78 THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE 



save for evil. The great function of death is to 

 rejuvenate the world perennially, and to keep it in 

 tune with a changing environment. Our wise men 

 have tried to defeat it by drilling the oncoming 

 generations in the dead languages and humanistic 

 philosophies and religions of their forefathers, and 

 the transitional period ahead promises to be most 

 uncomfortable in this country. 



But it has now been borne in on the conscious- 

 ness of the most reactionary that for the State to 

 leave science to the tender mercies of its priests 

 and humanists is to ask for extermination. Our 

 boasted moral superiority over our enemies can 

 only make us deserve victory. Science alone can 

 achieve it on the battlefield, and safeguard it sub- 

 sequently. We may pray for rain, but as a shrewd 

 clergyman once remarked, "What is the use of 

 praying for rain with the wind in the east ? " 



Hitherto the war has been represented as 

 originating in mistaken ideas of Right, but it equally 

 is due to mediaeval ideas of Might. The professors 

 of history and politics and the military publicists 

 of Germany, who revived and made palatable the 

 ancient doctrine of " Might is Right," intoxicated, 

 no doubt, by the new weapons and inventions of 

 science, regarded them from the childish standpoint 

 of the savage. These old ideas cannot coexist with 

 science. If they involved merely the destruction 

 of those who held them it would be just, but they 

 jeopardise the whole race. 



If the task of altering the character of a nation's 

 education is, like afforestation, slow in its fruition, 

 when accomplished it resembles rather the pro- 

 cesses of geology in its initiation. Chemistry 

 emerged as a science from being the handmaid to 

 medicine 250 years ago, but in the Scottish uni- 

 versities its recognition, as a separate subject of 



