Science and Citizenship
which are essentially Regular orders of an incipient Spiritual Power, and as such they are silently preparing a great moral revolution. Where are we to look for the Secular orders who will be their active instruments of temporal change? The occupations concerned with the biological or organic side of civilisation are, of course, those of peasant and farmer, of gardener and stock-raiser, along with medical doctors and surgeons, not to mention the herbalists and the nurses, the barbers and the hairdressers, the gymnasts and all the lower and older groups of occupations, from and through which the medical profession has risen to its present summit. Which amongst all these are the Secular orders of science, and which the empirical survivals of a pre-scientific age? To answer that, we must first ask what is the special vision of the world which animates the biologist? and further, we must ask what militant groups are there whom this vision stimulates into practical activity? The biologist, like other scientists, has his cosmic and his humanist mood. In the former he sees an endless chain of developing life beginning he knows not how or why, and tending he knows not whither. In his humanist mood he sees the same unbroken chain that links together the whole series of organic beings; but now sees in it evidence at every point, from lowest to highest, of the promise and the potency of a supreme culmination. And in the most beautiful and noblest of human beings he sees a form which, by taking thought, the whole race may reach and surpass.
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