Need of Social Engineering xi 



used mainly for material ends at all. The real 

 importance of astronomy for long lay not in its 

 services to navigation or civil engineering, which 

 in its beginnings were perhaps small, but in its 

 effect on the moral conceptions, in its creation in 

 the minds of men of a sense of ordered law in the 

 world. Its real service was to enable them to 

 think clearly about the universe and men's rela- 

 tions to it and to one another. For Americans, 

 perhaps above all others, is it important to grasp 

 the real meaning of the facts hinted at here. For 

 it is perhaps roughly and broadly true to say that 

 while we have successfully established general 

 laws in the field of mechanics, which have given 

 us to a marvellous degree the material conquest 

 of nature, while the laws of the physical world 

 are being revealed to us in increasing measure, 

 there is no corresponding development of under- 

 standing in the field of human relationship, in our 

 conception of human right and obligation, the 

 laws of the social world, the nature of the social 

 organism, the mechanism of human society. In 

 all that we are hardly more advanced than the 

 Greeks or the Romans,, or, for that matter, the 

 Egyptians and the Chaldeans. We have covered 

 the earth with a marvellous mechanism which will 

 carry our thought and understanding to the utmost 

 corners; with the invisible waves of wireless 

 telegraphy, with post-offices, railroads, hotels de 

 luxe, and cinematograph shows, but we cannot 

 cover it with a system of law. We can analyse 



