412 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1082 



while endeavoring to find a common bond 

 between all sections of the community, in 

 reality drawing a ring round a small and 

 privileged leisured class, telling them these 

 enjoyments are for you and for you alone ? 

 Should I not have found a surer ground 

 for the claims of science in its daily increas- 

 ing necessity for the success of our manu- 

 factures and commerce? 



I have said nothing to indicate that I do 

 not put the highest value on this impor- 

 tant function of science, which finds its 

 noblest task in siirrendering the richness of 

 its achievements to the use of humanity. 

 But I must ask you to reflect whether the 

 achievement of wealth and power, to the 

 exclusion of higher aims, can lead to more 

 than a superficial prosperity which passes 

 away, because it carries the virus of its own 

 doom within it. Do we not find in the wor- 

 ship of material success the seed of the per- 

 nicious ambition which has maddened a na- 

 tion, and plunged Europe into war? Ts 

 this contempt for all idealistic purposes not 

 responsible for the mischievous doctrine 

 that the power to possess confers the right 

 to possess, and that possession is desirable 

 in itself without regard to the use which 

 is made of it? I must therefore insist that 

 if we delight in enlisting the wealth accu- 

 mulated in the earth, and all the power 

 stored in the orbs of heaven, or in the orbits 

 of atomic structure, it should not be be- 

 cause we place material wealth above intel- 

 lectual enjoyment, but rather because we 

 experience a double pleasure if the efforts 

 of the mind contribute to the welfare of 

 the nation. When Joule taught us to util- 

 ize the powers at our disposal to the best 

 advantage he did it not — and his whole life 

 is a proof of it — to increase either his own 

 wealth or that of the nation, but because, 

 brought up in commercial life and deeply 

 imbued with the deep insight and genius 

 of science, he found his greatest delight in 



that very combination of esthetic satisfac- 

 tion and useful achievement which Poin- 

 eare has so well described. And again, 

 when another of our fellow-citizens, Henry 

 Wilde, showed how electrical power can be 

 accumulated until it became an efficient 

 instrument for the economic transmission 

 of work, he found his inspiration in the in- 

 tellectual gratification it gave him, rather 

 than in the expectation of material gain. I 

 am drawing no ring round a privileged 

 class, but urge that the hunger for intel- 

 lectual enjoyment is universal and every- 

 body should be given the opportunity and 

 leisure of appeasing it. The duty to work, 

 the right to live, and the leisure to think 

 are the three prime necessities of our exist- 

 ence, and when one of them fails we only 

 live an incomplete life. 



I should have no difficulty in illustrating 

 by examples, drawn from personal experi- 

 ence, the power which the revelations of 

 science can exert over a community steeped 

 in the petty conflicts of ordinary life ; but 

 I must bring these remarks to a conclusion, 

 and content myself with the account of one 

 incident. 



An American friend, who possessed a 

 powerful telescope, one night received the 

 visit of an ardent politician. It was the 

 time of a presidential election, Bryan and 

 Taft being the opposing candidates, and 

 feeling ran high. After looking at clusters 

 of stars and other celestial objects, and hav- 

 ing received answers to his various ques- 

 tions the visitor turned to my friend : 



And all these stars I see, he asked, what space in 

 the heaven do they occupy? 



About the area of the moon. 



And you tell me that every one of them is a sun 

 like our own? 



Yes. 



And that each of them may have a number of 

 planets circulating round them like our sun? 



Yes. 



And that there may be life on each of these 

 planets? 



