'It is a great honour,' he began, 'to come and address scientific workers (I have only recently discovered my claim to be a scientific worker),[Pg 152] and to describe to you what has turned out to be a scientific experiment. I hope to show the results of an experiment carried on, not in a scientific laboratory so-called—physical, chemical, biological, or anthropological—but in a school for boys.  
'Before doing that, I should like to say that we scientific workers do very much depend on having a number of us together. One scientific worker placed in charge of any great work finds it difficult; scientific workers do not get the chance of appointing men in sympathy with themselves often enough; so it is frequently said that scientific men placed in command of a factory in industry or a department of state at home or in the colonies fail. Well, if so, they fail because scientific men have not often got the opportunity of getting men of like sympathy to work with them. I take it that the object of the National union of Scientific Workers is to get scientific men with scientific views of life and experimental experience to join together in some great work. When I speak of the duty and service of science in the new era, I mean that I want scientific men to claim justly a larger share in the work of the world, and not to confine themselves to what is[Pg 153] called purely¹ scientific work. We want them to expand themselves over a wider area. As a matter of fact, that is what two distinguished² writers have suggested: that the time has come when the ordinary discoveries and inventions of science should be closed down in order to enable scientific minds to do this simple thing. Practically everything that exists now is the work of scientific men, their discoveries and their inventions. The whole world teems³ with the results of the work of science. The great machines we see used in industry—the industrial machine itself—have been created by men of science. Now, I put it to you that when motor cars came in, the nobility of the land found their coachmen of little use. The scientific machine requires scientific men to manage it. Our industrial life is imperfectly organised; all our troubles are due to the fact that we have a process created by science, but organised in the old way by men of a different outlook. The discoveries of science have rushed into the world a considerable amount of unexpected ability. Working men engaged in industrial pursuits have had their intelligence discovered and brought out, and it is one thing to control a mass of human[Pg 154] beings who are not thus inspired with the knowledge of their own possibilities, and another to control those who are. It is like trying to control a set of live molecules⁵. It is one thing to control a hard atom and another to control a live electron.
 
'So that the duty and service of science would seem to lie in scientific men bringing their ideal of life, their standards, their vision, their outlook, and their methods to organise⁴ the great machine that their inventions have created. You cannot have a world half scientific and the other half nothing of the sort.
 
'That is to say, scientific workers will have to consider the whole question, for instance, of economics. I heard yesterday a distinguished member of the Government saying that we cannot change economics. Of course, that is one thing scientific men have got to do, to change economics so that the system of our industry shall be recreated. The system of management by dual⁶ control of the master and the slave will not work when the slave becomes an alive, active, intelligent, anarchic being. He will not be governed by the rein⁷ but by a system which the magnet can influence. However, the last hundred years has[Pg 155] resulted in a race between the changed conditions that science has brought about and the organisation⁸ required to control them, in what has been called by Mr. Wells a race between education and catastrophe⁹. In scientific language, it has produced a serious stress because of the hurrying on of change of conditions and the lagging behind of the methods of controlling them. It is this stress, I think, which has broken up the system. You may even say that the war itself is no cause of anything, but a result of the purely automatic action of shearing¹⁰ forces, as when a testing machine breaks a metal bar.
 
'The end of the war has left us with a whole host of individuals set free, and the business before science men is to organise this new body. It is a big problem, and requires scientific thought, temperament¹¹, and outlook to rewrite practically the whole of our knowledge. It reminds me of the tremendous rush there was amongst scientific men to provide workers to overhaul¹² practically everything in biology (and theology) and other parts of human knowledge after the doctrines¹³ of Darwin were well established. I take it that all the departments of human life have to be rewritten [Pg 156]by men under the influence of the spirit of science. Our books have to be rewritten, our very dictionaries. I have often amused myself with the Oxford¹⁴ Dictionary, or found it necessary to send a boy to that authority for a definition, and it has pretty nearly always been false. Take such a simple case as the word "democracy." The Oxford Dictionary hasn't a thing to tell you about the meaning of "democracy" as we use it to-day. It tells you nothing of the living use of words. That is one of the terrible dangers of leaving our books in the hands of men who have not got that outlook which experiment in science brings to the individual. Consequently I say that the duty of scientific men is to scour¹⁵ the whole area of knowledge and rewrite it to bring out new standards, new values, by means of which labour and industry itself, in the first instance, can be reorganised (the schools first should be reorganised), and then you can extend it into the wider area of international affairs.
 
