52 SCIENCE AND THE STATE 



profane application to the more efficient destruction 

 of their fellow-men. But this which, at the moment, 

 passes for science with the ignorant is an aspect 

 which is the absolute opposite of its proper function. 

 A fire-engine, the purpose of which is to quench a 

 conflagration by pouring water on the flames, could 

 even more effectively be used for an exactly opposite 

 purpose by supplying it with petroleum instead of 

 with water. Is the inventor of the fire-engine less 

 a benefactor of the community on this account? If 

 some lunatic used a fire-engine for this purpose, 

 would you immure the inventor or the lunatic ? 



Those who in the early stages of the war were so 

 ready to regard the initial supremacy in military 

 science of the enemy as but one aspect of his moral 

 degeneracy, have now realised that science is as 

 indispensable to a good cause as to a bad one. 

 Science is not responsible for the morals of its human 

 employers. That is their affair. No one in his 

 senses would recruit 3 policemen because the cause 

 of the criminal is bad. 



The newly awakened interest for science in this 

 country is entirely due, not to any sudden love of 

 truth, any desire to understand and walk familiarly 

 through the labyrinth of Nature, any weariness with 

 the old rule-of-thumb and hit-or-miss methods of our 

 ancestors. It is due simply to the realisation of the 

 fact that it is indispensable in war, and that without it 

 we shall go down as completely as the Dervishes did 

 at Omdurman and for precisely the same reason. 



It was, I think, a German philosopher who 

 remarked "Chemistry to one is a goddess, to 

 another an excellent cow," and to this one might 

 add, "to the third a handmaid of war." 



So one can discuss the relation of science to the 

 State from this triple point of view. Science as the 

 representative of Mars has now been admitted to be 



