A Theory In Its Day Helps To

There Are Three Creative Ideas Which, Each In Its Turn, Have Been Central To Science. They Are The Idea Of Order, The Idea Of Causes, And The Idea Of Chance.

The Private Motives Of Scientists Are Not The Trend Of Science. The Trend Of Science Is Made By The Needs Of Society: Navigation Before The Eighteenth Century, Manufacture Thereafter; And In Our Age I Believe The Liberation Of Personality. Whatever The Part Which Scientists Like To Act, Or For That Matter Which Painters Like To Dress, Science Shares The Aims Of Our Society Just As Art Does.

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority . . .

I Call That Brilliant Sequence Of Cultural Peaks The Ascent Of Man.

You Will Die But The Carbon Will Not; Its Career Does Not End With You. It Will Return To The Soil, And There A Plant May Take It Up Again In Time, Sending It Once More On A Cycle Of Plant And Animal Life.