I have only been able, in the time at my disposal, to traverse a very few of the possible fields of scientific advance. If I have convinced anyone present that science has still a good deal up her sleeve, and that of a sufficiently startling character, I shall be amply repaid. If anything I have said appears to be of a gratuitously disgusting nature, I would reply that certain phenomena of normal life do seem to many to be of that nature, and that these phenomena are of the utmost scientific and practical importance.
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he feels to be higher than himself.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides. In the past they have been, in general, men like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine Julius, but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there will be more Darwins. Such men are interested primarily in truth as such, but they can hardly be quite uninterested in what will happen when they throw down their dragon’s teeth into the world.
I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any detail the future applications of their science. The central problems of life for them may be the relationship between the echinoderms and brachiopods, and the attempt to live on their salaries. They do not see themselves as sinister and revolutionary figures. They have no time to dream. But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to confess it.
I have given above a very small selection from my dreams. Perhaps they are bad dreams. It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. And though personally I am Victorian enough in my sympathies to hope that after all family life, for example, may be spared, I can only reiterate that not one of the practical advances which I have predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. If a chemist or physicist living at the end of the seventeenth century had been asked to predict the future application of his science he would doubtless have made many laughable errors in the best Laputan style, but he would have been certain that it would somehow be applied, and his faith would have been justified.
We must regard science then from three points of view. First it is the free activity of man’s divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, for “νόσων τ’ ἀπείρους καὶ μακραίωνας βίους,” gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man’s gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.
None of these conquests will ever be complete, but all, I believe will be progressive. The question of what he will do with these powers is essentially a question for religion and aesthetic. It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
The answer to this contention may, I think, be found in the daily papers. For scores of centuries idealists had urged that wars must cease and all the earth be united under one rule. As long as any other alternative was possible it was persisted in. The events of the last nine years constituted a reductio ad absurdum of war, but when we ask who was responsible for this we shall find that it was not the visionaries but men like Black, Kekule, and Langley, who enlarged man’s power over nature until he was forced by the inexorable logic of facts to form the nucleus of an international government.
We have already reacted against the frame of mind that engendered the league of nations, but we have not reacted at all completely. The league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are many people, and ordinary normal people, who favour the idea in one form or another of a world-state. I do not suggest that a world-state will arise from the present league—or for the matter of that from the third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority. The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war is a very dirty business.
No doubt there is a fair chance that the possibility of human organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand years for another opportunity. But to the student of geology such a period is negligible. It took man 250,000 years to transcend the hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation.