5 JULY 1935, Page 22

SCIENCE UNDER SUSPICION

Vie the Editor of TILE SPECTATOR.]

Sin,—One could hardly expect the uneducated to draw a care- ful distinction between the pure scientist on the one hand and the inventor and the mechanic on the other, but one might expect this distinction from the artist, the philosopher and the cultured man generally. But it often means that not only the vulgar but also the literary and educated view of the scientist is of a mechanic who bears to the pure scientist the same relation as a jazz band conductor does to Beethoven. In his: review of Mr. Heard's book in your last issue, Professor Joad says that the ultimate object of the scientist is to make himself superfluous, paving the way for the philosopher and the artist. May we not have an explicit acknowledgement that the pure scientist of the present day is both natural philosopher and artist ?

The purest scientist cannot, of course, evade the charge that some of his discoveries may ultimately he exploited by commercial or militarist interests ; but are scientific discoveries really responsible for the unpleasant features of this century ? Big guns, bombs and aeroplanes owe almost nothing to pure science and the cinema owes very little. , An analysis will show that the magnificent engineering technique which characterizes our age owes very little to twentieth-century science, though, of course, the engineer will snap up an aid wherever he can. Even poison gas is due to the elementary chemistry of the nineteenth century, and with luck the Chinese might have produced chlorine, as well as gunpowder. The natural philosopher may well hope that humanity will have put its house in order and, abjured 'war long before the Rela- tivity Theory and the Expanding Universe have a military. application.

Professor Joad suggests that the cinema and the radio are in part responsible for that rejuvenation of mind which makes continental dictatorships possible. But are either of these instruments of propaganda really to be compared with a rigor- ously controlled Press, and is the present German mass men7 tality any more homogeneous than our own in 1914-18, when the infant cinema amused us with Charlie Chaplin and Pearl AVhite, and the radio was still unborn ?—Yours faithfully,