It is not an unfair judgment, we think, that decides, on a survey of contemporary intellectual activities, to grant science the first place. Whether we consider the quality of the work which is being done, its importance to mankind, or the spirit in which the work is done, we think science earns that place. Our age is a scientific age to an extent which is certainly not generally realised. Contemporary scientific work is of a quality fully comparable with that of the greatest periods of its history; it is inevitable that our age should emerge, in the history of the future, as an age of science. It has, indeed, already established a perspective which leads to a revaluation of the Victorian age. There have already been many writers who have thought that age more memorable for its science than for its other achievements, that its significance to humanity lay more in the work of Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell than in that of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, or even in that of Mr. Gladstone, but the perspective we have now obtained puts the matter almost beyond doubt. With most of us our outlook is the result of a decrepit tradition. Our orientation towards life, so far as we are conscious of having one, is based upon the values we attribute to the various objects of our thoughts, and these values are determined partly by our instinctive desires and partly by the suggestions of our education--using the term “education” to include all converse with the minds of our fellows. Education, so defined, is the result very largely of a long and widespread tradition, a general tradition of European culture. It is a curious fact that, although the history of science goes as far back as the history of the arts, science is not an integral part of this, nevertheless, very catholic culture. There are periods, it is true, when some scientific theory is sufficiently dramatic, or appears sufficiently pertinent to man’s destiny, to secure general attention; Newton’s theory of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Einstein’s theory of relativity have each given rise to such a period. Einstein’s theory, we are informed, is now the favourite topic of enlightened conversation in Parisian salons, as Newton’s theory once was. Some of this interest, no doubt, is the product of disinterested curiosity, and in that respect is vastly different from the once general interest in Darwin’s theory. But we fear that many of those who are curious about Einstein’s theory would, if they understood it, find it uninteresting. We dare not interpret this curiosity as a sign that people are beginning to be as naturally interested in science as they are in literature, for instance.