Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/253

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TWENTIETH CENTURY SCIENCE PROBLEMS.
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and activity, on the one hand, and all expressions of them through muscular action as exhibited by motions and emotions.

There are many reasons for expecting most important disclosures from this direction, which may make needful many changes in common beliefs in educational theories and efforts, of responsibility in crime and the proper management of defectives of all sorts. It is not unlikely as great changes as took place during the last century in the beliefs on many important subjects will be required for the work of the twentieth century.

So far I have been speaking of science as related knowledge. Knowledge of such a kind as to react upon our opinions of men, of institutions, society, and the universe as a whole, but science is more popularly conceived as improved ways of doing things, of new products and new possibilities in life, of the arts as managed for economy of effort, enhancing comfort and removing the stress of living. These, however, are not science, but the products of science, and every one is properly concerned to know what changes are likely to come from such a source. The mechanic arts of the last century worked a wonderful change in the modes of living, in the variety and kinds of wants. If we could be deprived suddenly of all save such things as could be had a hundred years ago, we should all be made as miserable as one can think, yet those who lived a hundred years ago were no more miserable than we are. They got as much out of their lives as we do out of ours, and never suffered from thinking they did not have railways, telegraphs, telephones, steamships, automobiles and weather forecasts. These things could never be missed as no one had ever had them, and perhaps most people would have thought a prophet of them to be a romancer.

Many lessons have been drawn from history with the expectation that we may the better order our lives. How many historians there have been, and how few are those whose interpretations have not been wrong! One may recall that squib by Bishop Stubbs, of Oxford, whose, contempt for Froude was profound. Canon Kingsley had resigned the chair of history at the university, assigning as reason that what had been understood to be history was unfounded.

While Froude instructs the Scottish youth
That parsons never tell the truth,
The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries
That history is a pack of lies.

These strange results who shall combine?
One plain reflection solves the mystery,
That Froude thinks Kingsley a divine
While Kingsley goes to Froude for history.

One might once fairly have inferred that leisure was what all man-