BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1351 



gerated) "materialism", as from say Biichner to Loeb, for which 

 living beings, in their organic and even psychic functionings, were 

 but a dance of material and energic change, and thus, and thus 

 only, to be interpreted. But even with this advance, can a scientific 

 policy be elaborated? It is no doubt much thus clearly to see that 

 "there is no wealth but life"; and that our essential "progress" 

 must thus be in "life more abundantly" — Life in its Evolution. 

 Thus as all must agree, our mechanistic progress has to be judged. 

 What use of microscope and telescope, albeit marvels of mechanistic 

 construction, save as added eye-power to us, what value of railway 

 and speed-ship, motor and aeroplane, save for enhancement of our 

 locomotion, or of telephone and wireless, cinema and what not, 

 save as extensions of our natural and organic psychic powers? At 

 first sight this is a commonplace ; for every mechanical inventor has 

 seen it, indeed, as his main goal, and often his only reward. Yet 

 has not the industrial age, in using these advances, also deeply 

 vulgarised them; as for "business" ("not for our health!") and for 

 finance, so widely misused and debased — and above all for war, 

 increasingly destructive — war, with farther destructive armaments, 

 now wellnigh capable of destroying humanity and organic life 

 together. 



This present outrunning of the sciences of life, by the mathe- 

 matico-physical and chemical sciences, has been the essential and 

 dominant character of the Industrial Age throughout its progress, 

 now ever attaining new culminations. Yet it is no small sign of 

 hope that its serious thinkers begin to realise this. Witness, and as 

 a date in contemporary history and its interpretation, the recent 

 Centenary celebration of the Institute of Engineers, with the 

 admirable retrospective address reviewing "A Century of Progress", 

 in which their profession has been the very foremost, and by their 

 fitting and weU-chosen President, Principal Sir Alfred Ewing, of 

 Edinburgh University, than whom probably no engineer in any 

 country has had more varied experience, in science and invention, 

 in war and peace, and in education, from Navy-School to those of 

 all the professions. Yet his address ends with realisation of what is 

 nothing short of world-tragedy, and this both past and anew 

 impending. We look through the address for some sign of hope, and 

 so there is — a call — indeed a cry — for some renewal of social and 

 moral progress to save us ere we perish and by each other's hands, 

 super-mechanised and super- armed as these are more and more 

 becoming. But here — albeit Principal of a University which has 

 justly been earning its eminence through ages past, in the arts and 

 sciences of peace, incomparably more than in those of war — Sir 

 Alfred gave his hearers but faint light, and no definite leading. How 

 so? Because of the essential nature of the Industrial Age to which 

 engineers belong, which they so largely create, and also maintain. 



