Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/556

 550 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

a rule been dictated by a sense of immediate or personal advantage. They have therefore resulted in the attacking of broad problems, for the nonce unprofitable but in their fruition how deeply fraught with significance to humanity I If the kind intentions of our political friends are executed, however, all this will now be changed, the old academic notion of the remoteness of the investigator from the every- day exigencies of life will be swept away, the unpractical investigation of the laws of atomic affinity will be replaced by an intensive study of cheese-making and the inspiring contemplation of the mysterious slruc- ture of the crystal will be replaced by a study of improved methods of hardening steel.

I am far from attempting to impugn the value or the ultimate as well as proximate importance of these studies of immediate practical concern. The Infinite lies hidden in every grain of sand and no object whatever is devoid of dignity as an object of research. Pasteur was led to his epoch-making investigations which have ameliorated so much of human pain and suffering by a study of the problems encountered in the manufacture of wine and of silk. Faraday's genius for research found the path to a new world through his attempts to provide manu- facturers of optical instruments with a new and more satisfactory type of glass. But the doubt which assails me is this : Supposing our polit- ical friends had by happy chance engaged a potential Faraday or Pas- teur to investigate the chemistry of cheese or the hardening of steel and suppose in the course of these utilitarian investigations he too were to tap a vein of knowledge leading deep into the heart of the mysteries of our environment, would he be permitted so unprofitable a divergence from the main object for which he had been hired? How- ever sympathetically inclined his immediate overseer might feel, I think that it might be diflBcult to convey to the politicians to whom he in turn would be answerable the ultimate significance of such abstract and generalized investigations, and when in turn the matter came to be referred to voters, i. e., taxpayers, I fear it would go hard with our new Faraday or Pasteur.

The wind bloweth where it listeth and the spirit of man can not be confined within premeditated bounds. This human institution, the institution of investigation, must like other human institutions be of natural and spontaneous growth or it will inevitably decay. Just as a church can not be established by statute, nor a system of law be per- fected in the brief deliberations of a committee, so scientific investiga- tion must develop of itself, by the expression of its own internal vigor, into an autonomous and self-supporting institution, integrally welded into our daily lives and the living expression of a need and a function of society.

Such, indeed, in slow and painful stages has been the past devel-

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