A PURPOSE FOR PROGRESS
One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is Power!” Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology (religion) and art rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes. Our progress in science and technique has involved some tincture of evil with good. Our comforts and conveniences may have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber. We have immensely developed our means of locomotion, but some of us use them to facilitate crime and to kill our fellow men or ourselves. We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand…
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