SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 549
it is true, being displayed throughout the civilized world at present, owing to the crucial part which his labors play in the organized destruc- tion of life and property which is the chief preoccupation of civilized peoples at this date. Good resolutions are being actively formed in Great Britain, America, Canada and Australia, resolutions which jSnd expression in governmental plans for the future administration of scientific research. The education and training of the professional politician is, however, so purely legal, commercial and, in rare instances, literary, that it is not a matter for surprise that the various schemes for the furtherance of research which have thus amiably been put for- ward betray little comprehension of the real needs and potentialities of the investigator and little or no grasp of his true significance in world politics. Indeed the various plans which have been proposed will, if they materialize, carry with them very real dangers to true research and were the investigator as stridently vocal as the politician, I think it not unlikely that in many quarters at the present juncture earnest appeals might be heard from the scientific investigator to be saved from his friends and to be favored once more with the obscurity to which, like certain fish which dwell in caves, he has become by habitude adapted.
The various plans to which I have made allusion all bear indeed the unmistakable stamp of the mental bias of the political administrator. They unite in assuming that any given problem can be solved provided only the requisite number of persons, duly provided with diplomas, be paid to investigate it under the supervision of course of the omniscient administrator, who, in some of the plans I have instanced, is not even required himself to take part in the labors of his employees. Such tactics are well known to succeed in the production of public buildings, and while it may well be doubted whether they ever produced a Milan Cathedral, stiU they have given rise to many imposing edifices and why not, therefore, to the halls and corridors of science ?
And then, of course, all of these plans unite in assuming that the public investment in science must be made to '^ pay.^* Now the author is far from taking the view of certain of his scientific colleagues that any association of commercial value with the products of research is inevitably accompanied by a degradation of ideals. The ultimate ob- ject of investigation lies in the attainment of complete control and understanding of our environment and only in so far as our environ- ment is subject to control does it become of value to us. The whole difference between the value of our world to-day and that of the world inhabited by neolithic man is, as I have sought to show in a previous article, the product of the labors of the investigator. But these labors, however inchoate and devoid of the inspiration of a broad predeter- mined policy, have nevertheless in the past been for the greater part the result of an enlightened and penetrating curiosity and have not as
�� �
