2 SCIENCE AND LIFE 



of the past century of science, should have been the 

 golden opportunity of statesmen and humanitarians 

 and the raw material out of which the sum total 

 of human happiness could have been augmented. 

 Instead, it has but revealed a growing incapacity 

 and failure on the part of the altruist to appreciate 

 the nature and power of the new weapon that science 

 has placed in his hands, and an ever-increasing 

 rapacity and far-sightedness on the part of the 

 egotist to secure it for his own ends. 



For many a decade now, owing primarily and 

 indisputably to the intellectual achievements of a 

 comparative handful of men of communistic and 

 cloisteral habit of thought, a steady shower of 

 material benefits has been raining down upon 

 humanity, and for these benefits men have fought 

 in the traditional manner of the struggle when the 

 fickle sunlight was the sole hazardous income of the 

 world. The strong have fed and grown fat upon a 

 larger and ever larger share of the manna. Initial 

 slight differences of strength and sagacity have 

 become so emphasised by the virile stream that the 

 more successful are becoming monstrously so, and 

 the unsuccessful less and less able to secure a full 

 meal than before the shower began. 



Already it savours of indelicacy and tactlessness 

 to recall that the exploiters of all this wealth are not 

 its creators ; that the spirit of acquisitiveness which 

 has ensured success to them, rather than to their 

 immediate neighbours, is the antithesis of the spirit 

 by which the wealth was won. 



Amid all the sneers at the impracticability and 

 visionary character of communist schemes, let it not 

 be forgotten that science is a communism, neither 

 theoretical nor on paper, but actual and in practice. 

 The results of those who labour in the fields of 

 knowledge for its own sake are published freely and 



