22 The Higher Usefulness of Science 



tion can do nothing greater than find some means of 

 destroying anything it can create? Is growth in civ- 

 ilization purely quantitative purely a matter of giv- 

 ing the head-hunter's business greater scope and 

 precision and power? Is the making of hell more 

 hellish the supreme achievement of science? I do not 

 believe so despite the strong evidence pointing that 

 way. But scientific men ought to recognize that the 

 share of blame and shame which falls to science is not 

 small. 



It would be unjust and foolish to contend under pre- 

 vailing conceptions of right and wrong that moral 

 culpability rests upon the chemists, the physicists, the 

 engineers and others who have participated in making 

 the war machine the dreadful thing it is. But when 

 men shall come to know themselves and other men and 

 nature as these really are, moral law if not civil law 

 will, I believe, interdict science from lending itself to 

 the dire business in such unrestrained way as it has 

 hitherto. 



To see something of the character of that knowledge 

 of man and nature which would tend to such an end 

 is the task before us. 



That wonderful period, the later 16th century and 

 the earlier 17th, in which the two great Englishmen 

 lived whose works are the occasion of this week's meet- 

 ings, contributed more, I believe, to such knowledge 

 than any other period of equal length in the history 

 of the world. Run over the list of familiar names be- 



