aw, the less threatening or capricious
seems the world in which we live. Where everything that
happens is part of a system, we do not need, like the savage
trembling in a thunderstorm, to be frightened at what will
happen next. It is like moving in familiar surroundings
among familiar people. Not all that goes on may be pleasant,
but we can within limits predict what will happen, and are
not puzzled and pained by continuous shocks and surprises.
We like order in the places in which we live, in our homes, in
our cities, in the universe.

The sciences satisfy us not only in that they bring order
into what at first seems the chaos of our surroundings, but in
that they are themselves beautiful in their spaciousness and
their simplicity. We cannot pause here to consider the
physiological facts which make us admire symmetry, but it is
fundamental in our appreciation of music, poetry, and the
plastic arts. From the sciences, likewise, we derive the
satisfaction of symmetry on a magnificent scale. There is beauty
as of a great symphony in the sweep and movement of the
solar system. There is a quiet and infinite splendor about the
changeless and comparatively simple structure which physics,
in the broadest sense, reveals beneath the seeming multiplicity
and variety of things. It is a desire for beauty as well as
a thoroughgoing scientific passion which prompts men like
Poincare and Karl Pearson to seek for one law, one formula
which, like "one clear chord to reach the ears of God,"
expresses the whole universe.

THE PRACTICAL ASPECT OF SCIENCE. But while the origins of
science may lie in man's thirst for system, simplicity, and
beauty in the world, the tremendous advance of science has
a more immediate and practical cause. To understand the
laws of Nature means to have the power of prediction; it
means to know that, given certain circumstances, certain
others follow always and inevitably; it means to discover
causes--and their effects. Man having attained through
patient inquiry this capacity to tell in advance, may take
advantage of it for his own good. The whole of modern
industry with its phenomenal control of natural powers and
resources is testimony to the use which man has found for
the facts and laws which he would never have found out
save for the curiosity which was his endowment and the
inquiry which he made his habit. "Knowledge is power,"
said Francis Bacon, and the three hundred years of science
that have ma