ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE 15 



must also be given the credit for having conceived an idea and 

 started a process which, at first slowly and gropingly, now slip- 

 ping and falling, torn and bleeding among the thorns of the dark 

 forest of human motives, presently goes on, with a firmer, more 

 practiced, more confident step, to emerge into the light as the 

 deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That idea-process, this Anti-Fate 

 is Science. 



Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, 

 who revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. 

 Sceptics concerning the knowledge that was the accepted mono- 

 poly of the priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization 

 we know anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, 

 the Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that 

 amalgamation of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of 

 systematic research and critical thinking untrammelled by social 

 inhibitions which is the essence of modern science. Out of 

 them has come the great Tree of Knowledge of our time, which is, 

 too, the only Ygdrasil of Life, undying because it lives upon 

 successive generations of human brain cells. 



Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things 

 by men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of 

 isolated data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux 

 of transient sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle 

 of phenomena, were their goal. With no sense of themselves as 

 the mightiest of master-builders, cultivating humility toward 

 their material at any rate, the little men ploughed their little 

 fields, striking the oil of a great generalization or classification 

 or explanation with no fanfare of trumpets. 



First as freaks and cranks> then as scholars and pedants, then 

 protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal 

 patronage as societies and academies, they prepared for the 

 harvest. Comparing them to pioneer farmers sowing an undevel- 

 oped territory is really totally inadequate and inaccurate. For 

 the most part, they were like coral makers, laboriously construct- 

 ing, with no vision, certainly no sustained vision, of the whole. 

 To the practical men of affairs, the shopkeepers and traders, 

 the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers and sailors, the 

 statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized in maneu- 

 vering human beings and materials, they were, for this futile 

 devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd 

 weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the de- 

 mands and dangers of public life. 



