Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/54

50 are, first of all, different. Science is defined by its point of view; the man of science takes his stand at the handle of the fan, and looks out along the sticks to an undefined periphery. Technology is defined by its practical end; the technologist, moving over the periphery, chooses and shapes the sticks which are to meet at the pivot that he has always held in view. The advice to "let the facts lead us where they will, over the hills and dales of physiology, into the deep borings of anatomy, or upward into the ethereal reaches of psychology" is admirable advice to offer the technologist; but its phrasing shows that it would be fatal if accepted by the man of science. For suppose that the man of science should accept it! Then the technologist, asking physiology for a detail of the landscape, might receive a sample of ore; or asking anatomy for the dip of the strata, might receive a cloud-photograph: things well enough in their own place but, out of place, turning his ignorance into sheer confusion. It is only in so far as he can rely upon the physiologist to keep his physiological point of view, and the psychologist his psychological, that the technologist is able to move freely from the one science to the other in pursuit of his practical end.

It follows from this primary difference that no technology is properly characterized as the application of a special science. Every technology is itself a special discipline, indebted (to be sure) to many sciences and to many other sources than science, but adding matter and method of its own, and rounding up all that it handles into a single whole. It is therefore no more in order to speak to-day, say, of an "applied psychology," than it would be to call engineering by its older name of "applied mechanics"; and the sooner we recognize that, in this particular sense, technology is independent of science, that the technologist lives and moves in a world of his own, has his own problems and methods, is charged with a special message to his generation, the sooner shall we exchange our present bickering for the harmony that we desire.

Science and technology are, in the second place, closely related; the nature of the relationship has been sketched in preceding paragraphs. If we look at this relation from without, from the side of maintenance and material aids, then the advantage lies with technology, and science is the beneficiary. The scientific man, accordingly, should rejoice at every technological advance, seeing that it ensures by just so much the material future of science. "How many men," asked Kepler in the old time, "how many men would be able to make astronomy their business, if men did not cherish the hope to read the future in the skies?"—and, with change of terms, the story is told again of us moderns. If, contrariwise, we look at the relation from within, then, as this paper has tried to show, technology appears as the beneficiary of science. The technologist should accordingly rejoice at every scientific advance, seeing that it means just so much more of observed fact which he may some