Natural science is concerned with understanding the working of material nature. The subject of this paper is the positive contribution which natural science, given its true place among the other activities of man, might make to the world. At the outset, it is essential to distinguish between science and the applications of science. When a certain knowledge of nature has been won, it is often possible to apply it to the control and manipulation of nature—to devise new techniques for handling matter. Modern industry is becoming more and more dominated by technology based in this way on applied science. The emphasis on the use of science in modern life is such that most of those who write on the ‘place of science in society’ are thinking primarily of the place of technics in society, and treat science only in relation to technics. But the question of the place of technics in society raises problems wholly different from that of the place of science in society, and a lack of clear distinctions here can lead to a wholly false conceptions of the functions of science. That technics (which presupposes science) will be of major importance to this nation, it is impossible to deny; that science has significance only as a basis for material prosperity is not, however, a legitimate conclusion. Science is concerned with understanding nature, not with manipulating it for economic purposes. The great human problems centreing round the rapid growth of industrial technology must here be left aside, as being only indirectly, connected with the functions of science in modern culture.