io SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



plane which "won the war" has exacted the life of many 

 of those who persisted in flying. Gasolene, which also 

 "won the war," is just coming under reasonably safe 

 control. To live in a scientific age, an age of rapidly 

 accumulating knowledge, imposes heavy obligations 

 upon education and upon the resultant social and in- 

 dustrial controls. In the presence of modern science 

 those who do not know cannot long survive, else they 

 must seek the primitive places of the earth where the 

 more elemental practices may persist for a time. Even 

 in these primitive places, science will soon catch up and 

 there will again recur the old biological requirement to 

 learn, to move, or to cease to exist. 



But the hardest question is yet to come. Has the 

 common appreciation of moral obligations developed 

 to a point where it is socially safe for all science knowl- 

 edge to become common property? Can the common 

 moral sense be trusted? Does knowledge of those* 

 chemicals which will readily destroy human life ever 

 result in an easier suicide or in the more ready destruc- 

 tion of one's human enemies ? Poison gases and other 

 war inventions are so terrible that it is not even safe 

 to allow all citizens to know what a few inquisitive and 

 trusted scientific men have discovered. If a bio- 

 chemico-physicist were to discover just how to change 

 electrical potentials over an area twenty miles square, 

 so that the electrons of human protoplasm would in- 

 stantly break down, it would not as yet be morally safe 

 for the different nations to have possession of this 

 secret. Since science deals with progressive truth, it 

 should not omit its obligation toward better common 



