SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 418. 



honest and true, and they lead us to the 

 Golden Rule. Asaph HaIjL. 



POPULAR SCIENCE.* 

 Ladies and Gentlemen : Five years ago 

 I prepared a sketch of an address which I 

 expected to deliver as retiring president 

 of the Iowa Academy of Science. I was 

 not able to deliver the address, however, 

 on account of enforced absence from the 

 Des Moines meeting of the Academy at 

 Christmas time, 1897. It was my inten- 

 tion in that address to speak in terms of 

 commendation of some of the ideas ad- 

 vanced by Professor Woodrow "Wilson in 

 his then recent address given on the occa- 

 sion of the Sesquicentennial celebration of 

 Princeton University. Professor Wilson's 

 recent promotion to the presidency of 

 Princeton University has called his Sesqui- 

 centennial address again to our minds, and 

 it seems to me that I may very properly 

 say now what I had intended to say in 

 1897, especially inasmuch as no one, speak- 

 ing for science, has expressed any degree 

 of sympathy with President Wilson 's point 

 of view. I hope to make my meaning so 

 clear and definite as to render it unneces- 

 sary for me to limit or qualify my general 

 expression of sympathy with Professor 

 Wilson; although the words he has used 

 in his Sesquicentennial address are cer- 

 tainly open to an interpretation which no 

 seriously minded man of science could pos- 

 sibly accept. 



In order that we may enter upon this 

 subject with some degree of mutual under- 

 standing, I think it is necessary to quote 

 President Wilson at some length. He 

 says, "I am much mistaken if the scien- 

 tific spirit of the age is not doing us a 

 great disservice, working in us a certain 

 great degeneracy. Science has bred in us 

 a spirit of experiment and a contempt for 



* Address of the Chairman of Section B and 

 Vice-President of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science, read at the Wash- 

 ington meeting, December 29, 1902. 



the past, * • •" yet "I have no indict- 

 ment against what science has done: I 

 have only a warning to utter against the 

 atmosphere which has stolen from our 

 laboratories into lecture rooms and into 

 the general air of the world at large. • * • " 

 Science "has driven mystery out of the 

 universe; it has made malleable stuff out 

 of the hard world and laid it out in its 

 elements upon the table of every class 

 room. Its own masters have known its 

 limitations ; they have stopped short at the 

 confines of the physical universe ; they have 

 declined to reckon with spirit or with the 

 stuffs of the mind, have eschewed sense 

 and confined themselves to sensation. But 

 their work has been so stupendous that all 

 other men of aU other studies have been 

 set staring at their methods, imitating their 

 ways of thought, ogling their results." 

 "Let me say once more, this is not the 

 fault of the scientist, he has done his work 

 with an intelligence and success which can- 

 not be too much admired. It is the wori 

 of the noxious and intoxicating gas, which 

 has somehow got into the lungs of the rest 

 of us from out of the crevices of his work- 

 shops—a gas it would seem, which forms 

 only in the outer air, and where men 

 do not know the right use of their 

 lungs. * * *" "We have not given sci- 

 ence too big a place in our education, but 

 we have made a perilous mistake in giving 

 it too great a preponderance in method 

 over every other branch of study. We 

 must make the humanities human again; 

 we must recall what manner of men we 

 are; must turn back once more to the re- 

 gion of practicable ideals. * * *" "j 

 should fear nothing," says President Wil- 

 son, "better than utter destruction from a 

 revolution conceived and led in the scien- 

 tific spirit." 



The chief obstacle to me in my attemp* 

 to reach a satisfactory appreciation of 

 President Wilson's point of view lies in 

 his apparently loose and unguarded use 



