Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/27

Rh Open-mindedness, with suppression of vanity in quest or argument, freedom from unquestioned traditional tenets, and an ideal of impersonal and unselfish search for truth constitute the core of the scientific spirit. It requires suspended judgment in the absence of adequate evidence, and it demands freedom from all authority other than the supreme authority of Nature itself as interpreted by the collective scientific intelligence. Thus science is a social enterprise and the best example of successful cooperation we have, James refers to this cooperative nature of science when he speaks of the "thousands of disinterested moral lives of men buried in the mere foundations" of the edifice of science and of the "patience and postponement, the choking down of preferences, the submission to the icy laws of outer fact wrought into its very stones and mortar."

If there had been no Galileo there would have been no Newton and it is equally true that without Newton there would have been no Galileo, What Einstein has achieved was possible because of the prior work of Minkowski, Fitzgerald, Lorenz, Michelson and others, without which he could not have developed his relativity theories. The most important results of scientific research are given to the world with no thought of profiting from their possible applications and often without luxuries, or even necessities, in the lives of those responsible for them. As a result of its underlying method and ethics science has become international and completely democratic.

Science arose in a period of breakdown of older authority and of an emergence of wider individual freedom, and its existence is dependent upon continuance of conditions that permit thinking without trammel. The question of freedom, therefore, is a particularly vital one to science at the present day, when in some countries under dictatorships the right to seek, verify and openly proclaim the truth has been stifled, in some cases, it is said, with a cruelty more intense than anything western civilization has known in 400 years. Science depends upon freedom; but, in turn, during those 400 years science has been the most important factor in bringing the larger human freedom, both in body and mind, we have enjoyed.

Every ancient civilization was built upon a foundation of slavery, for human muscle was the only source of power they possessed. Slavery and civilization were synonymous. When the Egyptians needed bricks, they enslaved the Hebrews; and, as Dr. Whitehead suggests, "the confusion of tongues associated with the Tower of Babel. . . is at least well-founded as a reference to the confusion of races amid the slave population supplying the mechanized manpower for the building of cities." For a thousand years or more of classical Greek and Roman history the civilized apex of society rested upon a foundation of slavery, A sudden abolition of slavery at the time of Augustus would undoubtedly have meant the collapse of the whole social system, Plato's concept of the human