Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/98

94 may have until after it is acquired, and the seeker after purely useful knowledge will fail to acquire any real knowledge whatever.

We have here the explanation of the well-known fact that the functions of the investigator of the laws of nature, and of the inventor who applies these laws to utilitarian purposes are rarely united in the same person. If the one conspicuous exception which the past century presents to this rule is not unique, we should probably have to go back to Watt to find another. The true man of science of to-day and of all past time has no such expression in his vocabulary as useful knowledge. His domain is the whole of nature, and were he to attempt its division into the useful and the useless, he would drop from his high estate.

It is, therefore, clear that the primary agent in the movement which has elevated man to the masterful position he now occupies is the scientific investigator. He it is whose work has deprived plague and pestilence of their terrors, alleviated human suffering, girdled the earth with the electric wire, bound the continent with the iron way, and made neighbors of the most distant nations. As the first agent which has made possible this meeting of his representatives, let his evolution be this day our worthy theme.

It has been said that the scientific investigator is a new species of the human race. If this designation is applicable to a class defined only by its functions, then it is eminently appropriate. But the biologist may object to it on the ground that a species, or even a variety, is the product of heredity, and propagates only or mainly its own kind. The evolutionist may join hands with him on the ground that only new faculties, not new modes of activity, are to be regarded as products of evolution, but let us not stop to dispute about words. We have no need of the term 'species' in our present course of thought; but to deny the term evolution to the genesis of previously non-existent forms of intellectual activity is to narrow our conception of the course of nature, and draw a line of demarkation where no tangible boundary exists.

I am the more ready to invite your attention to the evolution of the scientific investigator, not only because the subject is closely correlated with human evolution in general, but because it is one branch of evolution which seems to me not to have received due prominence in discussions of the subject.

There is an increasing recognition of methods of research and of deduction which are common to large branches or to the whole of science. We are more and more recognizing the principle that progress in knowledge implies its reduction to a more exact form, and the expression of its ideas in language more or less mathematical. The problem before the organizers of this congress was, therefore, to bring the sciences together, and seek for the unity which we believe underlies