‘Science’ has been such an entity ever since Francis Bacon found again, without knowing it, the path of Aristotle’s best thought.  The conception of ‘Science,’ of scientific method and the scientific spirit, was built up in successive generations by a few students.  At first their conception was confined to themselves.  Its effects were seen in the discoveries which they actually made; but to the mass of mankind they seemed little better than magicians.  Now it has spread to the whole world.  In every class-room and laboratory in Europe and America the conscious idea of Science forms the minds and wills of thousands of men and women who could never have helped to create it.  It has penetrated, as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural Right never penetrated, to non-European races.  Arab engineers in Khartoum, doctors and nurses and generals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese students make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by absolute submission to Science, and not only English or American or German town working men, but villagers in Italy or Argentina are learning to respect the authority and sympathise with the methods of that organised study which may double at any moment the produce of their crops or check a plague among their cattle.

‘Science,’ however, is associated by most men, even in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, things that can be examined by test-tubes and microscopes.  They are dimly aware that there exists a science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to them, as yet, no ideal of conduct.

It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men’s unconscious impulses from without, there have been of late some noteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control from within.  Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct.  But it seems to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the old form of an opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘passion.’  The President of the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in a powerful address, ’Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers ... attacks our political life at a most vulnerable point.’[60] If forty years ago Huxley had in this way merely preached ‘intelligence’ as against ‘emotion’ in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him.  Men will not take up the ‘intolerable disease of thought’ unless their feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has been that it does touch men’s feelings, and draws motive power for thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitless hope.

[60] A. T. Hadley in Munsey’s Magazine, 1907.