Besides the satisfactions of system and clarity which the sciences give, they afford man power and security. "Knowledge is power," said Francis Bacon, meaning thereby that to know the connection between causes and effects was to be able to regulate conditions so as to be able to produce desirable effects and eliminate undesirable ones. Even the most disinterested inquiry may eventually produce practical results of a highly important character. "Science is," as Bertrand Russell says, "to the ordinary reader of newspapers, represented by a varying selection of sensational triumphs, such as wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes, radio-activity, etc." But these practical triumphs in the control of natural resources are often casual incidents of patiently constructed systems of knowledge which were built up without the slightest reference to their fruits in human welfare. Wireless telegraphy, for example, was made possible by the disinterested and abstract inquiry of three men, Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz.
In alternating layers of experiment and theory these three men built up the modern theory of electromagnetism, and demonstrated the identity of light with electromagnetic waves. The system which they discovered is one of profound intellectual interest, bringing together and unifying an endless variety of apparently detached phenomena, and displaying a cumulative mental power which cannot but afford delight to every generous spirit. The mechanical details which remained to be adjusted in order to utilize their discoveries for a practical system of telegraphy demanded, no doubt, very considerable ingenuity, but had not that broad sweep and that universality which could give them intrinsic interest as an object of disinterested contemplation.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: Mysticism and Logic, p. 34 ("Science and Culture").]
Science and a world view. One of the values of disinterested science that is of considerable psychological importance is the change in attitude it brings about in man's realization of his place in the universe. Lucretius long ago thought to free men's minds from terror and superstition by showing them how regular, ordered, and inevitable was the nature of things. The superstitious savage walks in dread among natural phenomena. He lives in a world which he imagines to be governed by capricious and incalculable forces. To a certain extent he can, as we have seen, control these. But he is ill at ease. He is surrounded by vast ambiguous forces, and moves in a trembling ignorance of what will happen next.
To those educated to the scientific point of view, there is a solidity and assurance about the frame of things. Beneath the variability and flux, which they continually perceive, is the changeless law which they have learned to comprehend. Although they discover that the processes of Nature move on indifferent to the welfare of man, they know, nevertheless, that they are dependable and certain, that they are fixed conditions of life which, to a certain extent, can be controlled, and the incidental goods and ills of which are definitely calculable. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, noted the eternal flux, yet perceived the steady order beneath, so that he could eventually assert that all things changed save the law of change. The magnificent regularity of natural processes has been repeatedly remarked by students of science.
The æsthetic value of science. As pointed out in the chapter on Art, scientific discovery is more than a mere tabulation of facts. It is also a work of the imagination, and gives to the worker in the scientific field precisely the same sense of satisfaction as that experienced by the creative artist. Of Kelvin his biographer writes:
Like Faraday and the other great masters in science, he was accustomed to let his thoughts become so filled with the facts on which his attention was concentrated that the relations subsisting between the various phenomena gradually dawned upon him, and he saw them, as if by some process of instinctive vision denied to others. ... His imagination was vivid; in his intense enthusiasm, he seemed to be driven rather than to drive himself. The man was lost in his subject, becoming as truly inspired as is the artist in the act of creation.[1]
[Footnote 1: Sylvanus P. Thompson; The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, pp. 1125 ff.]
In the working-out of a principle, the systematizing of many facts under a sweeping generalization, the scientist finds a creator's joy. He is giving form and significance to the disordered and chaotic materials of experience. The scientific imagination differs from the artistic imagination simply in that it is controlled with reference to facts. The first flash is subjected to criticism, examination, revision, and testing. But the grand generalizations of science originate in just such an unpredictable original vision. The discovery of the fitting formula which clarifies a mass of facts hitherto chaotic and contradictory is very closely akin to the process by which a poet discovers an appropriate epithet or a musician an apposite chord.
But in its products as well as in its processes, scientific investigations have a high æsthetic value. There is symmetry, order, and splendor in the relations which science reveals. The same formal beauty that appeals to us in a Greek statue or a Beethoven symphony is to be found in the universe, but on a far more magnificent scale. There is, in the first place, the sense of rhythm and regularity: