I believe that both these feelings do equal harm: the feeling of marvel as much as the fear.Because they have this in common, that they both want to persuade the layman that there is nothing he can do for himself.Science is the new magic, they whisper; it is out of your hands;for good or ill, your salvation or your doom is the business of others.That is why I have attacked the magic before the fear:because the marvel lies below the fear.In the minds of most people today, the fear is plainly uppermost.They are afraid of the future; and if you ask them why, they conveniently blame the atomic bomb.But the atomic bomb is only the scapegoat for our fears.We are not afraid of the future because of a bomb.We are afraid of bombs because we have no faith in the future.We no longer have faith in our ability, as individuals or as nations, to control our own future.That loss of confidence has not sprung overnight from the invention of a weapon.The atomic bomb has merely brought home to us, harshly, as a matter of life and death, what has long been growing:our failure to face, our refusal to face, as individuals and as nations, the place of science in our world.There is the taproot of our fears.In our hearts, of course, we know that the future belongs to science; we do not deceive ourselves about that.
