ii6 SCIENCE AND THE WAR 



So far, everybody whose opinion counts seems 

 to be agreed; but in any plea for an extended 

 and improved teaching of science, certain points 

 ought not to be left out of count. In the first 

 place, science is not the key to all locks ; there 

 are many important things some of the most 

 important things in life with which it has 

 nothing whatever to do. It will be well to recall 

 Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the National 

 Physical Laboratory : " Science depends on 

 measurement, and things not measurable are 

 therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from 

 its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happi- 

 ness are not measurable. If there could be a 

 unit of happiness, politics might begin to be 

 scientific." It follows that there are a number of 

 subjects on which the scientific man is just as fit, 

 or as unfit, to express an opinion as any other 

 man. The intense preoccupation which serious 

 scientific studies demand, may render the man 

 who is engaged therein even less competent to 

 express an opinion on alien subjects than one 

 whose attention, less concentrated, has time to 

 range over diverse fields of study. Readers of 

 Darwin's Life will remember his confession that 

 he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature ; 

 that he " could not endure to read a line of 

 poetry " and found Shakespeare " so intolerably 

 dull that it nauseated " him ; and finally, that his 

 mind seemed " to have become a kind of machine 

 for grinding general laws out of a large collection 

 of facts." 



Despite this warning as to the limits of science, 



