Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Popular Science Monthly

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us to control it wisely rather than to destroy it ruthlessly. Even were I able to do so, I should in no degree belittle the achievements of the physical sciences and their technologies, for I believe whole-heartedly in their value, and long for the steady increase of our power to control our environment. But when these achievements are offered as means of creating or maintaining certain desired conditions of individual and social life, I must insist that other knowledge is essential--nay, more essential--than that of the physicist or chemist. Knowledge, namely, of life itself. Most briefly, the situation may thus be described. In peace and in war there are two large, complex and intricate groups of facts to be dealt with by those who seek the welfare of man. The one group comprises the phenomena of physical nature as the condition of life--environment; the other is constituted by the phenomena of life and the relations of lives. Those who sincerely believe in preparedness for war as a preventive measure, misconceive and attempt to misuse the emotion of fear and its modes of expression. It is as though we should strive tirelessly to develop machinery and methods for educating our children, the while ignorant of the laws of child development and branding as of no practical importance the fundamentals of human nature. To nations no more than to individuals is it given to live by fear alone. By it a nation may become dominant, and diversity of body, mind, and ideals be eradicated. To base our civilization upon fear entails uniformity, monotony of life; the sacrifice of peoples for the unduly exalted traits and national ideals of a single homogeneous social group--a single all-powerful nation. Knowledge of life, and the sympathy for one's fellow men which springs from it, must control the world if nations are to live in peaceful and mutually helpful relations. If life, whether of the individual or of the social group, is to be controlled, it must be through intimate knowledge of life, not through knowledge of something else. The world must be ruled by sympathy, based upon understanding, insight, appreciation. This is my prophecy, this my faith and my present thesis. Material as contrasted with purely intellectual or spiritual progress is the pride of our time. We worship technology as reared upon physics and chemistry. But what is our gain, in this progress, so long as we continue to use one another as targets? Would it not be wiser, more far-sighted, more humane, more favorable to the development of universal peace and brotherhood, to give a large share of our time and substance to the search for the secrets of life? As compared with the physical sciences, the biological departments of inquiry are, in general, backward and ill-supported. Why? Because their tremendous importance is not generally recognized, and, still more, because the control of inanimate nature as promised by physical discovery and its applications appeals irresistibly both to our imagination and to our greed. We long for peace--because we are afraid of war--we long for the perfecting of individual and social life, but much more intensely and effectively we long for wealth, power and pleasure. What I have already said and now repeat in other words is that if we really desired above anything attainable on earth the lasting peace of nations, we should diligently foster and tirelessly pursue the sciences of life and seek to perfect and exalt the varied arts and technologies which should be based upon them. Experimental zoology and genetics; physiology and hygiene; genetic psychology and education; anthropology and ethnology; sociology and economics, would be held in as high esteem and as ardently furthered as are the various physical sciences and their technologies. Does it not seem reasonable to claim that human behavior may be intelligently controlled or directed only in the light of intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the organism, its processes, and its relations to its environment? If this be true, how pitiably, how shamefully, inadequate is our knowledge even of ourselves! How few are those who have a sound, although meager, knowledge of the laws of heredity, of the primary facts of human physiology, of the principles of hygiene, of the chief facts and laws of mental life, including the fundamental emotions and their corresponding instinctive modes of action, the modifiability or educability of the individual and the important relations of varied sorts of experience and conduct, the laws of habit, the nature and role of the sentiments, the unnumbered varieties of memory and ideation, the chief facts of social life and their relations to individual experience and behavior. Not one person in a thousand has a knowledge of life and its conditions equal in adequacy for practical demands to his knowledge of those aspects of physical nature with which he is concerned in earning a livelihood. Even those of us who have dedicated our lives to the study of life are humble before our ignorance. But with a faith which can not be shaken, because we have seen visions and dreamed dreams, we insist that the knowledge which we seek and daily find is absolutely essential for the perfecting of educational methods; for the development of effective systems of bodily and mental hygiene; for the discovery, fostering and maintenance of increasingly profitable social relations and organizations. In a word, we believe that biology, of all sciences, can and must lead us in the path of social as contrasted with merely material progress; can and ultimately will so alter the relations of nations that war shall be as impossible as is peace to-day. Fortunately the biologist may depend, in his efforts to further the study of all aspects of life, not upon faith and hope alone, but also upon works, for already physiology and psychology have transformed our educational practices; and the medical sciences given us a great and steadily increasing measure of control over disease. At least two men, as different in intellectual equipment, habits of mind, and methods of inquiry as well could be, the one an American, the other an Englishman, have heralded the broadly comparative and genetic study of mind and behavior--let us call it Genetic Psychology--as the promise of a new era for

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