THE ECONOMICAL INFLUENCES OF SCIENCE.

The scientific study of Nature tends not only to correct and ennoble the intellectual conceptions of man; it serves also to ameliorate his physical condition.  It perpetually suggests to him the inquiry, how he may make, by their economical application, ascertained facts subservient to his use.

The investigation of principles is quickly followed by practical inventions.  This, indeed, is the characteristic feature of our times.  It has produced a great revolution in national policy.

In former ages wars were made for the procuring of slaves.  A conqueror transported entire populations, and extorted from them forced labor, for it was only by human labor that human labor could be relieved.  But when it was discovered that physical agents and mechanical combinations could be employed to incomparably greater advantage, public policy underwent a change; when it was recognized that the application of a new principle, or the invention of a new machine, was better than the acquisition of an additional slave, peace became preferable to war.  And not only so, but nations possessing great slave or serf populations, as was the care in America and Russia, found that considerations of humanity were supported by considerations of interest, and set their bondmen free.

Scientific inventions.  Thus we live in a period of which a characteristic is the supplanting of human and animal labor by machines.  Its mechanical inventions have wrought a social revolution.  We appeal to the natural, not to the supernatural, for the accomplishment of our ends.  It is with the “modern civilization” thus arising that Catholicism refuses to be reconciled.  The papacy loudly proclaims its inflexible repudiation of this state of affairs, and insists on a restoration of the medieval condition of things.

That a piece of amber, when rubbed, will attract and then repel light bodies, was a fact known six hundred years before Christ.  It remained an isolated, uncultivated fact, a mere trifle, until sixteen hundred years after Christ.  Then dealt with by the scientific methods of mathematical discussion and experiment, and practical application made of the result, it has permitted men to communicate instantaneously with each other across continents and under oceans.  It has centralized the world.  By enabling the sovereign authority to transmit its mandates without regard to distance or to time, it has revolutionized statesmanship and condensed political power.

In the Museum of Alexandria there was a machine invented by Hero, the mathematician, a little more than one hundred years before Christ.  It revolved by the agency of steam, and was of the form that we should now call a reaction-engine.  This, the germ of one of the most important inventions ever made, was remembered as a mere curiosity for seventeen hundred years.