“And with what a wealth of unforeseen goods it has supplied us, motor cars, and aëroplanes, and talking machines, and a countless variety of new chemical products. What indeed can we not achieve with its aid; we can send our messages around the world, dig the Panama Canal, throw a dam across the Mississippi and turn the wheels and light the homes of distant cities. We can make the lightning our household servant, we can fly through the clouds, we can weigh distant suns, and by throwing their light waves through a spectroscope, analyze them chemically and tell whether they are composed of gas or solid matter and whether they are moving towards us or receding. As science is giving us mastery over nature, why should it not likewise give man control over his own nature? The existence in a scientific age of poverty and crime and injustice and corruption is an anachronism. Human reason has at last decided to make itself at home and put the house of life in order, and all nature smilingly welcomes it. It is flushed with success and well it may be, for in it is the promise of the final triumph of man on the earth.” We are not so sanguine now. We have seen the destructive uses to which scientific knowledge may be put in warfare. We are not so hopeful about the easy control of human nature by means of it. It cannot be said that there has been a general gain in intelligence, corresponding to the increase of specialized scientific knowledge. The disturbing thought has been expressed that the tremendous power of the engines created by applied science for our generation is something like dangerous explosives in the hands of young children. We are like passengers on a steamship speeding through fog with an empty pilot house. We move swiftly from one place to another, but it is doubtful if we find more happiness or good when we reach our destination, or if we behave more wisely than do men who know nothing of the fruits of science. Those who are acquainted with China, a country in which a vast population has maintained the oldest civilization extant without any science at all, say that the cultural level of that nation has not been raised by the occasional importation of western methods of sanitation, military science, electric lights and chewing gum.