Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/524

514 broad domain of every-day life rather than from the special, though rapidly widening, fields of scientific activity.

Between this nominally unlimited freedom on the one hand, and these actually narrow restrictions on the other, I have chosen to invite your attention for the hour to a summary view of the salient features of scientific progress, with special reference to its effects on the masses, rather than on the individuals, of mankind. We all know, at least in a general way, what such progress is. We are assured almost daily by the public press and by popular consent that the present is not only an age of scientific progress, but that it is preeminently the age of scientific progress. And with respect to the future of scientific achievement, the consensus of expert opinion is cheerfully hopeful, and the consensus of public opinion is extremely optimistic. Indeed, to borrow the language sometimes used by the rulers of nations, it may be said that the realm of science is now at peace with all foreign parts of the world, and in a state of the happiest domestic prosperity.

But times have not been always thus pleasant and promising for science. As we look backward over the history of scientific progress it is seen that our realm has been taxed often to the utmost in defense of its autonomy, and that the present state of domestic felicity, bordering on tranquillity, has been preceded often by states of domestic discord bordering on dissolution. And, as we look forward into the new century before us, we may well enquire whether science has vanquished its foreign enemies and settled its domestic disputes for good and all, or whether future conquests can be made only by a similarly wasteful outlay of energy to that which has accompanied the advances of the past. Especially may we fitly enquire on an occasion like the present what are the types of mind and the methods of procedure which make for the progress, and what are the types of mind and the methods of procedure which make for the regress, of science. And I venture to think that we may enquire also with profit, in some prominent instances, under what circumstances in the past science has waxed or waned, as the case may be, in its slow rise from the myths and mysticism of earlier eras to the law and order of the present day. For it is a maxim of common parlance, too well justified, alas! by experience, that history repeats itself; or, to state the fact less gently, that the blunders and errors of one age are repeated with little variation in the succeeding age. This maxim is strikingly illustrated by the history of science, and it has been especially deeply impressed upon us—burnt in, one might say—by the scientific events of our own times. Have we not learned, however, some lasting lessons in the hard school of experience, and may we not transmit to our successors along with the established facts and principles of science the almost equally well established ways and means for the