. Inventories, collections of isolated
data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient
sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena,
were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of
master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any
rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil
of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no
fanfare of trumpets.

First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then
protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage
as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing
them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really
totally inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like
coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no
sustained vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the
shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers
and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized
in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this
futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd
weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands
and dangers of public life.

But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery
of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for
industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most
marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not
the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations
at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were
raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science
acquired prestige.

Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the
overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the
factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par
excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors
of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the
conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of
the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the
inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into
the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville
show of the restless personal ambit