as a basis of our common life, of our 
national culture, of our world plans. The idea of working 
together for a great future purpose is almost unknown to us; 
must such a possibility exist only for an autocracy? When 
conservation is called for, we as a people need to know science, 
or we cannot conserve wisely and cheerfully. When we wish 
to engage in a new manufacturing enterprise we need to have 
science, not that it may stand as a wage servant at our elbow 
and merely register our will, but as the forerunner and pioneer 
to blaze the trail. As we cannot raise armies over night, so we 
cannot make our people scientific by wishing them to be so. 
Scientific knowledge must not simply be diffused among our 
people, but ingrained into our people, so that they can act as an 
intelligent unit toward a common purpose. The conviction of 
this need rises paramount to every other; to achieve this end 
should be the aim of our national policies, the goal of our 
popular education. Science is not analyzing bugs, or making 
oxygen, or measuring the distance of the stars, or guessing the 
age of a trilobite. Greater than these individual products of 
science, are the methods of science. To ascertain the facts, 
large and small; to eliminate the non-essential ones; to draw 
conclusions; to realize the limitations of these conclusions, yet 
to derive a working philosophy from them; and to determine 
upon a line of action based upon the facts and the conclusions 
—these are the ways of science. It will need two generations, 
at least, of scientific, devoted, patriotic thinking to make us a 
scientific nation. We cannot learn the principles of science by 
