they make upon men to become less
egotistical and isolated. The main difference of modern scientific
research from that of the middle ages, the secret of its immense
successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every
fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships
explained. In a sense scientific research is a triumph over natural
instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive, that makes
a man keep knowledge to himself and use it slyly to his own advantage.
The training of a scientific man is a training in what an illiterate
lout would despise as a weakness; it is a training in blabbing, in
blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible and as
soon as possible what it is he has found. To "keep shut" and
bright-eyed and to score advantages, that is the wisdom of the common
stuff of humanity still. To science it is a crime. The noble practice
of that noble profession medicine, for example, is to condemn as a
quack and a rascal every man who uses secret remedies. And it is one
of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human
possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three
centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and
for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of
knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out
by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon,
Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the
culminating peaks of a nearly limitless Oberland of devoted toiling
men, men one could list by the thousand. The rest have had the
smallest meed of fame, small reward, much toil, much abandonment, of
pleasure for their lot. One thing ennobles them all in common--their
conquest over the meanness of concealment, their systematic
application of energy to other than personal ends!

And that, too, Socialism pre-eminently demands. It applies to social
and economic relationships the same high rule of frankness and
veracity, the same subordination of purely personal considerations to
a common end that Science demands in the field of thought and
knowledge. Just as Science aims at a common organized body of
knowledge to which all its servants contribute and in which they
share, so Socialism insists upon its ideal of an organized social
order which every man serves and by which every man benefits. Their
common enemy is the secret-thinking, s