some undiscovered Newton, some unknown Pasteur-to set a new course for human advance.

Here lies the hope of the future. With such high-visioned and creative leadership we can conquer the most powerful creatures with which man has ever had to contend-creatures which he himself fashioned and set free: his own machines. Without such leadership, or with a timid, uninformed following behind it, all the gains of the mechanical age are illusory, and like the brontosaurs of the Triassic Period that developed a protective armour so heavy that they bogged themselves in the mud, man will be mired by the weight of his own inventions.

Chapter II

THE OLD SAVAGE AT THE HELM

"Men fear thought as they fear

nothing else on earth."

-BERTRAND RUSSELL.

IT WAS the war that brought all these questions to the front. We knew of course that physics and chemistry had given us a new heaven and a new earth, but it scarcely occurred to us that the whole thing might get out of control. For a generation our machine civilization had plunged along the track with little misgiving on the part of the passengers as to the safety of the route or the capacity of science as the engineer. And then suddenly the World War flashed the red light of a danger signal across the track, and ever since we have been asking anxious questions of each other, peering around the curves ahead to see what the difficulty might be. We have not stopped the engine, and science is still at the throttle, and the pace is un

checked. But the passengers are uneasy, and apprehension is beginning to spread that the train may not really be under control.

Stated in more accurate terms, the question that confronts our generation is whether or not our shifting physical environment has outrun our capacity for adaptation. Is human society being gorged with innovations too great for its powers of assimilation? Are there limits to our ability to absorb alteration and change? If the pace were not so swift, if history were moving with more deliberate steps, biology would have a ready answer to these questions. There is no fixed status for any environment, and the survival of any organism depends upon its inherent capacity to adapt itself to shifting conditions. But we are living in an age in which overwhelming transformations of environment are taking place overnight. It is not the fact of change; it is the rate of change that constitutes the danger. The overrapid alteration of artificial environment may annihilate mankind no less certainly than the overrapid modification of natural environment wiped out the sabre-toothed tiger and the mastodon.

If the advance in the last three generations had been more symmetrical, the quandary in which

mankind is now placed would not be so marked. But the progress has been almost exclusively along the line of the natural sciences. Physics, chemistry, and biology are the triple kings before whose thrones we worship, the three wise men out of the East whose gifts we eagerly accept. The social sciences, on the other hand, have advanced scarcely at all. In the knowledge of man, of his natural equipment and impulses, of his relations to his fellow man, and of the regulation of human intercourse in the interests of harmony, we are still untouched by any Renaissance. As James Harvey Robinson points out, Aristotle's treatises on astronomy and physics, and his notions of "generation and decay" and of chemical processes, have long since gone by the board, but his politics and ethics are still revered.

It is this gap between the brilliant development of scientific knowledge on the one hand and the almost stationary position of our knowledge of man on the other that constitutes the danger. We have utilized our growing acquaintance with the laws of nature to harness new forces and transform the physical world about us, but the scientific study

of the human being, of the springs of his conduct, and of human relations has not been pushed with anything like the same eagerness and with little of the same technique. In spite of his new weapons and of his increased powers, man himself remains as he was and always has been-irrational, impulsive, emotional, inherently conservative to change, bound by customs and traditions which he will not analyze, the victim of age-old conventions and prejudices. Except for a certain urbanity, the good nature and good temper of the herd, modern man is probably not far removed from his paleolithic ancestors. Kept normally in control by the pressure of social institutions, he is easily tempted to throw off the restraint, and all that is cruel or credulous or destructive in his inheritance wells up like a fountain of wine to intoxicate him. The temporary absence of the police force of the city of Boston means pillage and rioting. The emotional outbreak of the Ku Klux Klan is accompanied by burnings and whippings. A great wave of passion sweeps the earth, and fifteen million of our young men are slain or maimed in a war in which one atrocity marches upon the heels of another and all that is base and brutal in mankind is glorified and sanctified.