Januasy 30, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



101 



but his animal organs, his cultural imple- 

 ments, and his intelligence, or his knowledge 

 of right and wrong constructive ways to work 

 with. The more those instruments are aug- 

 mented, the better he can direct nature's con- 

 structive agencies to his own egoistic ends, 

 and in so doing, man himself then unwittingly 

 becomes a new and better altruistic agent in 

 evolution. 



We scientists, conscious of our purpose as 

 constructive social agents, have three broad 

 fields of activity open to us, as already indi- 

 cated in defining the various functions and 

 purposes of science. First, investigation, or 

 the discovery of nature's ways and means of 

 creative action. This is the ethical side of 

 our work. Second, the constructive usage of 

 these ways and means, or their application to 

 the growing demands of social life, and their 

 usage in the regulation of human conduct. 

 This is the moral side. And, third, the con- 

 servation of our ethical and moral gains 

 through education. The first two we may 

 now ignore, for their significance is duly 

 appreciated and their future is promising. 

 But the educational side of our work is in a 

 very serious condition, and it may even now be 

 too late to avoid disaster. It little matters how 

 much we may develop either our technique, or 

 the spear-head of our research, if the so-called 

 common people still have the ghost-hunter's 

 paleolithic mental attitude toward natural 

 phenomena, and their leaders a similar atti- 

 tude toward social problems. 



'No social life can endure that is not under 

 some common compulsion to united action. 

 "With the growth of the spirit of freedom 

 and democracy, and the absence of any com- 

 monly recognized dictatorship in church or 

 state, that compulsion can come only through 

 a common understanding of the elemental 

 necessities of social life, and through that 

 sense of personal benefit and personal owner- 

 ship in social institutions which alone can 

 create the will to cherish and protect them. 



The compulsion of elemental intelligence, 

 acting in social unison, can alone provide the 

 enduring directive and cohesive power essen- 

 tial to social cooperation. Man's will to 



create can be steadfast in purpose only when 

 his intelligence becomes stabilized in its 

 trophic attitudes, and rightly oriented to ele- 

 mental realities. Man, stumbling in igno- 

 rance, must be bandaged with restrictions and 

 propped up with crutches of force. A nation, 

 pricked by the xwisoned shafts of a lying pro- 

 paganda, will dissolve in anarchy, though the 

 armies and navies of the world have failed 

 to break it. 



In our education, we continually over-em- 

 phasized social rights and individual freedom 

 of action, and ignore the obligations essential 

 to partnership in any social or constructive 

 compact. It is not without significance that 

 ordinary people, like you and me, can discover 

 no specific mandate in the Constitution of the 

 United States. It broadly defines what the 

 state does, or will do, in certain contingencies, 

 and what its citizens may, or may not do, but 

 says nothing about what the citizen must do 

 in return for what the state does for him. 

 The absence in citizenship of a formal and 

 specific contract, defining a common purpose 

 and recognizing mutual liabilities and mutual 

 benefits in its attainment, is in marked con- 

 trast with modern business procedure, as well 

 as with almost every other form of intelligent 

 cooperation. It is, therefore, not surprising 

 that an international covenant for the specific 

 purpose of reducing the danger of interna- 

 tional wars to a minimum, in which an at- 

 tempt is made to define national rights and 

 obligations in that undertaking, has a strange 

 and unfamiliar soimd. 



The absence of this covenant principle is 

 noticeable in almost every phase of modern 

 education. Science, even, does not formally 

 recognize a covenant with nature, although 

 nature virtually says to man " Know me, and 

 serve me, and I will serve you." Much of our 

 biological teaching is like a shop window dis- 

 play of nature's competitive goods, with a 

 varied assortment of human notions thrown 

 in, but with no guarantee as to their signifi- 

 cance, or quality, or usefulness. The peda- 

 gogical barker, seldom having convictions of 

 his own, proudly displays the impartiality of 

 his " purely scientific " attitude, and leaves 

 the callow purchaser to decide for himself 



