The great advance of electrical
science in the last generation was closely associated, as effect
and as cause, with application of electric agencies to means of
communication, transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and
more economical production of goods. These are social ends,
moreover, and if they are too closely associated with notions of
private profit, it is not because of anything in them, but
because they have been deflected to private uses: -- a fact which
puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their
connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public
scientific and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew
out of processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in
recent times has found innumerable new uses in industry.
Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however,
means literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in
counting to keep track of things and in measuring is even more
important to-day than in the times when it was invented for these
purposes. Such considerations (which could be duplicated in the
history of any science) are not arguments for a recapitulation of
the history of the race or for dwelling long in the early rule of
thumb stage. But they indicate the possibilities--greater to-day
than ever before -- of using active occupations as opportunities
for scientific study. The opportunities are just as great on the
social side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity
in its past or in its future.
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