Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/263

Rh of the rich and high-born as well as of the poor. But it is to the common man that it means most, for it lifts him for the first time in history above the level of economic slavery. Regardless of all the theories of political science and philosophy, this economic liberation of the fourth estate is working toward the ultimate democratization of society with a force as irresistible as gravitation. It matters little what Bourbon statesmen or scholastics may think about ultimate democracy; it matters tremendously that science has made it possible.

The economic results of science are not its only bearings upon democratic tendencies. Equally important are the changes it has wrought upon the attitude which men take toward the world of things. The time was when it was regarded as the surest way to wisdom to retire from contact with the concrete world of change. Plato held that the supreme duty of man is to escape from the sensible world to the world of ideas. The supreme destiny of the philosopher and his fullest satisfactions are to be found in the life of contemplation, culminating in the vision of the good. The world evident to the senses, the world of observation was thus to be disregarded and neglected. It was instable, changing and altogether below the life of reason. Small need, therefore, to examine it, for through it one would never find the truth, the beauty, or the goodness so necessary for the happy soul.

How large a share this doctrine of Plato's may have had in thwarting the development of science in ancient Greece, it is difficult to see. Mr. Schiller thinks it was very great. There were glimmerings of science and the experimental study of nature in Plato's time. Man was recognized as a part of nature; dissections had been practised by the Pythagoreans; the experimental spirit had expressed itself in the attitude of physicians toward their patients; anatomical research had been extended to animals; the relation of the parts of the body to their functions were discovered; Democritus had glimpsed the essence of atomic physics and had practiced experimental demonstration in his teaching; the relativity of nature to human sensibilities was set forth by Protagorus and other Sophists, and attempts had been made by a score of thinkers to analyze the physical world. But it all came to naught. Through the long night between Democritus and Galileo these flickerings of science slumbered.

To the abortion of these scientific interests several causes probably contributed. But if all the others had been removed, the chief philosophy of the time would probably have prevented any wide application of students to the things of nature, for Plato was the one overpowering genius of his time. The dominance of the Greek philosophy down to modern times is coincident with the sleep of science.

To-day all this is changed; we seek the truth through analysis and mastery of the world of sensible observation. The air, the soil, the