THE CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE

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A parallel to the normal attitude of the world towards science and its application, respectively, may be found in its attitude towards the musical performer and the musical composer. The musical world will go wild with enthusiasm over the perfect rendering of any of its favourite compositions, and will shower upon the skilled artists wealth and honour. But the man who created the music, an infinitely rarer kind of genius, probably had difficulty in obtaining a bare livelihood by his art, and would have just as much difficulty, if he lived now, as he would have had in past times.

Science in the capacity of the creator of knowledge is esteemed as little by the world as creative work in art, literature or music. Not that it is not appreciated in theory, but the appreciation so lags behind the accomplishment that the creator has ample time to die of starvation. Yet this is the science from which fundamentally all the benefits of modern civilisation are derived. This is the science that has made it possible for us to-day to afford to wage war on a thousand-fold more extravagant scale than ever before in history. This is the science that is to pay the bill if it can be paid without a general depression in the standard of living below the level of decency for the many, and which alone, after the unparalleled waste of the past two years, given fair play, can hope to keep the wolf from the door. If one judged from history solely, bad times must follow the present orgy as night follows day. The only question is whether science, which in the past century is estimated to have increased the wealth of the world a thousand-fold, will not also make each million of debt now incurred bear no more heavily than each thousand did upon our unsophisticated ancestors.

It is low ground to plead for fair play to science. It is the ground of the hymn-—

"O Lord, we know that all we give

Will be a thousand times repaid."

I suppose most of my hearers, like myself, have outgrown many of their rooted convictions of two years ago many times. Great changes have come over all of us, and greater will come, perhaps, when the full tide of our manhood, who have sacrificed all they had and sunk their individual interests and aspirations in the general social weal, returns. The particular faith in me that has undergone eclipse at the moment is a faith in democracy, and if an aristocracy of intelligence were practical, I am afraid I should vote for it.

The one problem that it seems to me has not been solved by this democracy, if it is a democracy, is that of finding each man his proper life-work and then letting him do it; and, until it is solved, the complex organism that the modern State is, must remain a heterogeneous collection of individuals rather than a community. Perhaps it is that two of a trade seldom agree, but I have never been wildly enthusiastic of German science. I admire it, of course, as much as any, but what I mean is that I never have believed that, compared with that of the rest of the scientific world, it was at all pre-eminent. Germany is not a democracy, and I have no love for her political system. But it is indisputable that Germany uses her people to infinitely better advantage than we do, and that there is in the State a power of finding, for the infinitely complex and varied needs of a modern nation, the infinitely complex and varied individuals necessary each for their particular job. Here we delight in racing cart-horses and leaving Derby winners to haul coal.

DEMOCRACY AND GENIUS

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As regards the most important and fundamental things of life-such as, to mention only as illustrations, the number of people that can be supported in a given country in a given standard of comfort and affluence, the amount of food the country can grow or buy, whether it can outpour from its superabundance into the less fertile and more necessitous countries of the earth, or whether it remains a malaria-haunted or fever-stricken jungle, ruled by the mosquito-the 999,999 out of the million have no direct say whatever. It little matters whether they are an absolute monarchy like Russia, a republic like France or the United States, or, to come to this country, whether they are ruled by an aristocracy of blood, an aristocracy of wealth, or the loudest of cheap presses. These questions are settled otherwise in the laboratory by men, sometimes, as in the case of malaria and yellow fever, with the special problem to be solved before them, more often impelled by a divine curiosity and the desire to know and understand Nature for her own sake and the sake of truth, and without any care whether or not all the labour and thought they expend in the search will or will not be repaid in increased good to the community.

Now, willing enough as I am to subscribe to the doctrine that every one born into the world may be a potential Faraday, a potential Newton, or a potential Pasteur, I am absolutely certain that the 999,999 out of the million are in fact nothing of the kind and never could be, even if they had the laboratory resources of the whole world put at their disposal, and Faraday, Newton and Pasteur reincarnated to serve as their professors.

What applies in science applies everywhere. The creative element is not the only element, but it is the pace-maker of progress and civilisation. For

one that leads a thousand can follow, and, when the path followed is the path of natural knowledge, each of these thousand can teach another thousand new means of livelihood.

You cannot starve into non-productiveness a poet, an artist, a parson, or any great thinker of the old type, nearly as easily as you can starve a scientific genius. Because they are more self-contained. To them the brain is both the raw material and the machine for finishing and producing it. But, to the devotees of the newer philosophy, the raw material is not in the brain but is to be sought for in external nature; and in handling this raw material, mastery over materials by scientific methods of experiment is, at least, of equal importance with mastery over the processes of thought. In other words, laboratories are required, and, though an artist without a studio, or an evangelist without a church, might conceivably find under the blue dome of heaven a substitute, a scientific man without a laboratory is in most branches a misnomer.

As science advances and most of the more accessible fields of knowledge have been gleaned of their harvest, the need for more and more powerful and elaborate appliances and more and more costly materials ever grows. Yet, if one-tenth of one per cent. of all the added wealth that scientific men have, without acknowledgment and without reward, earned for the community were repaid, it would suffice them, beyond their wildest dreams of avarice, for laboratories and maintenance.

Suppose, then, we have found capable scientific men, not necessarily any outstanding genius like Newton, not one in a million, but say we have picked out the best of every thousand in the community, the chances are that the thousand, which we have picked out of a million, will contain any potential

RESEARCH VERSUS TEACHING

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Newton the age may have produced, and a number of thoroughly useful understudies as well.

Many people suppose thereby that the work is finished and all has been done that should be done. They have forgotten, however, the primary purpose it was all about. The problem which I stated that this democracy has not solved is the finding for each man his proper life-work and then letting him do it. We have assumed, in our discussion of the relations between science and the State, that the men to advance science and the buildings in which they are to work have been found. It remains, therefore, only to let the scientific men alone to do their work. But this is precisely what is almost never done in this country. The candidates go through a long and severe course of training, selection and apprenticeship at apprentice's wages, fitting themselves for their life-work. They must show some evidence of the capacity of making original investigations and discoveries before they are put in charge of one or other of the laboratories of the country, and when they get there they teach.

Now the teaching and training of students for scientific professions and for scientific investigation is almost as vital and important to the welfare of the country as the making of scientific discoveries. But it is a totally different business to that of scientific investigation. Some try more or less successfully to do both, but, in Scotland at least, it is the teaching function of the university, rather than its equally important function as the natural home of scientific investigation, which has hitherto claimed an altogether disproportionate share. I cannot recall a single Research Professor in any university of the United Kingdom. In America, Johns Hopkins University, for example, entirely devotes itself to research. Here everything else comes first. Re

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