§ 1. =Common Sense and Science.=—We live in a world of values. We
have material standards of comfort, and moral standards of conduct;
and we eat and drink, and dress, and house our families, and educate
our children, and carry on our business in life, with these standards
more or less definitely before us. We approve good manners; we avoid
extravagance and display; we aim at efficiency; we try to be honest;
we should like to be cultivated. Everywhere and always our ordinary
living implies this reference to values, to better and worse, desirable
and undesirable, vulgar and refined. And that is the same thing as
saying that our ordinary living is not scientific. It is not either
unscientific, in the regular meaning of that word; it has nothing to do
with science; it is non-scientific or extra-scientific. For =science
deals, not with values, but with facts=. There is no good or bad, sick
or well, useful or useless, in science. When the results of science
are taken over into everyday life, they are transformed into values;
the telegraph becomes a business necessity, the telephone a household
convenience, the motor-car a means of recreation; the physician works
to cure, the educator to fit for citizenship, the social reformer to
correct abuses. Science itself, however, works simply to ascertain the
truth, to discover the fact. Mr. H. G. Wells complains in a recent
novel that no sick soul could find help or relief in a modern text-book
of psychology. Of course not! Psychology is the science of mind, not
the source of mental comfort or improvement. A sick soul would not go,
for that matter, to a text-book of theology; it would go to some proved
and trusted friend, or to some wise and tender book written by one who
had himself suffered. So a sick body would betake itself, not to the
physiological laboratory, but to a physician’s consulting room or to a
hospital.
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