the destroyer can look with still greater pride on
the power which science has given him to sweep away lives and to work
desolation and ruin; while the one has slowly been learning to save units,
the other has quickly learned to slay thousands. But, happily, the very
greatness of the modern power of destruction is already becoming a bar to
its use, and bids fair--may we hope before long--wholly to put an end to
it; in the words of Tacitus, though in another sense, the very
preparations for war, through the character which science gives them, make
for peace.
Moreover, not in one branch of science only, but in all, there is a deep
undercurrent of influence sapping the very foundations of all war. As I
have already urged, no feature of scientific inquiry is more marked than
the dependence of each step forward on other steps which have been made
before. The man of science cannot sit by himself in his own cave, weaving
out results by his own efforts, unaided by others, heedless of what others
have done and are doing. He is but a bit of a great system, a joint in a
great machine, and he can only work aright when he is in due touch with
his fellow workers. If his labor is to be what it ought to be, and is to
have the weight which it ought to have, he must know what is being done,
not by himself, but by others, and by others not of his own land and
speaking his tongue only, but also of other lands and of other speech.
Hence it comes about that to the man of science the barriers of manners
and of speech which pen men into nations become more and more unreal and
indistinct. He recognizes his fellow worker, wherever he may live, and
whatever tongue he may speak, as one who is pushing forward shoulder to
shoulder with him toward a common goal, as one whom he is helping and who
is helping him. The touch of science makes the whole world kin.
The history of the past gives us many examples of this brotherhood of
science. In the revival of learning throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and some way on into the eighteenth century, the
common use of the Latin tongue made intercourse easy. In some respects, in
those earlier days science was more cosmopolitan than it afterwards
became. In spite of the difficulties and hardships of travel, the men of
science of different lands again and again met each other face to face,
heard with their ears, and saw with their eyes, what their brethren had to
say or show. The Englishman too
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