thing else, besides
positive conclusions, that results from a long devotion to science.
There is a certain attitude towards life, a certain sense of what is
important and what is not, a view of what one may call the commonplaces
of existence, that distinguishes, I think, all competent people who
have been trained in that discipline. For we do think about politics,
or rather about society, even we specialists. And between us we are
gradually developing a sort of body of first principles which will be
at the basis of any future sociology. It is these that I feel tempted
to try to indicate. And the more so, because they are so foreign to
much that has been spoken here to-night. I have had a kind of feeling,
to tell the truth, throughout this whole discussion, of dwelling among
the tombs and listening to the voices of the dead. And I feel a kind
of need to speak for the living, for the new generation with which I
believe I am in touch. I want to say how the problems you have raised
look to us, who live in the dry light of physical science.

"Let me say, then, to begin with, that for us the nineteenth century
marks a breach with the whole past of the world to which there is
nothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly new
powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude
to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam
and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But
the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that
has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some
first rough expression to it.

"The first constituent, then, of the new view is that of continuity.
We of the new generation realize that the present is a mere transition
from the past into the future; that no event and no moment is isolated;
that all things, successive as well as coincident, are bound in a
single system. Of this system the general formula is causation. But,
in human society, the specifically important case of it is the nexus of
successive generations. We do not now, we who reflect, regard man as
an individual, nor even as one of a body of contemporaries; we regard
him as primarily a son and a father. In other words, what we have in
mind is always the race: whereas hitherto the central point has been
the individual or the citizen. But this shifting in the point of view
implies a revolution in ethics and politics. Wi