96 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1439 



alter the whole conception of the various old 

 divisions of philosophy — logic, epistomology, 

 psychology, ethics — and tend to put these 

 hitherto rather unreal and half mythical dis- 

 ciplines on a fii-mer foundation of observable 

 facts. To cite a single example of this hopeful 

 tendency, John Dewey has recently issued a 

 book called "Human Nature and Conduct" in 

 which he frankly reverses the usual procedure 

 of writers on ethics. He first takes up the 

 nature and workings of the human animal and 

 then attempts to deduce the general rules that 

 would seem appropriate to a creature like man. 

 Now, the moralists in the past have in general 

 neglected man's nature, of which with their 

 mistaken presuppositions they could at best 

 know but little, and have devoted their atten- 

 tion to accepted standards of conduct, ancient 

 and dubious in origin, which they sought to 

 justify by subtle theories and ingenious appli- 

 cations. This was, of course, to do little more 

 than to rationalize the prevailing morals and 

 mores. Hence the general barrenness of ethics 

 as commonly understood. 



Those who follow the recent developments in 

 philosophical speculation can not fail to see 

 how deeply they are influenced by the methods 

 and discoveries of natural science. Indeed this 

 old distinction between "natural" science and 

 our knowledge of man himself is an artificial 

 and misleading one. Man is an integral part 

 of the natural order; he and his environment 

 are constantly interacting. Such well-tried old 

 terms as the will, consciousness, selfishness, the 

 instincts, etc., when reinspected in the light of 

 our ancestral background and embryological 

 beginnings, all look very different from what 

 they once did. The soul is no longer the pale 

 little creature, Hospes comesque corporis, as 

 described in Emperor Hadrian's famous lines. 

 Nor is the human body, made up as it appears 

 to be, exclusively of electrical charges, so lump- 

 ish a thing as it seemed. Mind and matter can 

 no longer be divorced but must be studied as 

 diiferent phases of a single vital and incredibly 

 complicated situation. Mind, as a recent writer 

 has well put it, is no longer to be viewed as 

 "primary but eventual." It is in the making, 

 and a historical consideration of human intelli- 

 gence, taking into account its animal and pre- 



historic substrata, its development in historic 

 times and the profound effect of childhood on 

 adult thought and feeling, reveals all sorts of 

 previously neglected elements in the estimate 

 of mind itself and of its untold future possi- 

 bilities. 



V 



The chief aim of education for us who really 

 grasp the value of a scientific attitude and 

 appreciate the inherent obstacles which oppose 

 themselves to its successful cultivation in the 

 human species should be the inculcation of the 

 profoundest of truths, namely, that science is 

 one. It is nothing more or less than the most 

 accurate and best authenticated information 

 that we possess, subject to constant rectification 

 and amplification, of man's nature and history, 

 and of the nature and history of the world in 

 which he finds himself. It is just the most 

 reliable knowledge we have. It is not history, 

 philosophy, psychology, ethics, politics, eco- 

 nomics; it is not astronomy, physics, chemistry, 

 geology, botany, biology — these are merely his- 

 torical divisions of labor, which are now being 

 profitably transgressed as we learn more of the 

 essential intenveaving and mutual dependence 

 of all things. Those consecrated divisions may 

 still have a declining significance in research, 

 but I can not but think that they are one of 

 the chief barriers to the cultivation of a really 

 scientific frame of mind in the young and the 

 public at large. They are aspects of a single 

 supreme theme, Man and his World. Once it 

 was well to dehumamze science; now it must 

 be rehumanized. 



The prevailing misapprehension of the evo- 

 lutionary or historical conception of life and 

 its unity should not be permitted to afflict the 

 coming generation. But the precautions neces- 

 sary to prevent this, demand our most careful 

 thought and planning. The problem is nothing 

 less than so revising our education that a new 

 type of mind will be cultivated appropriate to 

 our present knowledge and circumstances. 

 Education is, however, controlled to a large 

 extent by those who still adhere to many an- 

 cient conceptions which appear to them to be 

 based on the best wisdom of the past, to be test- 

 ed by time and substantiated by a consensus 

 of human experience. These they do not wish 



