Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/613

 PLACE OF SCIENCE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 597

of course, denied by those who insist on a purely mathematical formulation of scientific theories, but the denial is maintained only at the cost of consistency. Those eminent authorities who speak for a colorless mathematical formulation invariably and neces- sarily fall back on the (essentially metaphysical) preconception of causation as soon as they go into the actual work of scientific inquiry. 10

Since the machine technology has made great advances, dur- ing the nineteenth century, and has become a cultural force of wide-reaching consequence, the formulations of science have made another move in the direction of impersonal matter-of-fact. The machine process has displaced the workman as the archetype in whose image causation is conceived by the scientific investiga- tors. The dramatic interpretation of natural phenomena has thereby become less anthropomorphic ; it no longer constructs the life-history of a cause working to produce a given effect after the manner of a skilled workman producing a piece of wrought goods but it constructs the life-history of a process in which the distinction between cause and effect need scarcely be observed in an itemized and specific way, but in which the run of causation unfolds itself in an unbroken sequence of cumulative change. By contrast with the pragmatic formulations of worldly wisdom these latter-day theories of the scientists appear highly opaque, impersonal, and matter-of-fact; but taken by themselves they must be admitted still to show the constraint of the dramatic prepossessions that once guided the savage myth-makers.

In so far as touches the aims and the animus of scientific in- quiry, as seen from the point of view of the scientist, it is a wholly fortuitous and insubstantial coincidence that much of the knowl- edge gained under machine-made canons of research can be turned to practical account. Much of this knowledge is useful, or may be made so, by applying it to the control of the processes in which natural forces are engaged. This employment of scien-

10 Cf., e. g., Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, and compare his ideal of inert magnitudes as set forth in his exposition with his actual work as shown in chaps. 9, 10, and 12, and more particularly in his discussions of "Mother Right" and related topics in The Chances of Death.