Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/771

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 755

instance, a far cry from the stoker, or even the driver, of a coal engine at the one end of the scale, to, at the other, the active partner in the firm of White & Co., electricians and instrument- makers; for the active partner in that firm is, or was, Lord Kelvin. It will be urged that Lord Kelvin as instrument-maker and electrical engineer is merged and sunk in Lord Kelvin the professor, the investigator, the theorist. But the opposite interpretation would be equally true, and equally false. The essential point is to see that it is the very coincidence and alternation of theory and practice, of science and art, of thought and action, that above all differentiates and marks off the secu- lars of science from those of other varieties of spiritual power, And, applying this distinction, we readily recognize that the great majority of engineering occupations do not really belong to science at all, in the proper sense, but are persistent survivals af a pre-scientific age. The empirical rule-of-thumb types of engineer are still predominant, but they essentially belong to a pre-scientific order that has been well called paleo-technic. They do not possess the physicist's vision of the world; still less, therefore, do they seek to apply it to life. The physical scientist in his cosmic mood sees the world as an automatic system of energies, with a tendency to run down, and without a discover- able means of winding it up again, while as to the why and wherefore of its being originally set going the data of his science give him no clue. Looking at the same phenomena in his human- ist mood, he sees the flux and transformation of forces take on and assume a definite design and purpose, which the very logic of his science compels him to postulate as an inherent potency in the very system of energies. He sees every form of energy a poten- tial slave of man. He sees the cities scattered over the face of the globe, as the supreme, the collective, the ceaseless effort of the race to realize this potency of energy, to harness it in the service of man. The type of physical scientist in whom the cos- mic mood is habitual and dominant is the actual or incipient regular. But where the grand and inspiring ideal of realizing for man the potency of world-energies animates the physical scientist, there clearly we have the possibility of great secular