Science in Public Affairs 



out powerful and generous minds. No one wishes to lose any- 

 thing of that result, and no one who appreciates it can under- 

 value the means by which it was attained. But the young men 

 who, with this kind of attainment, were turned out at two-and- 

 twenty into the world were not in touch with it. The region 

 in which their minds had been developed was the ancient 

 world, dead, no doubt, to the practical man, but in spirit at 

 least still living for these young men. The world into which 

 they emerged on leaving the University was a very different 

 world from that of Pericles, Aristotle, or Caesar. Instead of 

 being bounded on the north by the Danube and Hadrian's 

 Wall, and on the south by the Sahara, it covered the whole 

 surface of a planet revolving in infinite space. Its men of 

 knowledge, the true successors of Aristotle and Archimedes, 

 had weighed and measured it, had ascertained the laws of 

 its stability and of its movements, had traced its genesis and 

 found out what it was made of, had explored the structure and 

 the growth of all living things. This new world, so different 

 to that known to the ancients, was full of steam engines and 

 electrical machines, of factories and of their workpeople. These 

 workpeople were not slaves as in that old world, but free men, 

 respecting themselves, believing they had as good a right as 

 any senator to take part in affairs of State. The man of 

 classical training, in spite of his well-developed powers, found 

 himself a stranger in this new world. Its engines were a 

 mystery to him. Its natural laws he had to learn from all 

 sorts of aliens to his intellectual experience persons calling 

 themselves engineers, chemists, biologists, and geologists 

 with whom during his academic life he had had only a nodding 

 acquaintance. The link was wanting between the world of his 

 books and the real world, the only clue which he possessed 

 being the identity with itself of the human mind and the human 

 character in the two worlds between which he was placed, the 

 world of his old books and the world of his new surroundings. 



" Such was the contrast which existed thirty or forty years ago. 

 Since then it has been mitigated, so that the description just 

 given may now seem to be exaggerated, but the contrast still 

 exists. It has to be altogether obliterated. How that is to be 

 done may best be seen by considering the process by which 

 the gulf which has to be filled up has been bridged. What has 



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