Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/378

374 lovely and most holy thing that has been given to man. So may we clear the fair name of science of the false charge of materialism that is so often brought against it by those who do not know and judge science purely by mechanical inventions.

Next let us consider the applications of scientific discovery and see if we cherish aright the gifts of the fairy godmother, for her gifts are dangerous if wrongly used. Consider, if this be doubted, the enormous advantages given by mechanical and chemical contrivances in producing the material comforts necessary to civilized human existence, and then turn your eyes to the reeking slums of our great cities. It is clear that natural science can not go on successfully alone, it must take sociology with it if our world is to be a better world to live in because of the gifts brought by scientific discovery.

Nor is the ideal and the outlook different in the least from that given above for pure research, when we come to consider its applications, the same high spirit must prevail in all our endeavors, or we shall defeat our own ends and miserably fail. Selfishness here, as everywhere, must recoil on the culprit, who only deadens his own soul. Health is needed not to grow wealthy or to prolong to greater length a "lingering death" as Plato puts it, but to fill life with happiness, and beckon the bold and adventurous forward to higher things. Here we must copy Nature's own plan and take care of the race as a whole instead of spending our energies upon single individuals or favored classes. Nor need any one fear that any individual or any particular class in the community is going to suffer from the adoption of the true scientific attitude towards disease. The penalty taken by nature on the more comfortable classes who have hitherto enjoyed the greater share in government for allowing the existence of poverty, disease and slumdom, is to utilize this negelectedneglected [sic] area as a culture-ground for diseases, which invade the classes above. Nature is still at work creating, still conducting evolution at the highest level, and disease is at present the tool with which she is working. So long as those poverty-stricken slums are allowed to remain, just so long is she grimly prepared to take her toll of death and suffering from those who ought to know how to lead on and do it not. The disease and the crime below are to the social community what pain is to the individual, and just as the special senses become more highly organized and sensitive as the nervous system becomes more highly developed, so as the civilization of the community intensifies does the public conscience awaken to forms of mischief and crime in one generation that were unsuspected in a previous one. So social evils become intolerable and finally are removed. How then are we employing our knowledge as to the causation of disease to the public problem of its removal or abatement?

In regard to the physical environment much has been done during