28 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



mands more numerous and more various emendations." 



Such is a brief historical summary, brought up to date, of 

 the fluctuations of scientific and philosophical opinion with 

 respect to the meaning, the possibility and the actuality of the 

 unification of science. In our own day, as you see, the belief 

 in a fundamental unity and an eventual practical unification, 

 and the denial of the possibility of either, stand over against 

 one another in a sharp and definite opposition for which the 

 previous history of science apparently affords no precedent. 

 And those who have the privilege of following the movement 

 of scientific thought during the next half-century may expect 

 to see, over and above all specific discoveries in the individual 

 sciences, some interesting progress made towards the settle- 

 ment of this more general issue. I shall not undertake to pre- 

 dict the outcome, or even to take sides in the contemporary 

 controversies on the subject; for there is no time on the pres- 

 ent occasion for any adequate discussion of the matter, and I 

 wish to avoid merely dogmatic forth-puttings of personal 

 opinion. The function of this lecture must be merely to 

 formulate the issue, to summarize its past vicissitudes, and 

 thus, perhaps, to prepare some of those who are to be wit- 

 nesses of, and some who are even, we assume, to be actors in, 

 the intellectual progress of the next half-century, to know 

 what to look for, to catch the larger bearings of what is going 

 on. 



But wherein — you may by this time be asking — lies the 

 significance of the issue? What human interests are at stake 

 in the controversy? What difference does it make whether 

 science be or be not capable of complete unification? And 

 some attempt ought now to be made to answer this natural 

 question, though there is time to do so only briefly and in- 

 sufficiently. 



It must be apparent from what has already been said 

 that, in so far as unification takes place, it is necessarily a uni- 

 fication downward. I use this last word in a familiar and in- 

 telligible sense. We are accustomed to arrange the sciences 



