mutual
action and reaction between science and practice. The social movement
has stimulated the development of abstract science, and the new progress
in science has enabled further advances to be made in social practice.
The era of expansion in sanitation was the era of development in
chemistry and physics, which alone enabled a sound system of sanitation
to be developed. The fight against disease would have been impossible
but for bacteriology. The new care for human life, and for the
protection of its source, is associated with fresh developments of
biological science. Sociological observations and speculation, including
economics, are intimately connected with the efforts of social reform to
attain a broad, sound, and truly democratic basis.[6]

When we survey this movement as a whole, we have to recognize that it is
exclusively concerned with the improvement of the conditions of life. It
makes no attempt to influence either the quantity or the quality of
life.[7] It may sometimes have been carried out with the assumption that
to improve the conditions of life is, in some way or other, to improve
the quality of life itself. But it accepted the stream of life as it
found it, and while working to cleanse the banks of the stream it made
no attempt to purify the stream itself.

It must, however, be remembered that the arguments which, especially
nowadays, are brought against the social reform of the condition of
life, will not bear serious examination. It is said, for instance, or at
all events implied, that we need bestow very little care on the
conditions of life because such care can have no permanently beneficial
effect on the race, since acquired characters, for the most part, are
not transmitted to descendants. But to assume that social reform is
unnecessary because it is not inherited is altogether absurd. The people
who make this assumption would certainly not argue that it is useless
for them to satisfy their own hunger and thirst, because their children
will not thereby be safeguarded from experiencing hunger and thirst. Yet
the needs which the movement of organized social reform seeks to satisfy
are precisely on a level with, and indeed to some extent identical with,
the needs of hunger and thirst. The impulse and the duty which move
every civilized community to elaborate and gratify its own social needs
to the utmost are altogether independent of the race, and would not
cease to exist even in a community vo