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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1402 



uaknown lands. Many have been private ad- 

 venturers, and few have shared in the riches 

 they have brought into port. Corporations 

 and governments are now eager to provide 

 ships which will bring them profitable 

 freights, and to pay bounties to the crews, 

 but this service is dominated by the com- 

 mercial spirit which expects immediate re- 

 turns for investments, and mariners who 

 enter it are no longer free to sail in any di- 

 rection they please or to enter whatever creek 

 attracts them. The purpose is to secure some- 

 thing of direct profit or use, and not that 

 of discovery alone, by which the greatest ad- 

 vances of science have hitherto been achieved. 



When science permits itself to be controlled 

 by the spirit of profitable application it be- 

 comes merely the galley-slave of short-sighted 

 commerce. Almost all the investigations 

 upon which modern industry has been built 

 would have been put aside at the outset if 

 the standard of immediate practical value 

 tad been applied to them. To the man of 

 science discoveries signify extensions of the 

 field of work, and he usually leaves their ex- 

 ploitation to prospectors who follow him. 

 His motives are intellectual advancement, 

 and not the production of something from 

 which financial gain may be secured. For 

 generations he has worked in faith purely 

 for the love of knowledge, and has enriched 

 mankind with the fruits of his labors; but 

 this altruistic attribute is undergoing a 

 change. Scientific workers are beginning to 

 ask what the community owes to them, and 

 what use has been made of the talents en- 

 trusted to it. They have created stores of 

 wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and of 

 power unlimited, and these resources have 

 been used to convert beautiful countrysides 

 into grimy centers of industrialism, and ta 

 construct weapons of deatli of such diaboli- 

 cal character that civilized man ought to 

 hang his head in shame at their use. 



Mankind has, indeed, proved itself un- 

 worthy of the gifts which science has placed 

 at its disposal, with the result that squalid 

 surroundings and squandered life are the 

 characteristics of modern Weptejrn civiliza- 



tion, instead of social conditions and ethical 

 ideals superior to those of any other epoch. 

 Responsibility for this does not lie with sci- 

 entific discoverers, but with statesmen and 

 democracy. Like the gifts of God, those of 

 science can be made either a blessing or a 

 curse, to glorify the human race or to destroy 

 it; and upon civilized man himself rests the 

 decision as to the course to follow. With 

 science as an ally, and the citadels of igno- 

 rance and self as the objective, he can trans- 

 form the world, but if he neglects the guid- 

 ance which knowledge can give, and prefers 

 to be led by the phrases of rhetoricians, this 

 planet will become a place of dust and ashes. 

 Unsatisfactory social conditions are not a 

 necessary consequence of the advance of sci- 

 ence, but of incapacity to use it rightly. 

 Whatever may be said of captains of industry 

 or princes of commerce, scientific men them- 

 selves can not be accused of amassing riches 

 at the expense of labor, or of having neglected 

 to put into force the laws of healthy social 

 life. Power — financial and political — has 

 been in the hands of people who know nothing 

 of science, not even that of man himself, 

 and it is they who should be arraigned at 

 the bar of public justice for their failure to 

 use for the welfare of all the scientific knowl- 

 edge offered to all. Science should dissoci- 

 ate itself entirely from those who have thus 

 abused its favors, and not permit the public 

 to believe it is the emblem of all that is gross 

 and material and destructive in modern 

 civilization. There was a time when intelli- 

 gent working men idealized science; now they 

 mostly regard it with distrust or are un- 

 moved by its aims, believing it to be part of 

 a soul-destroying economic system. The 

 obligation is upon men of science to restore 

 the former feeling by removing their acade- 

 mic robes and entering into social move- 

 ments as citizens whose motives are above 

 suspicion and whose knowledge is at the 

 service of the community for the promotion 

 of the greatest good. The public mind has 

 yet to understand that science is the pituit- 

 ary body of the social organism, and without 



