One is justified in stating that the expansion of human knowledge has resulted in many advantages. Modern inventions, and the consequent ease of daily life in civilized countries, are the natural outcome of what we are accustomed to call education. However, happiness, health, and economic security have not kept pace with the increase of this knowledge. The world's present state of unrest and partial disintegration shows this clearly. Unity and concerted action in human society— more essential than ever in a world shrunk by rapid and convenient ways of transportation—seem to a great extent absent. Where they appear to exist, they are more often a product of superimposition, rather than of a deep-seated conviction welling up from within.
This incoherent state of affairs may be analyzed as the objectivation of a confused mental condition on the part of mankind. Since what are called science and religion are largely shaping human ways of thinking, we have to take cognizance of their course of development. By so doing, we come to the conclusion that the expansion of scientific knowledge along material lines has not promoted unification. On the contrary, there seems to have been brought about a specialization wherein contradiction and divergence are almost proportionate to the increase of material knowledge and its consequent classification. Humanity's concept of science has become so divergent that even in its smallest ramifications there is a conspicuous lack of harmony and a plentiful crop of controversy.
This situation is being deplored by those who have gleaned a more profound insight into the real meaning of science and its purpose. President Conant of Harvard University has lately stressed more than once the urgent need for men of vision who will be able to escape the restricted views of the specialist, and to coordinate the results of specialized research and scholarship in new paths of knowledge more applicable to humanity's needs. In other words, there is greater need than ever today for absolute Science—the demonstrable knowledge of the one First Cause, underlying all actual phenomena and real experience.
