68 THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE 



Merely to enumerate a few of these antagonistic 

 aspirations is to show that no decision has been 

 reached as regards them, nor indeed can be till a 

 decision is first reached on the field. It is merely as 

 though the bottom had dropped out of the mill-race 

 of human emotions and each jostling- element in the 

 turbulence, suddenly relieved from the antagonism 

 and obstruction of its neighbours, had sprung forward 

 crying victory. Yet, all are agreed that little in our 

 daily lives will be the same as it was before the war. 

 The universities of the future will certainly not be, as 

 in the past, proud to be considered the last sanctuaries 

 of lost causes. But there is one definite decision 

 that has been reached, whatever be the issue of the 

 conflict, which concerns us deeply, and that is that 

 science, whether it be loved or hated, whatever else 

 be relegated to a museum of antiquities, is absolutely 

 essential and indispensable if the nation is to survive 

 either in war or in peace. Magna est veritas et 

 prevalet. 



The reconciliation that will be arrived at on the 

 battlefield will be a reconciliation of exhaustion. 

 The reconciliation that will endure must be one 

 between the old in thought and manner and the new 

 in things, which can no longer co-exist. The 

 humanist, the student of man, must admit into his 

 world the science of the external universe, and modify 

 his ideas accordingly. Instead of his being the 

 central figure in a system of his own creation, man 

 is being constrained to move in an orbit by a power 

 external to himself. The battle between the old and 

 the new has but lately been joined in earnest. But 

 the incongruity of the battlefield the most wonderful 

 and terrible of scientific weapons, submarines, dread- 

 noughts, zeppelins and aeroplanes, each a mass of 

 the most ingenious and beautifully constructed 

 scientific machinery grappling on behalf of political 



