Science in Public Affairs 



recognise that the great majority of engineering 

 occupations do not really belong to science at all 

 in the proper sense, but are persistent survivals of 

 a pre-scientific age. The empirical rule-of-thumb 

 types of engineer are still predominant, but they 

 essentially belong to a pre-scientific order that 

 has been well called Palaeotechnic. They do not 

 possess the physicist's vision of the world, still less 

 therefore do they seek to apply it to life. The 

 physical scientist in his cosmic mood sees the 

 world as an automatic system of energies, with a 

 tendency to run down and without a discoverable 

 means of winding it up again ; while as to the why 

 and wherefore of its being originally set going, the 

 data of his science give him no clue. Looking at 

 the same phenomena in his humanist mood, he sees 

 the flux and transformation of forces take on and 

 assume a definite design and purpose, which the 

 very logic of his science compels him to postulate as 

 an inherent potency in the very system of energies. 

 He sees every form of energy a potential slave of 

 man. He sees the cities scattered over the face of 

 the globe, as the supreme, the collective, the cease- 

 less effort of the race to realise this potency of 

 energy, to harness it in the service of man. The 

 type of physical scientist in whom the cosmic mood 

 is habitual and dominant is the actual or incipient 

 Regular. But where the grand and inspiring ideal 

 of realising for man the potency of world energies 

 animates the physical scientist, there clearly we 

 have the possibility of great Secular orders. And 

 that such orders are everywhere incipient and 



