The Scientific Monthly, October to December, 1915Various
Science
The Scientific Monthly, October to December, 1915
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
But even if we grant that science is our main hope, there
remains a choice of methods. On the one hand, there is the way
of material progress, physical discovery and feverish haste to
apply every new fact to armament; on the other, that of
biological research, social enlightenment, and ever-increasing
human understanding and sympathy.
Firm believers in each of these possible approaches, through
science, to international peace, are at hand. The one group
argues that nations, like individuals, must be controlled in
all supreme crises by fear; the other contends that
civilization has developed in enlightened human sympathy a
higher, a more worthy, and a safer control of behavior.
As a biologist and a believer in the brotherhood of man, I wish
to present the merits of sympathy, as contrasted with fear, and
to plead for larger attention to the biological approach to the
control of international relations. For I am convinced that the
greatest lesson of the present stupendous world-conflict is the
need of thorough knowledge of the laws of individual and social
human behavior. Surely this war clearly indicates that the
study of instinct, and the use of our knowledge for the control
of human relations, is incalculably more important for the
welfare of mankind than is the discovery of new and ever more
powerful explosives or the building of increasingly terrible
engines of destruction.
During the last half-century the physical sciences,
technologies, arts and industries, have made marvelous
advances. At enormous cost of labor and material resources
there have been discovered and perfected means of destroying
life and property at once so effective and so terrible to
contemplate that preparedness for war seemed a safe guarantee
of peace. But who is there now to insist, against the evidence
of blood-drenched Europe, that material progress, physical
discovery, and armament based thereupon, assure international
friendship?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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