Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/16

10 of our troubles. We have spent much effort and wealth upon the science of matter; but the greater our success here, the greater must be our failure unless we, at long lost, make a corresponding advance in the science of man. Man has proceeded so far in his interference with extra-human nature, he has produced for himself such a special state of things by his successful defiance of Nature's earlier dispositions, that he must go on and acquire still firmer control of conditions or perish miserably by "the vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs."

Man has in many respects abrogated the laws of Nature by which he was formerly restrained; but along with the advantages he has thereby gained, he has opened himself to new dangers and disasters on every side. These perils already make him wince, and there are many who, blaming science and the machine age, openly suggest a return to a simpler life. But such reversal is impossible. As Bertrand Russell notes, Lao-Tze, said to have lived before Confucius in the 6th century B. C, "is just as eloquent as Ruskin on the subject of the destruction of ancient beauty by modern mechanical inventions. Roads and bridges and boats filled him with horror because they were unnatural; he speaks of music as modern high-brows speak of the moving-picture. He objects to the taming of horses, and to the arts of the potter and carpenter." Return to Nature, if taken as meant by Lao-Tze, "would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent of the population of civilized countries. Industrialism as it exists at the present day undoubtedly has grave difficulties, but they are not to be cured by a return to the past." The liquidation of the older order of life is irrevocable.

The idea that was finally to flower in the scientific method issued from the Ionian Greeks whose minds developed not so much because of their innate superiority as because circumstances conspired to make them intellectually the freest people of whom we have record. This idea is simply that Nature is a world of system and order comprehensible to the rational mind and that Nature itself constitutes the ultimate standard or authority for belief. The power of rational thought depends upon two elements, its method and its data, and in the end the Greek missed science because he slighted the second element. He failed to see, except spasmodically, the point at which philosophic speculation so far outruns fact as to become unprofitable. He did not acquire a solid anchorage in concrete knowledge in time to save his world, but he gave the intellectual impulse that was to determine the mind of Europe and remake the world through science.

Historically the stream of rational thought from Greek philosophy divided, one branch running through Rome, the other through Alexandria. In the first, the effort at natural explanations made by the worldly Greeks dried out completely, the other-worldly Christians seizing upon the religious aspects of philosophy for