Higher Usefulness of Science 51 



So much more fundamentally is science identified witK 

 the man who is said to be armed with it, than is the 

 club or gun with which he may arm himself, that if for 

 convenience of expression we represent it as thus de- 

 tached, the good and bad which we impute to it will be 

 quite different from the good and bad of a club or a 

 hoe. If science is personified, the goodness or the bad- 

 ness attributed to it are found, sooner or later, to 

 assume moral aspects. This seems to me a truth which 

 scientific men have not sufficiently appreciated. Un- 

 questionably one of the supreme virtues of science is 

 its ability to be impersonal when occasion demands 

 to view facts as they actually are, regardless of any- 

 body's interests or wishes or feelings. If the epidemic 

 is diagnosed as bubonic plague, as such it must be ac- 

 cepted and preventive and remedial measures shaped 

 accordingly. But there is a limit beyond which science 

 can no longer operate with this impersonal detach- 

 ment. Situations are sure to arise wherein it will be 

 held to moral accountability. It is in the same boat 

 with ah 1 the other major interests and activities of 

 man. No human good whatever is beyond the possi- 

 bility of transformation into evil. Love may be so 

 permeated with selfishness and jealousy as to make of 

 it a curse instead of a blessing. Some of the darkest 

 chapters of human history are thus dark because of the 

 passage of religion over into superstition and cruelty. 

 Science is still too young, ethnologically speaking, to 

 have quite found its place in the enormous complexity 



