deeper into the sandy bottom. All along the bank grew willows in abundance. The engineer saw the willow branches cut, woven into great mattresses, and then loaded with stones and sunk, one after another along the course of the stream, layer upon layer, until willow twigs and stems, intermixed with sand deposited by the water extended from the bottom of the stream to the surface, forming a supplemental bank between which the contracted stream moved rapidly, cutting its way downward and giving the desired channel. The plan is not complicated and the completed work seems simple enough. But without the inspiring genius of the engineer, the Mississippi might today be rolling its slow, shallow and wide-reaching way.

The qualities which necessarily enter into our picture of the ideal engineer are in fact the elements of greatness. They are the outgrowth of natures which are large and sympathetic, and no one can possess them who confines his views and his interests to the narrow limits of his own personal affairs.

In thus urging upon you, the students of engineering of the University of Illinois, the importance of a well-rounded development, I proclaim no new doctrine, nor am I likely to find any who will disagree with me in the general propositions which have been set forth. But it will be said that the problem defined is practical rather than theoretical. In the minds of many students it at once resolves itself into a question of time. In such an institution as this, the pressure of technical work is necessarily heavy, and the student who would do other things, has need to study well the methods by which he proceeds. As the professional engineer brings the working of a machine to its highest performance by the careful adjustment of each of its parts, so the student-engineer must by proving his methods and by the omission of all trifles, find time in which to give attention to these necessary matters.

Finally, the wise student will never permit his routine to become a burden. The work must not be a taskmaster; he must be the master, for there can be no interest, no enthusiasm without mastery, and it is these, the interest and the enthusiasm, which must be depended upon to transform tasks which are difficult into opportunities to be enjoyed.

ASSEMBLY OF THE COLLEGE OF SCIENCE
PHYSICS LECTURE ROOM, 9:00 A.M.

THE SCIENTIFIC AND THE NON-SCIENTIFIC

THOMAS C. CHAMBERLIN, PH.D., LL.D.
Professor in the University of Chicago

This is to be a sermon; and my text is this: Let everyone stand on his own feet, and let everyone keep his feet on the ground. This text is not canonical and its verse and chapter cannot be cited, but it may be found embodied in every ideal contribution to true scientific education. Two fundamental canons control educational endeavor in the scientific field, independence in the worker, and reality in the subjectmatter. To teach the student to think for himself, to develop in him the power of independent inquiry, whether it be original investigation, or the more common inquiries of life, is the ideal of the modern science teacher. To prepare youth to be intellectual freemen, in contradistinction to mere followers or servile imitators, is the mission of scientific education. Authority indeed plays an appropriate part in scientific work, but chiefly as an authentication of determined facts, and only guardedly in the promotion of opinions and doctrines. A survey of the past reveals the significant fact that the influence of authority was most dominant in those stages of intellectual development when the grounds for safe conclusions were feeblest. A survey of the present reveals the fact that authority is still appealed to most. where good reasons and sound evidence are most lacking. One need not go farther afield for an illustration than the pages he reads whose forms are taught on authority because they cannot well be taught through reason. It is not too much to affirm that the decadence of authority and the rise of appeal to individual and independent reason have been directly proportionate to the amount of good evidence that could be commanded. True scientific education is leading on felicitously to individual and independent intellectual action, because science has an adequate body of irrefragible evidence to offer, and having such evidence can most freely leave everyone to draw his own conclusions. Under the wholesome influence of scientific education, the rising generation is coming to fulfil more and more effectually the first admonition of our text: Let everyone stand on his own feet. The preacher need only exhort to a continuance in well-doing.

The burden of our sermon rests on the second part of the text: Let everyone keep his feet on the ground. I would not have you put too literal and too narrow an interpretation on this injunction. It is not intended to mean that a man must always stand with both heels on the solid rock of demonstrated facts. That is too conservative,

and would prevent his getting on. It is lawful for a man to stride after truth, to tiptoe for it, and even to leap after it. If he can keep his balance well, and light safely on his feet, it is permissible to leap high and far. It is lawful to take as long philosophical or speculative flights as one may be able to sustain, provided he starts from the ground and returns to it without disaster. The admonition is not that we should limit our studies wholly to the demonstrated conclusions that form strict science, as distinguished from tentative endeavors to attain science, but that we should keep in touch with realities in our efforts to find truth. In our use of the term scientific, in this preachment, we include not only strict science but all properly ordered stages and processes of thought that lead toward science, even. though merely provisional and temporary, if controlled by scientific. canons. It includes scientific philosophy and scientific speculation when these start from scientific facts and properly strive to end in scientific demonstrations. The admonition is not intended to limit the range of processes so much as their character. We have need of every possible resource that helps on toward real science. We wish only to exclude from the scientific category those methods which do not conform to the canons of scientific endeavor, those that are not helpful to scientific results, those that are liable to create confusion as to what is scientific and those that are sure to involve wastage of talent and effort. We shall be more free to use hypotheses and speculations controlled by the canons of scientific procedure, if they are not confounded with hypotheses and speculations that ignore such canons. and cast the shadow of their untrustworthiness over the whole field of hypothesis and speculation. There are hypotheses and speculations that as scrupulously scrutinize the grounds on which they are built as does science itself. These are ever and always mindful of their hypothetical bases and of the scantiness of solid substance on which they are built. They are ever mindful of the insecurities of the heights to which they are reaching, and of the accumulating peril of that insecurity as the extension proceeds.

