THE HIGHER VALUES OF SCIENCE 301 



alteration in that to which he is accustomed. The reason 

 why youth accepts innovations, which shock old age, is that 

 the mind of youth has not become so wedded to established 

 practices. If the innovation survives, and becomes a part 

 of the social order, the generation which has accepted it 

 may later resist a further change. One of the tragedies of 

 life is the fact that so many minds close at the threshold of 

 what might have become a great adventure. We hear a 

 great deal about the individuals who choose the wrong moral 

 direction, and the facts are serious enough; but we hear 

 little about those who choose the closed in place of the open 

 frame of mind, whose intellectual development ceases before 

 they are grown to man's estate and who go through life with 

 a mental attitude that is immune to new ideas. Whatever 

 the shortcomings of the individual scientist, the ideal of 

 science is one of intellectual development, of a state of mind 

 that is always open to conviction when presented with new 

 evidence. This mental habit is not easily maintained be- 

 cause of the human tendencies aforementioned. It is, how- 

 ever, indispensable to intellectual and also to moral progress. 

 In professional life, men not infrequently fail because 

 they lose the capacity to grow intellectually. The individual 

 begins perhaps with an education that puts him ahead of 

 the majority of his competitors. As the years go on, he 

 gradually fails, while other men go steadily forward to 

 greater accomplishment. It is not the sclerosis of old age 

 stopping down the blood supply to the brain, but a sclerosis 

 which overtakes the mind perhaps at the beginning of man- 

 hood. Material success may be attained, but intellectually 

 life is at an end when the circle is closed and when there is no 

 chance to enlarge its circumference. The intellectual life 

 is the life of mental expansion, so that one cannot limit its 

 boundaries and continue to live. The physician, who is 

 too busy practicing to study either his patients or his jour- 

 nals, the clergyman, whose theology does not change with 

 his ripening years, the college professor, who settles com- 



