ADDRESSES 37 
lectures when we are grown up, or in the frenzied effort to 
drive off an enemy who is knocking at our doors. We must play 
with the means of science as toys in our childhood, must grow 
up with them, watching them expand as we grow, until they 
change from toy to playmate, and from playmate to counselor 
and friend. 
We believe American civilization has in it something worth 
living for and worth dying for, but the living and the dying 
will alike be in vain if the experience of this war does not 
teach us the need of consistent scientific solidarity, and push 
us rapidly into it. Instead of praying for the extension in 
length and breadth of an idealistic culture, that cannot be 
realized short of the millennium, let us work as well as pray 
for a three-dimensional American culture; a Kultur in action. 
It is well to have the clouds of idealism on which the setting 
sun may spread the rainbow of hope, but it is not well for 
present-day men to dwell in the clouds. The ways of science 
bring us down from the clouds to the actual world in which 
we and our children must live. Today, the greatest science in 
the world is linked with the greatest autocracy. Is it to con- 
tinue so? Science as the handmaid of autocracy may give us a 
fetish, a superstition, like the “Ich und Gott” cult of the 
Hohenzollerns ; democracy and science will give us faith. Have 
we the “will to live” strong enough within us so that we will 
subject ourselves to self-denial and self-control for the future 
good, or is this power of foresight and preparation to remain 
only in the hands of an autocracy? On her answer to this 
question hangs the future of America, if not the destiny of the 
world. 
This paper was prepared between the birthday anniversaries 
of Washington and Lincoln. Never, we believe, have the ideals 
of these two great Americans meant so much to us as this year. 
Each of them, we now see clearly, stood like a great rock of 
the ages between the clamor of the unharnassed idealism on the 
one hand, and of the gross materialism on the other hand. As 
we think of their lofty ideals and unselfish patriotism, we also 
think of their sturdy common sense. For, when you come down 
to it, this is true science, as it is also enlightened patriotism: 
trained common sense as applied to our world, our country, 
and to ourselves. 
