According to Huxley the discovery by Pasteur of the means of preventing or curing anthrax, silkworm disease and chicken cholera, a fraction of that great man's life work, added annually to the wealth of France a sum equivalent to the entire indemnity paid by France to Germany after the war of 1870.
Humanity has not finished its conquest of nature; on the contrary, it has barely begun. The discipline of thought which has carried humanity so far is destined to carry it further yet. Business enterprise and politics, the all-absorbing interests of the majority of mankind, work in an endless circle. Scientific research communicates a thrust to this rotation which converts the circle into a spiral; the apex of that spiral lies far beyond our vision. We have, not decades, not centuries, not thousands of years before us; but, as astronomy assures us, in all probability, humanity has millions of years of earthly destiny to realize. Barely three thousand years of PURPOSEFUL scientific research have brought the uttermost ends of the earth to our doors; have made civilization and excluded much of the most brutal and brutalizing in life. Not more than two hundred years of research have made us masters where we were slaves; masters of distance, of the air, of the water, of the bowels of the earth, of many of the most dreaded aspects of disease and suffering. Only for forty years have we practiced antisepsis; only for sixty years have we had anesthetics; yet life to-day is well-nigh inconceivable without them. And all of this has been accomplished without any forethought on the part of the acknowledged rulers and leaders of mankind or any save the most trumpery and uncertain provision for research. What will the millions of years which stretch in front of us bring of power to mankind? We can barely foreshadow things too vast to grasp; things that will make the imaginings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells seem puny by comparison. The future, with the uncanny control which it will bring over things that seem to us almost sacred—over life and death and development and thought itself—might well seem to us a terrifying prospect were it not for one great saving clause. Through all that may happen to man, of this we may be sure, that he will remain human; and because of that we can face the future unafraid and confident that because it will be greater, it will also be better than the present.
What can we do to accelerate the coming of this future? Not very much, it is true, but we can surely do something. We can not create geniuses, often we can not discern them, but having discerned, surely we can use them to the best advantage. It is true that all scientific research has depended and will depend upon individuals; Simon Newcomb expresses the matter thus:
'It is impressive to think how few men we should have to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. In the seventeenth century there would only have been Galileo, Newton and a few other contemporaries, in the eighteenth they could almost have been counted on the fingers, and they have not crowded the nineteenth.'[7]
[7] "Inventors at Work," Iles, Doubleday Page, 1906.
The first thing we have to do is to discover such men, to learn to know them or suspect them when we meet them or their works. The next is to give them moral and financial recognition, and the means of doing their work. Our procedure in the past has been the reverse of this. I quote from a letter of Kepler to his friend Moestlen:
'I supplicate you, if there is a situation vacant at Tubingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and let me know the prices of bread, wine and other necessaries of life, for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans.'
The founder of comparative psychology, J. H. Fabre, that "incomparable observer" as Darwin characterized him, is now over ninety years of age, and until very recently was actually suffering from poverty. All his life his work was stunted and crippled by poverty, and countless researches which he was the one human being qualified by genius and experience to undertake, remain to this day unperformed because he never could command the meager necessary equipment of apparatus.
Once again, what can we do?
No small proportion of the population of a modern community are alumni of some institution of higher learning, and one thing that these can do is to see to it by every means in their power that some measure of the spirit of academic freedom is preserved in their alma mater. That the spirit of inquiry and research is not merely tolerated therein but fostered and substantially supported, morally and financially.