196 THE IDEALS OF A SCIENCE SCHOOL 



The question of a citizen's duty and place in a 

 complex State to-day would surely be a better basis 

 for his education than Latin and Greek or intro- 

 spective philosophy. Parliament and the country 

 are being daily confronted and settle by votes 

 similar questions of practical twentieth - century 

 ethics, which it should be as much the function of 

 a university to explore, in a scientific spirit, and 

 reduce to a reasoned and complete form, as it is its 

 recognised duty to enlarge the boundaries of natural 

 knowledge. Applied professional Faculties of Law, 

 Divinity, Medicine, Education and so on, without 

 the pure Faculties to carry out constructive and 

 creative work in the subjects with which they deal, 

 are just one example of our artificially engendered 

 retrospective habit of mind. Professional Faculties 

 merely carry on, but whose business is it at present 

 to say what it is shall be carried on when what is 

 being carried on becomes anti-social and out of date ? 

 We pride ourselves on being the greatest nation on 

 earth, with an empire on which the sun never sets, 

 and all that sort of thing, and we leave to haphazard, 

 popular vote and professional interests, the settlement 

 of the problems arising out of the very growth and 

 development upon which greatness alone depends. 



There is only one principle, and that an undeniable 

 one, which needs to be logically accepted and carried 

 out in practice to make this nation exorcise the evil 

 spirit which has brought us so near to the brink of 

 ruin and made of us the object of real concern and 

 despair to every one of our daughter dominions 

 beyond the seas. We must act as we have been 

 forced to act during the war, as though we were 

 great because of ourselves, our environment, our 

 powers of making original discoveries and of applying 

 them without fear to the peculiar problems of our 

 day, not merely in science but universally. Act upon 



