Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/81

Rh flower of that highest philanthropy of the ages by which not even thought exists for itself alone, but must find its end in the enlargement of human control over matter and force or the amelioration of the conditions of human life.

The development of all science has been a constant struggle, a struggle of fact against philosophy, of instant impressions against traditional interpretations, of truth against 'make-believe' For men are prone to trust a theory rather than a fact; a fact is a single point of contact; a theory is a circle made of an infinite number of points, none of them, however, it may be, real points of contact.

The history of the progress of science is written in human psychology rather than in human records. It is the struggle of the few realities or present sense impressions against the multitude of past impressions, suggestions and explanations. I have elsewhere said that the one great discovery of the nineteenth century—forestalled many ages before—was that of the reality of external things. Men have learned to trust a present fact or group of facts, however contradictory its teachings, as apposed to tradition and philosophy. From this trust in the reality of the environment of matter and force, whatever these may be, the great fabric of modern science has been built up. Science is human experience of contact with environment tested, set in order, and expressed in terms of other human experience. Utilitarian science is that part of all this knowledge which we can use in our lives, in our business. What is pure science to one is applied science to another. The investigation of the laws of heredity may be strictly academic to us of the university, but they are utilitarian as related to the preservation of the nation or to the breeding of pigs. In the warfare of science the real in act and motive has been persistently substituted for the unreal. Men have slowly learned that the true glory of life lies in its wise conduct, in the daily act of love and helpfulness, not in the vagaries fostered by the priest or in the spasms of madness which are the culmination of war. To live here and now as a man should live constitutes the ethics of science, and this ideal has been in constant antithesis to the ethics of ecclesiasticism, of asceticism and of militarism.

The physical history of the progress of science has been a struggle of thinkers, observers and experimenters against the dominant forces of society. It has been a continuous battle, in which the weaker side in the long run is winner, having the strength of the earth behind. It has been incidentally a conflict of earth-born knowledge with opinions of men sanctioned by religion; of present fact with preestablished system, visibly a warfare between inductive thought and dogmatic theology.

The real struggle, as already indicated, lies deeper than this. It is the effort of the human mind to relate itself to realities in the midst of traditions and superstitions, to realize that Nature never contradicts herself, is always complex, but never mysterious. As a final result all