SCIENCE AS A FACTOR OF HUMAN EXPANSION 493 



and if science is to assume the moral, intellectual, and material 

 direction of society, what is left for religion, or metaphysics, or 

 any other factor ? But is science capable of satisfying our 

 condition ? Is it the force best adapted to increase the existing 

 tendency to widen the sphere of conflict, and to increase at the 

 same time the value of life ? 



As to the first condition, science is undoubtedly capable of 

 satisfying us. Indeed, we may go further, and say that it is in 

 science that human life has found one of the great sources of its 

 expansion ; not, indeed, the only source, but a very fertile one 

 nevertheless. It is since the development of the appUed sciences 

 that the sphere of social conflict has widened so immeasurably, 

 while the nature of the conflict has increased in intensity. Science 

 has created our Western civihsation as we know it, has extended 

 the power of man over Nature, and has caused an ever greater 

 number of persons to be enveloped in the sphere of social conflict, 

 and thus brought under the beneficial sway of the law of selection. 

 True, certain discoveries, notably of medical science, have 

 been appUed in a manner which is not conducive to the physical 

 welfare of the race ; but science itself cannot be held responsible 

 for the applications which man makes of it. We have already 

 quoted Macaulay's celebrated passage from his essay on Francis 

 Bacon, in which he so eloquently describes some of the triumphs 

 of science ; but it is needless to dwell on these achievements of 

 the applied sciences ; they have been made famihar to us, not 

 only by the facts of our everyday life, but by the books of 

 eminent writers ; and these achievements of the apphed sciences 

 constitute one of the noblest expressions of the expansion of the 

 human mind. Nothing has done so much to increase the 

 intensity of social conflict while widening its sphere as the 

 steam-engine, the machine, and the telegraph-wire, and the 

 claim of science to the material direction of society is fully 

 justifled. 



It is not in the sphere of practice alone, but in the domain of 



