The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

8. SCIENCE In a large degree Buckle was right: we progress only in knowledge, and these other gifts are rooted in the slow enlightenment of the mind. Here in the untitled nobility of research, and the silent battles of the laboratory, is a story fit to balance the chicanery of politics and the futile barbarism of war. Here man is at his best, and through darkness and persecution mounts steadily toward the light. Behold him standing on a little planet, measuring, weighing, analyzing constellations that he cannot see; predicting the vicissitudes of earth and sun and moon; and witnessing the birth and death of worlds. Or here is a seemingly unpractical mathematician tracking new formulas through laborious labyrinths, clearing the way for an endless chain of inventions that will multiply the power of his race. Here is a bridge: a hundred thousand tons of iron suspended from four ropes of steel flung bravely from shore to shore, and bearing the passage of countless men; this is poetry as eloquent as Shakespeare ever wrote. Or consider this citylike building that mounts boldly into the sky, guarded against every strain by the courage of our calculations, and shining like diamond-studded granite in the night. Here in physics are new dimensions, new elements, new atoms, and new powers. Here in the rocks is the autobiography of life. Here in the laboratories biology prepares to transform the organic world as physics transformed matter. Everywhere you come upon them studying, these unpretentious, unrewarded men; you hardly understand where their devotion finds its source and nourishment; they will die before the trees they plant will bear fruit for mankind. But they go on.

Yes, it is true that this victory of man over matter has not yet been matched with any kindred victory of man over himself. The argument for progress falters here again. Psychology has hardly begun to comprehend, much less to control, human conduct and desire; it is mingled with mysticism and metaphysics, with psychoanalysis, behaviorism, glandular mythology, and other diseases of adolescence (careful and modified statements are made only by psychologists of whom no one ever hears; in our country the democratic passion for extreme statements turns every science into a fad). But psychology will outlive these ills and storms; it will be matured, like older sciences, by the responsibilities which it undertakes. If another Bacon should come to map out its territory, clarify the proper methods and objectives of its attack, and point out the “fruits and powers” to be won, which of us—knowing the surprises of history and the pertinacity of men—would dare set limits to the achievements that may come from our growing knowledge of the mind? Already in our day man is turning round from his remade environment, and beginning to remake himself.

9. EDUCATION More and more completely we pass on to the next generation the gathered experience of the past. It is almost a contemporary innovation, this tremendous expenditure of wealth and labor in the equipment of schools and the provision of instruction for all; perhaps it is the most significant feature of our time. Once colleges were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure class; today universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a Ph.D. We have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history. Think now not of Plato and Aristotle, but of the stupid, bigoted, and brutal Athenian Assembly, of the unfranchised mob and its Orphic rites, of the secluded and enslaved women who could acquire education only by becoming courtesans.