164 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 919 



Copernicus, and science as we know it be- 

 gan to take shape. 



Aristotle had sat down in his chamber 

 and he wrote in a book, "A body twice as 

 heavy as another of course falls twice as 

 fast." Galileo released simultaneously 

 from the top of the Leaning Tower a one- 

 pound and a one-hundred-pound shot and 

 they reached the earth together, before the 

 eyes of the assembled University of Pisa. 

 But "the method" was repugnant to the 

 university, and almost to a man they be- 

 lieved their Aristotle, sophistieally ex- 

 plained away what they saw, and perse- 

 cuted Galileo. Descartes, Newton, La- 

 grange, Laplace, Francis Bacon connote to 

 ■engineers the transcendent story, unless for 

 electrical engineers there should be added 

 Ampere, Faraday, Henry, Helmholtz, 

 Kelvin. 



The method of doing things that makes 

 an engineer is, therefore, the applying to 

 practical and utilitarian ends the prin- 

 ciples and reasoning of science. Engineer- 

 ing is not science, for in science there is no 

 place for the conception of utility. Truth 

 is her sole criterion. In the exalted lan- 

 guage of Professor Keyser, "Not in the 

 ground of need, not in bent and painful 

 toil but in the deep-centered play-instinct 

 of the world science has her origin and root ; 

 and her spirit, which is the spirit of genius 

 in moments of elevation, is but a sublimated 

 form of play, the austere and lofty ana- 

 logue of the kitten playing with the en- 

 tangled skein or of the eaglet sporting with 

 the mountain winds." 



Engineering is science's handmaid fol- 

 lowing after her in honor and affection, but 

 doing the practical chores of life, concerned 

 with the useful and the material; with 

 costs and with expediency, and concerned 

 with the humanities only in so far as they 

 are an incident in some particular scheme 

 of reality, and then objectively, if that may 



be said. Her methods merely apply 

 straight thinking to material problems for 

 useful purposes. 



Does this constitute a profession? No. 

 Some day it will be the way almost every- 

 body thinks instead of a body of specialists 

 and then the difference between a doctor, 

 for instance, and an engineer, will be only 

 in the things they busy themselves about; 

 as is to-day the only difference between 

 kinds of engineers. 



The center of education has been shift- 

 ing rapidly recently — almost as rapidly as 

 material well being has been increasing. 

 The application of science to living has 

 marked an age as distinct as the age of the 

 climax of art in Greece. The "new class" 

 has been but a pioneer in sowing the seeds 

 of scientific rationalization in a field the 

 value of which was only dreamed of by 

 Archimedes and not actually recognized 

 until, as the encyclopedia tells us, "about 

 the middle of the eighteenth century," 

 when the "new class" began to arise. And 

 now, as to the limits within which engineer- 

 ing is a method rather than an occupation. 



There will always be engineers, for the 

 methods of science will constantly advance, 

 and there will be needed continually, to 

 interpret and transmit them to mankind, 

 and to make the first applications of them 

 to useful purposes, a class of men who, by 

 instinct and taste, as well as by the posses- 

 sion of what I later shall call the dynamic 

 component, find easier than other men — 

 and consequently perform better — the kind 

 of scientific thinking, observation and ac- 

 tion that characterize engineers to-day. 



What these men will be busy about it is 

 hardly safe to say, although it is probable 

 the present great divisions of engineering 

 will be more or less preserved. It seems 

 certain that a large mass of knowledge 

 that now is called engineering and forms 

 the basis of many of the engineering spe- 



