his ever-growing powers extend.

Man's reason is thus, as philosophers have always taught, his special
characteristic, and takes the place for him, on a higher plane, of the
law of organic growth common to all living things. In this we join
hands, across two thousand years, with Aristotle: he would have
understood us and used almost identical language. But the content of the
words as we use them and their applications are immeasurably greater.

The content is the mass of knowledge which man's reason has accumulated
and partly put in order since Aristotle taught. It is now so great that
thoroughly to master a single branch is arduous labour for a lifetime
of concentrated toil, and at the end of it new discoveries will crowd
upon the worker and he will die with all his earlier notions crying for
revision. No case so patent, so conclusive, of the reality of human
unity and the paramount need of organization. The individual here can
only thrive and only be of service as a small member of a great whole,
one atom in a planet, one cell in a body. The demand which Comte raised
more than fifty years ago for another class of specialists, the
specialists in generalities, is now being taken up by men of science
themselves. But the field has now so much extended and is so much fuller
in every part, that it would seem that nothing less than a committee of
Aristotles could survey the whole. And even this is but one aspect of
the matter. Just as the genesis of science was in the daily needs of
men--the cultivators whose fields must be re-measured after the
flooding, the priests who had to fix the right hour for sacrifice--so
all through its history science has grown and in the future will grow
still more by following the suggestions of practice. It gathers strength
by contact with the world and life, and it should use its strength in
making the world more fit to live in. Thus our committee of scientific
philosophers needs to have constantly in touch with it not one but many
boards of scientific practitioners.

The past which has given us this most wonderful of all the fruits of
time, does not satisfy us equally as to the use that has been made of
it. Our crowded slums do not proclaim the glory of Watt and Stephenson
as the heavens remind us of Kepler and Newton. Selfishness has grown fat
on ill-paid labour, and jealous nations have sharpened their weapons
with every device that science can suggest. But a sober judgement, as
well as t