invention or other cultural change were wholly undreamed of by the participants. Would a Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton not turn in their graves if they could be made to realize that they helped to mother birth control and trial marriages? A conspicuous current case is the Eighteenth Amendment. Cultural evolution is thus a blind stumbling. Great civilizations have repeatedly arisen only to disappear, while the peoples that created them knew neither why they rose nor why they fell. Nor can we now speak of such matters with any confidence. However, the realization that realistic cause and effect are universal in scope gives some ground for optimism as to the future. We have in organized scientific research a culture trait that is unique. The Greeks came very close to its discovery; had they once realized its significance, they would have changed the course of civilization during the last two thousand years. We, on the other hand, have at length placed science among the mores and made it the final judge of truth and validity. The social sciences, however, make slow progress toward that positivity which is essential for clear-sighted control. This is mainly due to two facts: first, the difficulty of extricating social research from the biases and taboos entrenched in the economic, political, and ethical mores themselves. Scientific objectivity is immensely more difficult to attain. Second, social phenomena are immensely more complex than those investigated in any other field. They result from an almost infinitely variable interaction of physiographic, biological, psychological, and cultural factors which make the detection of general laws extremely difficult. Moreover, the applications of science to social life necessarily, at present, have reference only to immediate problems and scarcely at all to the remote future. For example, medicine, sanitation, and psychiatry tend to give an increasingly scientific quality to a vast range of humanitarian activities.

The ultimate consequences for racial quality, and hence for social evolution, are only dimly perceived.

A final difficulty in the achievement of that social control which is the goal and final test of scientific validity is that public opinion determines both the introduction and the effective working of new truths. It is not easy to achieve in popular thought that degree of rational insight necessary for the rapid readjustment of political and ethical institutions. The growth of rationality in these fields is necessarily slow and takes place by a tedious transformation of popular views through suggestion and imitation of one social class by another. The gradual emergence of science to a position of chief authority among the mores is probably the most significant cultural change taking place at present. The warfare between science and theology is real and epoch-making. They represent two directly opposed modes of explaining phenomena, the animistic and the realistic, the creationist and the evolutionary, the irrational or supra-rational, and the rational. The future of our civilization depends on which one succeeds to the place of unquestioned and universal primacy among the criteria of thought and emotion. From this point of view the popularization of science and the increasing attachment of popular thought to scientific concepts and attitudes are bright omens of a new and better era.1 In the light of present knowledge, we seem warranted in saying that the future of our culture is dependent on learning how to accomplish by scientific methods that elimination of the unfit and ill adapted which now is accomplished by natural selection on both the biological and the sociological planes. Nature's methods are haphazard, wasteful, 1 For an interesting statement of what has already been achieved in the direction of a new texture of social life, see page 1402, "The Science of Life," by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., Garden City, N. Y. 1931.

and cruel, however beneficient and effective in the end. Artificial control in the light of tested knowledge is direct, economical, and humane. Nevertheless, the thoughtful student of the human epic does not anticipate that man will be able fully to control his social destiny. He aspires only greatly to decrease suffering and to increase happiness. When Hobbes declared that the life of man in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," he epitomized a remote age in the past. We may likewise imagine, under the salutary ministrations of science, a remote age in the future when human life will be sociable, comfortable, wholesome, humane, and enduring, and when the aesthetic values will be all pervasive.