Page:Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924, E.P. Dutton & Company).pdf/15

 SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE

repetition-work the goal and ideal to which humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science may throw some light on these questions.

But first we may consider for a moment, the question of whether there is any hope of stopping the progress of scientific research. It is after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now. In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be practically impossible, and I am in- clined to suspect that Mr. Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this state of things. The late M. Joseph Reinach, an able and not wholy illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it.

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