Page:Science and Citizenship.djvu/60

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

Science and Citizenship

recognise that the great majority of engineering occupations do not-really belong to science at all in the proper sense, but are persistent survivals of a pre-scientific age. The empirical rule-of-thumb types of engineer are still predominant, but they essentially belong to a pre-scientific order that has been well called Palæotechnic. They do not possess the physicist's vision of the world, still less therefore do they seek to apply it to life. The physical scientist in his cosmic mood sees the world as an automatic system of energies, with a tendency to run down and without a discoverable means of winding it up again; while as to the why and wherefore of its being originally set going, the data of his science give him no clue. Looking at the same phenomena in his humanist mood, he sees the flux and transformation of forces take on and assume a definite design and purpose, which the very logic of his science compels him to postulate as an inherent potency in the very system of energies. He sees every form of energy a potential slave of man. He sees the cities scattered over the face of the globe, as the supreme, the collective, the ceaseless effort of the race to realise this potency of energy, to harness it in the service of man. The type of physical scientist in whom the cosmic mood is habitual and dominant is the actual or incipient Regular. But where the grand and inspiring ideal of realising for man the potency of world energies animates the physical scientist, there clearly we have the possibility of great Secular orders. And that such orders are everywhere incipient and

55