60 SCIENCE AND THE STATE 



one that leads a thousand can follow, and, when the 

 path followed is the path of natural knowledge, each 

 of these thousand can teach another thousand new 

 means of livelihood. 



You cannot starve into non-productiveness a 

 poet, an artist, a parson, or any great thinker of the 

 old type, nearly as easily as you can starve a 

 scientific genius. Because they are more self-con- 

 tained. To them the brain is both the raw material 

 and the machine for finishing and producing it. But, 

 to the devotees of the newer philosophy, the raw 

 material is not in the brain but is to be sought 

 for in external nature ; and in handling this raw 

 material, mastery over materials by scientific methods 

 of experiment is, at least, of equal importance with 

 mastery over the processes of thought. In other 

 words, laboratories are required, and, though an 

 artist without a studio, or an evangelist without a 

 church, might conceivably find under the blue dome 

 of heaven a substitute, a scientific man without a 

 laboratory is in most branches a misnomer. 



As science advances and most of the more acces- 

 sible fields of knowledge have been gleaned of their 

 harvest, the need for more and more powerful and 

 elaborate appliances and more and more costly 

 materials ever grows. Yet, if one-tenth of one per 

 cent, of all the added wealth that scientific men have, 

 without acknowledgment and without reward, earned 

 for the community were repaid, it would suffice them, 

 beyond their wildest dreams of avarice, for labora- 

 tories and maintenance. 



Suppose, then, we have found capable scientific 

 men, not necessarily any outstanding genius like 

 Newton, not one in a million, but say we have picked 

 out the best of every thousand in the community, 

 the chances are that the thousand, which we have 

 picked out of a million, will contain any potential 



