ABSTRACT
It is a common remark that the growth of science has changed our world. Not only has it given us devices for controlling our environment and many aspects of our own lives, but it has also prompted alterations in our institutions, values, and ways of thinking. Man’s growing reliance upon the methoas and findings of science has brought it into sharp conflict with traditional beliefs and vested interests in various fields of life. The story of the early struggles of scientists against dogma, superstition, and inertia is too well known to the reader to require repetition. Nor are such struggles over. In Nazi and fascist theory and practice the world has been facing a systematic and streamlined attack upon the liberal scientific tradition. That its efficient war-machine employed the results of physical science and its continuous propaganda rested upon elaborate psychological study does not belie this view. For theoretical physics was abandoned or perverted, biology made a support for an absurd race-theory and a political encouragement of race hatred, and the social sciences and history rewritten to exalt the leader or the state. And for the general atmosphere of freedom of inquiry upon which scientific progress has rested there was substituted a strict regimentation not merely for the fighting of wars but for the glorification of war.