'They tell us that economics cannot change our human nature. That is the great duty and service of science—to change human nature. Scientific men have to collect a band of disciples¹⁶ and make[Pg 157] a new world. As far as I can gather, from a long connection with boys, the only scientific quality which is constant is inertia¹⁷ in response to change. The actual change itself, when it has arrived, no one objects to, and every one says, "Why didn't we do that before?" Scientific workers rarely have their opportunity in industry. To have their full opportunity they are to set forth¹⁸ in the spirit of the Great Master to found a new kingdom: not to manage industry by the standards and values of the present, but to transform them. And they must do what our Master Himself did—collect a faithful band of disciples imbued¹⁹ with the same belief. I know it is freely said (I have been corresponding with some of the leaders in industry) that scientific men cannot do this thing. They can, if only they are true to themselves and their vision; they can absolutely change the whole system under which industry is worked, and change the world to their ideals.
 
'"Come, and I will make you fishers of men...." The great work that lies before scientific workers to-day is to extend the area of their labours, to become not fishers of facts but fishers of men. There will always be a distinguished[Pg 158] band of purely scientific men devoted²⁰ to pure science, who will abide²¹ devoted to pure science; but with the present number trained in science, we claim them also to organise the machinery²² that science has created. They must leave their ships and nets and become fishers of men.... I dare-say even scientific workers know that is from the Bible. One of the greatest tragedies scientific men have allowed is for others to steal the Bible from them. The Old and New Testaments²³, with their record of progressive revelation, form the most scientific book ever seen. Yet scientific men have allowed a certain type of men to steal it from them. Bible stealing is an old thing, and one favourite method is to bind²⁴ it in morocco and to put it on a top shelf....
 
'But I must return to my scientific business. When I was at Cambridge I was not regarded as scientific. I was amongst those who took mathematics, and those who took mathematics and classics were respectable and had to attend chapel²⁵. But if you inclined at all towards science, or even ethics²⁶, you were not supposed to attend chapel....
 
'I said that I have recently discovered I am a[Pg 159] scientific worker, that I have been working a scientific experiment, though not of the kind accepted for report to the Royal Society. It has been worked by being headmaster of a school for thirty years and by having taught for forty years. When I became a headmaster I began by introducing engineering into the school—applied²⁷ science. The first effect was that a large number of boys who could not do other things could do that. They began to like their work in school. They began to like school. That led on to introducing a large number of other sciences, such as agricultural chemistry, horse-shoeing (if that is a science), metallurgical chemistry, bio-chemistry, agriculture; and, of course, these new sorts of work interested a large number of other boys of a type different from the type interested in the old work, so we got an exceptional number of boys, curiously²⁸ enough, unexpectedly liking²⁹ what they had to do in school. Then I ventured to do something daring; it is most daring to introduce the scientific method of finding out the truth—a dangerous thing—by the process of experiment and research. We began to replace explicit³⁰ teaching by finding out. We did this first with these newly [Pg 160]introduced sciences. Then we began to impress the aims and outlook of science on to other departments of school life. History, for instance: we began to replace the old class-room teaching and learning by a laboratory for history, full of books and other things required in abundance, so that boys in all parts of the school could, for some specific purpose (not to learn; to go into school to learn was egotistical), find out the things we required for to-day. We set them to find out things for the service of science, the service of literature, modern languages, music.
 
'This began to change the whole organisation of the school, its aims and methods. It was no use organising boys in forms by the ordinary methods of promotion³¹ for this sort of work. You have to make up your mind what you have to do, and then go about and collect anybody who would be of service to that particular work. You would require boys of one characteristic and boys of another. You make them up into teams for the particular work they have to do. The boys who do not fit into this or that particular work must have some other particular work found for them. You begin to design the work of the school for[Pg 161] them. You must have ............