First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest.  Comparing them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really totally inadequate and inaccurate.  For the most part, they were like coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no sustained vision, of the whole.  To the practical men of affairs, the shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands and dangers of public life.

But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for industrial machinery.  At the same time there were thrown up the most marvelous advances in physics and chemistry.  Recurring War became not the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations at each other.  New destructive devices out of the laboratories were raised into the commandants of the course of history.  Then science acquired prestige.

Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship.  Unlike the factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors of human life will be ascertained and solved.  As knowledge of the conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the inevitable, even the unknowable.  Human history resolves itself into the drama:  Science contra Fate.  Quite a change from the vaudeville show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.

The future of science has become the future of the race.  So much of an inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated.  That is ordinarily taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man became the New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental discoveries and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go on, providing a succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist and his retinue.  Not only is he to be entertained and served by them, but any commercial value will also be exploited by him.  The natural wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of the man in the street.  Even spiritualism apes the technique of the physicist.  The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is incredible.  There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science.