Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/53

Rh a technology; and since this is the case, it is really to the interest even of the most practical man that scientific activity should be conserved and encouraged.

A second consideration brings us by a different road to the same conclusion. The close relationship that we have shown to hold between science and technology is the relationship that holds in a scientific age,—at a time when science has won to recognition, is cultivated internationally, is widely popularized. In such an age, it is natural, as it is also the best policy, for technology to draw upon science. Technological activity, however, is a very complicated affair; and it may be doubted whether technology, if left wholly to itself, would turn instinctively even to the best scientific systems available; still more that it would supply for itself, by arduous and unaccustomed work, the knowledge that those systems fail to-furnish. The tendency would rather be (and this is no dispraise to the technologist, who may never lose sight of his practical end) to fall back upon past science, upon science that was already more or less familiar, or to extend technological activity by purely technological means. Indeed, this tendency may be observed at the present day. The leader of a reform-movement in psychiatry, which has found critics and adherents over the whole civilized world, expressly bases his teaching upon psychology; but the psychology which he has in part adopted, in part worked out anew,—and which he appears to find entirely adequate to his technological needs,—is in essentials the psychology of a past generation. The writer takes this illustration from the field which is most familiar to him; the reader will be able to supply others from his own experience. The moral of such things is surely plain: that the technologist, for the very sake of his technology, needs the stimulus, the criticism and the assistance, of the man of science. Practical work tends, always and everywhere, to become routine work; routine tends toward conservatism, toward the defence of the old and the avoidance of the new; and conservatism ensures social stability. But if our ideal of society is a progressive equilibration, rather than the mere inertia of routine, then the conservatism of practical work must be tempered by the radicalism of science.

It is difficult, in writing upon a disputed question, not to give the impression that one is trying to disparage one's opponents. Yet the writer has no desire, despite the many hard things that technologists have said of the science with which he is most nearly concerned, to attempt any sort of disparagement of technology. Science and