UiJsLOVliKY 



realisation lent a common tone to all the speeches at 

 this year's meeting of the British Association. Par- 

 ticularly remarkable from this point of view was 

 Sir Kichard Gregory's address ' to the delegates of 

 corresponding societies, urging them to make the im- 

 portance of science, as well as its material assistance, felt 

 in every corner of the country. Amongst many other 

 fine and apposite statements, Sir Richard said: " In 

 mechanics work is not considered to be done until the 

 point of application of the force is moved ; and 

 knowledge, like energy, is of no practical value unless 

 it is dynamic. The scientific society which shuts itself 

 up in a house where a favoured few can contemplate its 

 intellectual riches is no better than a group of misers 

 in its relations to the community around it. The time 

 has come for a crusade which will plant the flag of 

 scientific truth in a bold position in every province of 

 the modern world. . . . It is not by discoveries alone, 

 and the records of them in volumes rarely consulted, 

 that science is advanced, but by the diffusion of 

 knowledge and the direction of men's minds and actions 

 through it. In these democratic days no one accepts, 

 as a working social ideal, Aristotle's view of a small 

 and highly cultivated aristocracy pursuing the arts and 

 sciences in secluded groves and maintained by manual 

 workers excluded from citizenship ! " 



***** 



It is true that in the past the intellectual worker has 

 not sufficiently exerted himself in order to grip the 

 attention of the public ; it is equally true that the 

 public has not hitherto manifested interest in his work. 

 In his Presidential Address - at this year's Annual 

 General Meeting of the British Academy, Sir Frederick 

 Kenyon particularly emphasised this apathy ; 



" The progress of knowledge," he said, " of education, 

 of culture in the widest sense of the term, is hampered 

 by the dead weight of indifference with which it has to 

 contend. Taking the British public as a whole, there 

 is[a solid mass of disbelief in the value of knowledge and 

 of the things of the mind. In spite of the large class of 

 amateurs of culture that the country possesses, people 

 who sympathise with things of beauty and learning 

 without pretending to be professional students of them, 

 the nation has no deep-rooted faith in the necessity 

 for such things. We are predominantly a materially 

 minded people. Consequently literature, art, know- 

 ledge, wherever they have not an obvious material 

 value, have to fight everywhere for recognition." 

 ***** 



So the fault is on both sides, or, rather, it is a fault 

 resulting from the peculiar social conditions of our times. 



' The Advancement of Science, 1921 (John Murray. 6s^, 

 contains all the Presidential .Addresses at this year's meeting. 



a The Fellowship of Learning. By Sir F. G. Kenyon, K.C.B. 

 (Published for the British Academy by Humphrey Milford, 

 0.xford University Press, is. 6d.) 



We shall not overcome it merely by education. An 

 urge to a greater collective seriousness and care of 

 thought must be started. The gulf of indifference must 

 be bridged from both sides. On the one hand the intel- 

 lectual workers will have to ford right out into the 

 currents of daily life. Scientists have already done 

 splendid service in this way, but, as Sir Frederick Ken- 

 yon pointed out later in his speech, they need to show a 

 common front to the world ; to show that their many 

 branches of work link up one with the other ; they 

 need to show that the work of both natural and applied 

 science is the backbone of nearly every commercial 

 undertaking and every convenience of modem civilised 

 life ; that natural science, even when it has no im- 

 mediate or apparent practical value, as, for instance, 

 in Astronomy or Anthropology, opens up vistas of 

 knowledge about ourselves and the universe in which we 

 dwell, and makes us more sentient, more god-like beings. 

 And our creative artists and scholars must continually 

 be emphasising the fact that literature, art, and music 

 are not composed just to worry schoolboys, to fill up 

 the shelves of libraries, and to provide serious enter- 

 tainments in the concert-hall or picture-gallery, but 

 that they are forged from the very experiences and 

 emotions of life, and react with incalculable effect 

 on international, national, and individual destinies. 

 Popular expositions of all branches of knowledge by 

 the experts themselves, local scientific and artistic 

 societies, the opportunities offered by institutions Uke 

 the Workers' Education Association and the Co-opera- 

 tive Education Union, clubs for all classes and of all 

 types in which our pioneers of thought can reveal and 

 discuss their discoveries with members in a friendly 

 spirit, cheaper books, the right kind of co-operation 

 by the Press — all these things are needed more than 

 ever to-day. 



***** 

 And the pubhc itself must meet the intellectual 

 workers half-way and extend their s\Tnpathies to such 

 movements. Politicians and business men can give 

 them far more material support than they have hitherto 

 done ; our leisured and so-called educated classes must 

 abandon their phlegmatic, half-contemptuous attitude 

 to " learning " ; the manual worker must be wilUng to 

 realise that mental work is in its own way just as 

 arduous and productive of results as his own work, 

 and that the mental worker is a friend, not a foe. In 

 Britain we are still apt to look askance at "stinks" 

 men, " wild " poets, " book-worms," and "effeminate " 

 musicians, and to forget that without them we should 

 not have been blessed with electric light, telephones, 

 railways, theatres, cinemas, and novels. But these are 

 only some of their more concrete and visible contribu- 

 tions to life. In promoting knowledge the sciences 

 and fine arts are at once the inspirers and measiu-ers 



