Septembee 24, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



405 



driver is inefficient. The cry for organiza- 

 tion, justifiable as it no doubt often is, re- 

 solves itself, therefore, into a ciy for in- 

 creased discipline, by which I do not mean 

 the discipline enforced at the point of the 

 bayonet, but that accepted by the individ- 

 ual who voluntarily subordinates his per- 

 sonal convictions to the will of a properly 

 constituted authority. This discipline is 

 not an inborn quality which belongs more 

 to one nation than to another ; it is acquired 

 by education and training. In an emerg- 

 ency it is essential to success, but if it be 

 made the gniiding principle of a nation's 

 activity, it carries dangers with it which are 

 greater than the benefits conferred by the 

 increased facility for advance in some di- 

 rections. 



If there be no fundamental difference in 

 the mental qualifications which lead to suc- 

 cess in our different occupations, there is 

 also none in the ideals which move us in 

 childhood, maintain us through the difficul- 

 ties of our manhood, and give us peace in 

 old age. I am not speaking now of those 

 ideals which may simultaneously incite a 

 whole nation to combined action through 

 religious fervor or ambition of power, but I 

 am speaking of those more individual ideals 

 which make us choose our professions and 

 give us pleasure in the performance of our 

 duties. 



Why does a scientific man find satisfac- 

 tion in studying nature ? Let me once more 

 quote Poincare ■} 



The student does not study Nature because that 

 study is useful, but because it gives him pleasure, 

 and it gives him pleasure because Nature is beauti- 

 ful; if it were not beautiful it would not be worth 

 knowing and life would not be worth living. I am 

 not speaking, be it understood, of the beauty of its 

 outward appearance — ^not that I despise it, far 

 from it, but it has nothing to do with science: I 

 mean that more intimate beauty which depends on 

 the harmony in the order of the component parts of 

 Nature. This is the beauty which a pure intelli- 



8 Loc. oit., p. 15. 



gence can appreciate and which gives substance 

 and form to the scintillating impressions that 

 charm our senses. Without this intellectual sup- 

 port the beauty of the fugitive dreams inspired by 

 sensual impressions could only be imperfect, be- 

 cause it would be indecisive and always vanishing. 

 It is this intellectual and self-sufficing beauty, per- 

 haps more than the future welfare of humanity, 

 that impels the scientific man to condemn himself 

 to long and tedious studies. And the same search 

 for the sense of harmony in the world leads us to 

 select the facts which can most suitably enhance it, 

 just as the artist chooses among the features of his 

 model those that make the portrait and give it 

 character and life. There need be no fear that 

 this instinctive and unconscious motive should 

 tempt the man of science away from the truth, for 

 the real world is far more beautiful than any 

 vision of his dreams. The greatest artists that 

 ever lived — the Greeks — constructed a heaven; yet 

 how paltry that heaven is compared to ours! And 

 it is because simplicity and grandeur are beautiful 

 that we select by preference the simplest and 

 grandest facts, and find our highest pleasure, some- 

 times in following the gigantic orbits of the stars, 

 sometimes in the microscopic study of that minute- 

 ness which also is a grandeur, and sometimes in 

 piercing the secrets of geological times which at- 

 tract us because they are remote. And we see that 

 the cult of the beautiful guides us to the same 

 goal as the study of the useful. 



Whence comes this harmony? Is it that things 

 that appear to us as beautiful are simply those 

 which adapt themselves best to our intelligence, 

 and are therefore the tools which that intelligence 

 handles most easily; or is it all the play of evolu- 

 tion and natural selection? In that case, those 

 races only survived whose ideals best conformed 

 with their interests, and while all nations pursued 

 their ideals without regard to consequences, some 

 were led to perdition and others achieved an em- 

 pire. One is tempted to believe that such has been 

 the course of history, and that the Greeks tri- 

 umphed over the barbarians, and Europe, inheritor 

 of Greek thought, rules the world, because the sav- 

 ages cared only for the sensual enjoyment of gar- 

 ish colors and the blatant noise of the drum, while 

 the Greeks loved the intellectual beauty which is 

 hidden beneath the visible beauty. It is that 

 higher beauty which produces a clear and strong 

 intelligence. 



If the mathematician's imagination is 

 fired by the beauty and symmetry of his 



