Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/267

Rh world of matter, it has also brought to light moral facts, and problems unknown to the framers of the American constitution. In order that these newer living issues may have their day in court, the democrat is willing to tolerate a less fixed and stable government than is your cavalier, your tory, your man of comfortable surroundings who doesn't like to be disturbed.

Further, we are coming to see that the flexible government is not dangerous, that we may move on to a larger justice easily and smoothly without imperiling the goods we already have. That this new vision is becoming real to us is due to two causes. One of these is our experience in undergoing political changes; the other is our experience with science. Science is not destroyed by new discoveries and inventions. Radium and bacteria may alter certain highly important hypotheses, but they do not destroy our faith in science or make it a less serviceable instrument to men. It has become quite a matter of course to expect revolutionizing discoveries, and science is at heart disposed to readjustment and revision. This attitude has taken hold of the general social mind through the popularization of science, and society at large has acquired a faith in a mobile, growing body of truth. It is probably true that twentieth-century society has no more vital faith than this, and it would be strange if it had not affected our ideas of government and politics.

For the infusion of scientific conceptions into other fields of thought we are not without splendid precedent. President Wilson has shown how the American constitution was a reflection of the prevailing Newtonian physics, and all of us know how thoroughly the concept of evolution has interwoven itself into every specialized department of modern thought. In like manner, the growing receptivity of men's minds to new interests in society, to the rights of the laboring classes, to the claims of dependent peoples, to the widening interests of women and children, has been greatly accelerated by the diffusion of science and scientific ways of thinking. Men have become accustomed to changing their minds, to having their beliefs unsettled, to feeling the good that comes with a new order of things.

Finally, and in the most subtly penetrative way, the kinship of science and democracy appears in their attitude toward the future. To both, the present is but a cross section of an advancing stream whose source is in a distant and indefinite past, whose current has gathered momentum in its progress hitherward and which is pouring itself into the future with a rapidly accelerating force. To neither is the past of this stream so interesting or important as its future, and the present is but a point of vantage for the movement forward. There is a type of mind to whom this way of thinking is difficult or even offensive. To it the good things were the possession of former peoples, and to those