Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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6 THE COLLEGE RECORD. should not find things bad and determine to make them better. There is one idea with which natural science is continual- ly occupied, the idea of casuality. The simplest illustra- tion is from chemistry. If you want to get sulphuric acid you put together hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen in defi- nite proportions under definite laboratory conditions. The farmer does the same kind of things. If he wants a crop of potatoes he must put his seed potatoes into the right kind of soil and he must have the right kind of weather. The cook that makes a pudding and the statesman that brings about some social reform use the same method. They all put certain things together and then something happens. We assemble the conditions, which, when they can co-oper- ate, will generate a perfectly definite product. This is the operation of casuality. Things behave in typical ways when brought into conjunction with other things under definite conditions. If they did not we could never know how to do anything; we could not know with any certainty how to build a fire or how to boil an egg. If anything whatever is to be brought about, it has got to be brought about in this way. Somebody must put together the natural forces that will do spontaneously the work to be done. What I call assembling the conditions is technique or method. The technique of progress, to use a rather grand phrase, must be of the same sort. It must be, in the first place, a technique of remedies. We must find out what group of conditions generates the present result, and then what variation in the conditions will alter the result as we wish to alter it. It is not faith in ancient wisdom nor in the myths of ancient po- etry that will keep us here. Our only resources are the casualities that nature puts at our disposal, and the only way to know what these are, is to look for them, to study nature, for there is nothing else that we can use. Science gives us the technique of self-reliance, and the spirit of pa- tiently studying the facts, in order to discover the techniques to which facts lend themselves, I venture to call the spirit of science. We might say that the typical behavior of substances is

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THI COLLEGE RECORD. has happened. It has oot happened all at once, bnt its effects upon the imagination have come rather suddenly. A big part of it goes by the name of the industrial revolution, tin ohange from hand Labor to power driven machinery. And that is bringing a social revolution. We may like it or uot, we may apprehend the violence of anarchy, we may forsee the peaci i'ul evolution of new social arrangements, but we have got to make the best of it, and it will be well for us to make the best of it and not the worst. I think we are goiug to make the best of it. What is at the bottom of the industrial revolution? It is not poetry, or art, or religion. It is not anything that we owe in any great measure to the centuries before the nineteenth. It is a new thing ; it is science. To call this a scientific age is of course to commit an ob- vious platitude. Those who do not like science, and many that do like it, lament that the age has gone daft on science and cannot produce good art or good poetry. That is open to discussion, but it is true to a considerable extent, and it cannot be helped all at once. When the best ability of the day is attracted into industry and science other lines are bound to suffer. But all that belongs to another chapter. To say that science is a new thing, and that we have it in a stupendous measure is to say that our generation knows incomparably more facts than did the men who lived before 1850. I am not sure that we know any more about human values, about love, loyalty, courage and things like that. But we are getting a new point of view, and that is the great thing. It is the point of view of progress, not progress back to the civilization of Athens, but progress forward to, — well, nobody can tell quite what, but progress to something differ- ent and something better, because we are going to make things different and better, because we don't stand forever the stupidities that mutilate society. At least we talk that way very ardently and very nobly, and we think we are say- ing something. Yet if existing conditions are stupid, just what are the conditions that would be reasonable? No- body quite knows. That is however no reason why we

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THE COLLEGE RECORD. man's greatest asset. Another asset, equally important from the point of view of progress, is the plasticity and instabili- ty oi human habits and human institutions. Technique can- not generate progress unless society is a plastic affair. And when we get tlms Ear, we feel, if we have imagination enough, that we belong to a social organism that lives on and on, and ought to live better and better, but is just as capable of living worse. It is not stability, but instability, that gives opportunity to initiative and imagination and to the effective use of knowledge and wisdom. That is, of course, all obvious enough. The different languages have their maxims on the mutability of human affairs. All parents tremble at the plasticity of their chil- dren. Yet mutability has rather pessimistic associations. That shows how we are getting away from old habits of mind. I say this is all obvious enough, yet the willingness to remember it in our serious philosophy is something new. The discovery that plasticity and instability make the only basis for that large imaginative outlook that is inspired by the idea of progress is a new discovery. The modern spirit stands in the strongest contrast to what we may call the reminiscent habit of mind. It scoffs at tra- dition often too easily and too gayly. A critic of it might say that it is just as deferential to its own authority as is any other spirit, however antiquated. But the authority of the facts is a new authority, and that makes all the differ- ence. And what are the facts, and how shall we make them serve wise ends, and what are the ends they ought to serve ? Well, we are just trying to find out. That is what gives to the modern spirit its quality of adventure and its method of experiment. In the words of one of the Harvard philoso- phers that I am always glad to quote, it is a point of view, that looks to science for its view of the facts and to the happiness o f men on earth for its ideal. How does all this bear on the business of education ? Again I can say only that we are trying to find out, to make young men and women acquainted with the modern spirit, to help them to catch its enthusiasm and to respond to the contagion of its ideals is to vitalize whatever courses of