And why?—Because science to-day exists only for a handful of privileged persons, because social inequality, which divides society into two classes—the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital—renders all its teachings as to the conditions of a rational existence only the bitterest irony to nine-tenths of mankind.
I could give plenty more examples, but I stop short; only go outside Faust's closet, whose windows, darkened by dust, scarce let the light of heaven glimmer on its shelves full of books; look round, and at each step you will find fresh proof in support of this view.
At the present moment we no longer need to accumulate scientific truths and discoveries. The most important is to spread the truths already acquired, to practice them in daily life, to make of them a common inheritance. We have to order things in such wise that all humanity may be capable of assimilating and applying them, so that science ceasing to be a luxury becomes the basis of every-day life. Justice requires this.
Furthermore, the very interests of science require it. Science only makes real progress when its truths find environments ready prepared for their reception. The theory of the mechanical origin of heat, though enunciated in the last century in the same terms that Harn and Clausius formulate it to-day, remained for eighty years buried in the Academical Records until such knowledge of physics had spread widely enough to create a public capable of accepting it. Three generations had to go before the ideas of Erasmus Darwin on the variation of species could be favourably received from his grandson and admitted by academical philosophers, and not without pressure from public opinion even then. The philosopher, like the poet or artist, is always the product of the society in which he moves and teaches.
But if you are imbued with these ideas, you will understand that it is above all important to bring about a radical change in this state of affairs which to-day condemns the philosopher to be crammed with scientific truths, and almost the whole of the rest of human beings to remain what they were five or ten centuries ago, that is to say, in the state of slaves and machines, incapable of mastering established truths. And the day when you are imbued with wide, deep, humane, and profoundly scientific truth, that day will you lose your taste for pure science. You will set to work to find out the means to effect this transformation, and if you bring to your investigations the impartiality which has guided you in your scientific researches you will of necessity adopt the cause of Socialism; you will make an end of sophisms and you will come amongst us. Weary of working to procure pleasures for this small group, which already has a large share of them, you will place your information and devotion at the service of the oppressed.
And be sure that the feeling of duty accomplished and of a real accord established between your sentiments and your actions, you will then find powers in yourself of whose existence you never even dreamed. When too, one day—it is not far distant in any case, saving the presence of our professors—when one day, I say, the change for which you are working should have been brought about then, deriving new forces from collective scientific work, and from the powerful help of armies of labourers who will come to place their energies at its service, science
