Page:Science and modern civilisation - the Harveian oration - delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1897 (IA b24976039).pdf/24

20 SCIENCE AND MODERN CIVILISATION varied and most precious outcome of the human mind which may be grouped under the categories of the fine arts and literature. There is a history of improve- ment and growth up to a certain culmination, or phase of maturity. Beyond that point no further growth seems possible-but rather, instead, a tendency to decline and decadence.¹

The evolution of science differs fundamentally from that of literature and the fine arts. Science advances by a succession of discoveries. Each discovery constitutes a permanent addition to natural knowledge-and furnishes a post of vantage for, and a suggestion to, further discoveries. This mode of advance has no assignable limits; for the phenomena of nature-the material upon which science works-are practically infinite in extent and complexity. Moreover, science creates while it investigates; it creates new chemical compounds, new combinations of forces, new conditions of substances, and strange new environments-such as do not exist at all on the earth's surface in primitive nature. These 'new natures,' as Bacon would have called them, open out endless vistas of lines of future research. The prospects of the scientific inquirer are therefore bounded by no horizon-and no man can tell, nor even in the least conjecture, what ultimate issues. he may reach.

The difference here indicated between the growth of art and literature and the growth of science is, of course, inherent in the subjects; and is not difficult to explain.

If we take a wider view of the constituent elements of organised society and embrace in our consideration the religious systems, the political and civil institutions, the military organisations, the commerce and the miscellaneous disconnected mass of natural knowledge existing in the older civilisations-we look in vain for any constituent which had more than a limited scope of expansion, and was not subject to decay.