These stand in sharp contrast to hypotheses and speculations which are negligent of the ground on which they are built. They stand in especial contrast to those which confessedly assume that, regardless of a foundation in embodied reality, the building of the mental structure may go on indefinitely by virtue of its own logical relations, and may even become a substantial system of truth, whether the ground-proposition be a fact or a fancy. These we would have labeled by some other term than scientific, since their methods are at variance with those that have been found indispensable in the production of science in the fields where tangible demonstrations most effectually discriminate between that which is true and that which is not. Such hypotheses overlook the fact that every logical step only

extends the weakness of the fundamental postulate and that the more rigorously consistent the successive steps are, the more certainly do they retain the error of the primary assumption. These are cases in which a logical slip affords some little opportunity for the fundamental error to slip out.

Science has acquired title to its name and has earned the equity of its usage and good will by long continued labors and sacrifices of a distinctive kind. The canons of method and of ethics that have controlled these labors and sacrifices have given a distinctive character to the products commonly known as science, and these have acquired value because they have approved themselves in experience. Similar value, so far as we know, can only be produced by similar processes. It is therefore not only right but important to us and to mankind that the title thus earned should be applied exclusively to the processes and products that have given it value. It is not at all a matter of etymology or of sometime usage; it is a matter of rights and values earned by labor. Nor it is at all a matter of subject, within the range of embodied realities, whether the subject be mental or physical. Nor does it necessarily involve the presumption that the non-scientific is without value, even eminent value. It merely involves the assumption that each belongs to its own category, is entitled to its own name derived from its distinctive modes and processes, and that the product of the distinctive labors of each should be its own possession. The essential canons of scientific procedure are:

(1) Certain assumptions are necessarily made at the outset, as the basis of scientific procedure. They are usually quite unconscious because they are so pervasive and organic that they have become essentially instinctive. They deserve to be brought into sharper recognition. They are not different from the universal assumptions of all sane people in the common affairs of life. They appear to be ancestral inheritances, and this is doubtless why they have so nearly lapsed into unconsciousness. They are an essential element in what we call common sense; indeed I think some one has said that science is only a specially selected and carefully assorted variety of sanctified common sense. But in the course of their ratiocinations men often come about to propositions not in harmony with these and fail to note the incongruity because the basal assumptions are so nearly unconscious. Scientific inquiry, though eminently skeptical in its methods, proceeds on the assumption that the system in which we live is genuine, honest and real. It assumes that there really is, as our senses lead to us believe, a physical world and a mental world; that the mental world takes genuine cognizance of the physical world and of itself, and that such cognizance, when duly tested and rectified, constitutes the basis of science. It is assumed that the mental world possesses not only the power of true cognizance but the power of self

directed search for truth, and as a necessary means to this, has the power to choose between alternatives, to control conditions, to invent methods, to put its impressions to the test, and to discriminate between what is true and what is false. That which is in accord with rectified experience is accepted as the material of science. Such accord is indeed the best definition of science. These sound like platitudes, as indeed they are to us, but not a little that claims a place under the broad mantle of the term scientific is negligent of these basal assumptions. It is well therefore to remind ourselves that as the very basis of research, we assume a genuine volition with a working degree of freedom, not a mere sophistical succession of highest-motive sequences; a genuine intelligence with powers of discrimination between truth. and error, not a mere predetermined succession of compulsory impressions, and a genuine world of real existences, not a mere complexity of subjective illusions. I am not speaking here the ultimate truth about these matters, but simply what seems to me the assumptions actually made. Our belief in the honesty of the system of which we find ourselves members compasses the genuineness of our strongest organic impressions on both the mental and the physical side. In the normal state, we recognize no organic illusiveness, nor any Mephistophelian deceptiveness. We plant our feet squarely on the postulate that the system of the world is essentially what it purports to be. It is admitted erroneous impressions may be gained both in respect to the mental and the physcial, and these constitute the antitheses of science, and are made the subjects of the closest watch, but they are held to be incidental, and not organic or fundamental. They grow most largely out of the fact that our organism is incapable of receiving impressions from more than a minute fraction of the activities by which it is surrounded, and hence it has become adjusted to a select portion of possible impressions which chiefly include those most needed in common life; the susceptibility to those even is incomplete. It is difficult to see how it could well be otherwise. An organism that should do no more than take accurate cognizance of all the physical motions by which we are surrounded, from the complicated revolutions of the siderial system down to the immeasurably intense sub-atomic vibrations, would need powers of receptivity and endurance quite beyond our comprehension. We are limited to what we can stand. But when we shall have need to go below and beyond the selected range of impressions suited to everyday life, a multitude of mental shortcomings are inevitably disclosed. With the evolution of our organism we are endeavoring to extend our powers and to penetrate beyond the limited range of insight of our cruder life. There are indeed, incidentally, some real illusions, if the mind is not alert and skilful, and there are individual insanities. But all these, we assume, arise from limitations simply, not from insincerities in nature, nor from