Another line of work is that of invention, the application of the discoveries of science to human needs. It is the fashion to decry science of this sort as commercial, and to speak with scorn of the financial rewards which await those who are successful in its pursuit.
But I am glad that the Sigma Xi finds room for the creative engineer. In its last analysis the ultimate purpose of knowledge is the regulation of human conduct. The end of knowing is doing, and the justification of scientific research is that it makes life more comfortable, saner and richer. It is true that pure science must precede creation, but into some form of creative art all experimental science sooner or later finds its way. "We may then welcome the engineer as an inseparable companion in the domain of science, comrade in zeal, diverging in method, but loyal to fanaticism to the truth he can touch and feel.
Highest of all lines of scientific work, most difficult of all, and withal most susceptible of degeneration, is the study of causes and relations. This work is closely connected with all other forms of research; for every fact observed points us to the consideration of its cause.
Each fact must be the resultant of some adequate force. 'The globe is transparent law, not a mass of facts.' So Emerson tells us. Law is the expression of the relation of cause and effect. Nothing would be as it is, could it by any possibility have been something else. Nothing is variable in the universe save the wayward human will, and that only because its stimuli and reactions are too finely balanced to be measured by our instruments of precision.
Each peculiarity of structure, each character or quality of individual or species, has a meaning or a cause. It is the work of the investigator to find this meaning as well as to record the fact. "One of the noblest lessons left to the world by Darwin," Frank Cramer says, "is this, which to him amounted to a profound, almost religious, conviction, that every fact in nature, no matter how insignificant, every stripe of color, every tint of flowers, the length of an orchid's nectary, unusual height in a plant, all the infinite variety of apparently insignificant things, is full of significance." For him it was an historical record, the revelation of a cause, the lurking place of a principle.
For this reason, every line of work leads back to a causal interpretation. Every fact clamors for it. This is the strongest impulse which urges the devotee of science, the comrade in zeal, and his only danger is that he respond to these calls prematurely. The ultimate end of scientific research is found in prophecy, not in proclamations of the mystic order, but in such mastery of the solid ground of the present that we can tread with firm step on the solid ground of the future, 'the action of existing causes.' This interprets all that has been; foretells all that is to be. The value of all facts is found in their relation to such interpretation and such prophecy. It is the function of prophecy, as Dr. Wilhelm Ostwald has shown, which distinguishes the
