April 10, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



519 



nature, a great instinctive and intuitive 

 faith. It is because scientists believe in 

 their hearts that the world is a harmonious 

 and well-coordinated organism, and that it 

 is possible for them to find harmony and 

 coordination, if only they work hard 

 enough and honestly enough and patiently 

 enough, that they achieve their truly great 

 results. It is this faith inside them that 

 inspires them to toil on year after year on 

 one problem. How else could Darwin have 

 toiled on all those years to find coordination 

 in one direction? Was it because he 

 wanted to make himself unpopular with 

 the theologians and to set their tongues to 

 wagging against him all over Christendom? 

 Or was it because the problem interested 

 him, and because he knew in his heart that 

 there must be such a thing as law and order 

 among living organisms, and that such 

 order could be found if only he worked 

 patiently enough and honestly enough? 



The same is true of inventors and engi- 

 neers. Their greatness does not depend 

 primarily upon the fact that they have keen 

 intellects and use scientific methods of 

 thinking. When Wm. McAdoo conceived 

 the idea of the Hudson River tunnels, it 

 was not the idea alone that made him 

 achieve them. Many others had thought of 

 tunnels under rivers before. It was rather 

 his belief that the thing was worth while, 

 backed by an indomitable faith in things 

 and in men. He knew in his soul that the 

 people needed this and that it could be 

 done, and he knew it with such energy that 

 he succeeded in accomplishing it. Brains 

 were useful and even necessary too ; but 

 the real source of his success was the will 

 to do, and this in turn comes from a pro- 

 found and indomitable faith that there is 

 law and order in the world and that there- 

 fore it can be done. 



Look where you will at physics in real 

 life, and you will always find that the heart 



and soul of it is an unquestioned faith in 

 things and in the harmony and relatedness 

 of things, united with an unquestioned 

 faith that it is possible for any man to find 

 harmony and relatedness among things if 

 he devotes himself whole-heartedly to the 

 task. 



Look where you will at physics-teaching 

 in the schools, and what do you find? 

 Hundreds of teachers — all of us — bustling 

 around with definitions of the unit in 

 physics bound over our eyes. Open any 

 one of these definitions, and what do we 

 find? That the teachers must see to it 

 that each pupil does not less than 30 ex- 

 periments described in the following list; 

 that teachers should use algebra and geom- 

 etry when they find it convenient; that 

 teachers should not confuse the pupils with 

 too elaborate apparatus nor allow them to 

 obscure their results under unintelligible 

 units. Hereunto is appended a mighty 

 syllabus, which has cost some committee 

 many hours of hard labor, and which con- 

 tains the united wisdom of the committee 

 as to what must be included in the course. 

 Such a syllabus of topics we all carry with 

 us always lest we forget some weighty or 

 massive point, and so leave a vacant space 

 in the logical system with which we are 

 trying to adorn our pupils. 



So long as we teachers insist on keeping 

 such definitions and such syllabi before 

 our eyes, so long will a real industrial 

 physics be impossible. The syllabus of 

 industrial physics contains only one topic, 

 and that is a topic that no teacher or com- 

 mittee of teachers has ever yet thought of 

 putting in any syllabus yet made. This 

 may seem strange to us at present, with 

 our eyes all blindfolded in our present 

 stately game of blind-man's bluff; but 

 twenty years from now, when our eyes have 

 been opened and industrial physics is in 

 full swing everywhere, the tables will be 



