DISCUSSION 
have a profound influence in shaping the future towards ends 
which people can regard highly. 
We have seen over the past three hundred years a scientific 
revolution whose effect on public opinion, and on the public 
tolerance of acknowledged evils—evils acknowledged by 
Christians and non-Christians alike—has been phenomenal. 
Slavery, cruelty to animals, public execution, a thousand evils 
have been abolished by. a public opinion which has been 
moulded by science. These were evils which those who sat on 
the Inquisition recognized as evils, but did nothing to put right 
because they were too busy doing what they thought were more 
spiritual things. It is therefore, in my opinion, quite wrong to 
say that the accumulation of factual evidence in science has had 
no ethical effect. The very facts about how Jews are related to 
non-Jews, and Negroes to non-Negroes, has made civilized men 
feel differently, and feel ashamed, on these issues. I therefore 
deny those classical letters to The Times which bishops and re- 
tired admirals write every so often, that start with the phrase 
‘Science is neutral’. Even as an accumulation of facts, science 
is not neutral, because it invades the conscience of people with 
a sense of right and wrong applied to Minute Particulars—if I 
may borrow the phrase which Lord Brain has so eloquently 
borrowed from William Blake. 
This is much, but there is much more. The deeper effect of 
science over the past three hundred years has been, not in the 
accumulation of true facts, but in making people aware that the 
very search for what is factually true is itself an ethical activity. 
What is true in a factual sense is quite differently regarded 
today from the way it was regarded three hundred years ago. 
A man who wants to find out the truth, even about how I am 
going to vote at the next election, is now more highly regarded 
than he was three hundred years ago—not to mention the time 
of the Inquisition. 
The great ethical force of science has proved to be the dis- 
semination of the idea that truth is a thing which will in some 
way help us all. In this, we don’t have to claim that truth is 
good, or beautiful, or absolute. We simply recognize that men 
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