DIVORCE OF SCIENCE FROM EDUCATION

7

teach him to be content with penury should be capable of teaching him also the uses of wealth.

A single modern machine does the work of tens of thousands of labourers, releasing them from the benumbing and soul-destroying effect of unremittent physical labour. The very same movement which lightened the task of men, favoured women even The minimisation of individual brute strength in the affairs of life could hardly do otherwise.

ITS EFFECT ON EDUCATION.

Each year science increases by so many millions of horse-power its patient armies of inanimate slaves. The adoption of slave labour by Imperial Rome, we are taught, laid that mighty civilisation in the dust. Already the new slave of science has laid in ruins all the ineradicable doctrines derived from the history and experience of a time when the physical environment was unchanging. Those who pleaded just for one or two at least of the ancient seats of learning to be left untouched and unreformed amid the startling and dangerous innovations of science, as a sanctuary for what was noble and enduring in the thought of the past, may have perpetuated an anachronism, safe enough in a monastery, but infinitely more dangerous than innovation where it concerns the education of future generations of public men. If men so trained had been debarred from holding public positions in the State, or even if they had been regarded, so far as their training was serious, as specialists, instead of becoming the fashion and being preferred as the traditional type which all systems of general education should strive to produce, no possible objection could be taken. But it is absurd that the administration of a modern State should be left to men ignorant of science and of its

human consequences. More serious consequences have attended the overweighting of education by dead and moribund habits of thought than would have attended an overweighting of education with science. So great is the discontinuity between the present and any previous period.

One may believe that the human aspect of learning, if it is the highest, is also the last aspect to be achieved, and if no adequate appreciation of the older humanities can be arrived at without long preparation in the grammar and etymology of ancient languages, so no adequate appreciation of the newer scientific humanities can be derived without a long discipline in the grammar and principles of science. In spite of all make-believe to the contrary, this is the age of science.

One may walk through any city, as the early Greek sculptor did in his day, absorbing unconsciously from its medley of sights and sounds the fleeting impressions which, in a trained mind, fuse together and congeal, epitomising for all time the animation of a moment. Science is not sculpturing from models. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. But the workmen are building in steel and the designers are thinking in stone.

THE NEED FOR ADAPTATION.

Human nature, in general, is the result of an age-long adaptation to what has been hitherto, for any one country, an essentially unchanging physical environment. Emigration to other countries, as in the population of the Americas, produces corresponding marked changes of human nature, and the rapidity of these changes among the mixed population which finds its way into the United States is well known. The subjection of inanimate sources

THE NEED FOR ADAPTATION

9

of energy resulted in a far vaster and more sudden change of physical environment than a mere geographical alteration, and its effect on human nature have been more immediate and universal than could be produced by any local migrations in themselves. The change is the more immediate and complete, as one generation succeeds another, among those upon whom the struggle for existence presses the more directly. It began at the bottom with the unskilled labourer. It is resisted the more strenuously, and for the time the more effectively, in accordance as an accumulation of wealth, interests or privileges serves to protect the resister from the natural consequences of being out of tune with his environment, or endear him to the conditions which are changing.

In such resistance is to be found the explanation of the disquieting fact that the vast social reconstruction everywhere in progress is volcanic rather than a normal healthy growth. There is scarcely a social change of any consequence which has not, like the right of combination of labour, taken its origin and assumed strength from below, and burst through the resistance offered to it from above. After having been denounced as anti-social, it is, in due course, welcomed and universally adopted by official and orthodox circles, so soon as the further progress of the movement has made it appear as the least of inevitable evils. Even the nationalisation of railways, land, and the sources of wealth, the conscription of capital, and all the rank heresies of a little while ago, are now receiving serious consideration. Perhaps most significant of all such ideas is that of the international co-operative labour movement against war.

This movement is a remarkable instance of how the forces compelling change find expression, in spite of the most innate traditions, such as patriotism

and the martial spirit, which were once the essentials of survival, whatever they may be to-day. The progress of change spreading upwards throughout society leads to some strange paradoxes. Official constructive philosophy long since deteriorated in a soil utterly exhausted by a monotonous alternation of introspective and retrospective agriculture and the bearing of a monotonous succession of the same dwindling harvest. It alone remains sterile, whilst all around, in the most unexpected places, the fertilising influence of the new knowledge, won and being won by the perfection of the extrospective or experimental method, is producing a luxuriant, if tangled, growth.

THE ENERGY OF COAL.

So far as the mere multiplication of the physical capacity of the race is concerned, the shifting and transport of loads, the hurling of projectiles or the minimisation of animal strength, the social effects of science are obvious enough. But these are but special instances of a universal change, which the modern doctrine of energy enables us to envisage in its entirety. All life-processes demand for their continuation and maintenance a continuous supply of energy, which is derived from food. A modern maxim might be, "Look after the energy and the matter will look after itself." In metabolism, so far as matter is concerned, there is a closed cycle. Men feed on animals, and animals on plants. The plants feed on the carbon-dioxide and other products of the animal metabolism, reconverting them into food. The net result is nil, or nearly so, as far as the material changes are concerned. They cancel out. But the one essential physical factor that makes the process possible is the supply of energy as sunlight

THE ENERGY OF COAL

11

to the plant, which, unlike the animal, can utilise it in this form for its life's work.

Scientifically there is nothing peculiar about vital energy, or about one form of available energy rather than another. That is to say, if not yet, some time in the future, the synthesis of food from the material constituents and any form of available energy will probably become possible. Historically, and till quite recently, the energy of sunlight, apart from an insignificant source in the tides, was the sole income of energy available for the world, and the traditional source by which, through the intermediary of plant metabolism, both men and animals lived. Mankind still lives solely on the energy derived from the sun, but in addition to his former income, utilised as before through the pursuit of agriculture, he has secured the control of a handsome legacy of solar energy, laid by in former times. He is living on an immensely more lavish scale than any of his predecessors, not because he has had any great increase in salary in the proper sense, not even because he is, in the mass, somewhat more intelligent, but because he is squandering an inheritance. The plants which, alone of living forms, can utilise the energy of sunlight, were at work for man ages before the remotest likeness to his image had appeared upon the world, and, even then, were laying the foundations on which alone his present greatness rests. Quite extraordinary physiographical conditions must have prevailed, an alternate uplifting and depressing of the bed of the ocean, time and again, as one age succeeded another, when the luxuriant forests of the carboniferous era flourished in the sun, and then sank beneath the sea. In this fossilised vegetation, preserved as coal, sandwiched between alternate layers of shale, is conserved some tiny fraction of the solar energy so prodigally radiated