On the other hand, it is equally true that the needs of modern industry
have been tremendous stimuli to scientific investigation. The demands of
progressive production and transportation have set new problems to
inquiry; the processes used in industry have suggested new experimental
appliances and operations in science; the wealth rolled up in business
has to some extent been diverted to endowment of research. The
uninterrupted and pervasive interaction of scientific discovery and
industrial application has fructified both science and industry, and has
brought home to the contemporary mind the fact that the gist of
scientific knowledge is control of natural energies. These four facts,
natural science, experimentation, control and progress have been
inextricably bound up together. That up to the present the application
of the newer methods and results has influenced the means of life rather
than its ends; or, better put, that human aims have so far been affected
in an accidental rather than in an intelligently directed way,
signifies that so far the change has been technical rather than human
and moral, that it has been economic rather than adequately social. Put
in the language of Bacon, this means that while we have been reasonably
successful in obtaining command of nature by means of science, our
science is not yet such that this command is systematically and
pre-eminently applied to the relief of human estate. Such applications
occur and in great numbers, but they are incidental, sporadic and
external. And this limitation defines the specific problem of
philosophical reconstruction at the present time. For it emphasizes the
larger social deficiencies that require intelligent diagnosis, and
projection of aims and methods.
It is hardly necessary to remind you however that marked political
changes have already followed upon the new science and its industrial
applications, and that in so far some directions of social development
have at least been marked out. The growth of the new technique of
industry has everywhere been followed by the fall of feudal
institutions, in which the social pattern was formed in agricultural
occupations and military pursuits. Wherever business in the modern sense
has gone, the tendency has been to transfer power from land to financial
capital, from the country to the city, from the farm to factory, from
social titles based on personal allegiance, service and protection, to
those based on control of labor and exchange of goods. The change in
the political centre of gravity has resulted in emancipating the
individual from bonds of class and custom and in producing a political
organization which depends less upon superior authority and more upon
voluntary choice. Modern states, in other words, are regarded less as
divine, and more as human works than they used to be; less as necessary
manifestations of some supreme and over-ruling principles, and more as
contrivances of men and women to realize their own desires.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account