SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1383 



money, as does that man in India or in 

 China. In other words, the common, unskilled 

 laboring man in America has more than twenty 

 slaves, but they are senseless, iron slaves, each 

 of the same effectiveness as a common Indian 

 laborer, who are doing his work for him. 

 Why? Because Galileo and a few men like 

 him a few hundred years ago got the idea that 

 it was important to study out how nature 

 worked. It is that study which has resulted 

 in this modern scientific and industrial age. 

 And it is only in the regions of the earth 

 where that idea has got started, namely, in 

 Western Europe and in this country, where 

 the conditions under which the average man 

 lives and works have been thus alleviated. 

 Note that I say " have been " not " are to be." 

 True, they may be immensely more improved 

 than they are now. I can see little, immediate, 

 practical needs as well as you. But let us not 

 yet alight from our airplane. When you 

 ^ok at what lias already he done by the ad- 

 vance of modern science — by getting an idea 

 into a few men's minds — you begin to see 

 that, after all, the important thing in this 

 world is not the immediately practicable; the 

 important thing is the growth of the human 

 mind, the development of a few big ideas. 

 Other things come from that, and therein 

 lies the far-reaching significance of the ex- 

 periments with radium; they have opened our 

 eyes to new possibilities; they have given us 

 a new conception of the growth -and decay of 

 the elements, and of the possibility of the hu- 

 man control of these processes; they have re- 

 vealed the existence of new sources of energy 

 which some time we may hope to be able to 

 tap, and with the aid of which we may per- 

 haps enrich human life in as yet undreamed 

 of measure. 



The first step is to see whether it is pos- 

 sible by any means at our control, to disinte- 

 grate atoms. And we have already found that 

 we can do it, and radium has helped us to 

 make that discovery. But we have only begun 

 on this type of work. Its possibilities are 

 untold. 



From my point of view there are two things 



of immense importance in this world, two 

 ideas or beliefs upon which, in the last anal- 

 ysis, the weal or woe of the race depends, and 

 I am not going to say that belief in the pos- 

 sibilities of scientific progress is the most im- 

 portant. The most important thing in the 

 world is a ielief in the reality of moral and 

 spiritual values. It was because we lost that 

 belief that the world war came, and if we do 

 not now find a way to regain and to strengthen 

 that belief, then science is of no value. But, 

 on the other hand, it is also true that even 

 with that belief there is little hope of prog- 

 ress except through its twin sister, only sec- 

 ond in importance, namely, belief in the spirit 

 and the method of Galileo, of Newton, of 

 Faraday, and of the other great builders of 

 this modern scientific age — this age of the 

 understanding and the control of nature, upon 

 which let us hope we are just entering. For 

 while a starving man may indeed be supremely 

 happy, it is certain that he can not be happy 

 very long. So long as man is a physical be- 

 ing, his spiritual and his physical well-being 

 can not be disentangled. No efforts toward 

 social readjustments or toward the redistribu- 

 tion of wealth have one thousandth as large 

 a chance of contributing to human well-being 

 as have the efforts of the physicist, the chem- 

 ist, and the biologist toward the better under- 

 standing and the better control of nature. 



Finally, the most significant thing about 

 this evening is the way in which this con- 

 tribution to further progress has been made: 

 Not through a public grant — that is not the 

 method through which the genius of Anglo- 

 Saxon civilization has ever expressed itself, 

 but rather through private initiative. A large 

 group of public-spirited people have, of their 

 own free will, decided that they wished to have 

 a part in the development of a new chain of 

 scientific discovery. It is that spirit and that 

 method which has made America what it is, 

 and it is in the spread of that sort of intelli- 

 gence among one hundred million people that 

 our future lies. 



E. A. MiLLIKAN 



University of Chicago 



