2 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



increasing mastery over nature and enrichment of human 

 nature which we call the progress of civilization. 



This aspect of science it is easy to forget— and in ac- 

 ademic halls we forget it, I am afraid, more often than do 

 chose outside— because, in the minutiae of our specialized work, 

 it is often hard to see the wood because of the trees. To 

 make it not so hard is largely the purpose of this course. Its 

 design is to bring out broad outlines, to show the connections 

 between the different parts of science, to exhibit the unity 

 and total sweep of the scientific movement of our time, and 

 to remind us not only of its newer successes but also of its 

 hopes and its tasks-tasks at once baffling and alluring to that 

 highest expression of man's play-spirit which is the desire 

 to know to that wholesomest manifestation of his fighting 

 ^.pirit which is the inability to take a dare from an unsolved 

 problem We are, then, in this course to seek a general and 

 connected view of the system of organized knowledge- 

 though for the present only within the reata of physical 

 phenomena; and we are, so to say, to place ourselves more 

 especially upon the border-lines and the fightmg-hnes of the 



several sciences. . r r u 



It is I think, no mere illusion of perspective, nor foolish 

 conceit of our own generation, to say that there has been no 

 time since modern science began when such a survey of pres- 

 ent knowledge and current progress in knowledge could have 

 been so impressive, so interesting-one is tempted to say so 

 exciting-as in this first decade of the twentieth century. The 

 great moments of one science or group of sciences have not al- 

 ways been the great moments of another. The seventeenth cen- 

 tury from Galileo through Descartes to Newton and Leibniz, 

 was 'the age of the splendid dawn of modern mathematics, 

 mechanics, cosmical physics and exact astronomy ; but though 

 ■eminent, it was not equally eminent, in the biological sciences; 

 chemistry can scarcely be said to have existed; the social 

 sciences were yet unborn ; and the great transformations of 



