THE STABILITY OF TRUTH. 753 



Science has made it possible. The traditions of science are so 

 diffused among the people at large that fools find it safe to defy 

 them. Those who take dreams for realities ; those whose memory- 

 impressions and motor dreams are uncontrolled through defective 

 will ; those who mistake subjective sensations produced by disease 

 or disorder for objective conditions all these are sooner or later 

 dropped from existence, taking with them the whole line of their 

 possible successors. The condition of mind which is favorable to 

 mysticism, superstition, and revery is unfavorable to life, and the 

 continuance of such conditions leads to death. On the billboard 

 across the street I saw just now the advertisement of a lecture on 

 the "ethical value of living in two worlds at once." Whoever 

 thus lives in two worlds is certain soon to prove inadequate for 

 either. 



If all men sought healing from the blessed handkerchief of 

 the lunatic, or from contact with old bones or old clothes ; if all 

 physicians used "revealed remedies," or the remedies Nature finds 

 for each disease; if all business were conducted by faith; if all 

 supposed " natural rights " of man were made the basis of legisla- 

 tion ; if all the protean phases of that which Zangwill has cleverly 

 called the " higher foolishness " were worked out in action the 

 insecurity of these beliefs would speedily appear-. Not only civ- 

 ilization but civilized man himself would vanish from the earth. 

 The safe shelter of the cave and hollow tree would be the cradle 

 of the "new man" and the "new woman." The long and bloody 

 road of progress through fool-killing would for centuries be trav- 

 ersed again. The fool lives in society only by sufferance of the 

 sane ; the weak, by the altruism of the strong. That is strong 

 which endures. Might does not make right, but that which is 

 right will justify itself by becoming might. What we call social 

 virtues are the elements of race stability. 



In the ordinary affairs of life it may be as safe to believe in 

 mahatmas and magic, in cobolds and norns, as to have the vague 

 notions of microbes and molecules, atoms and protoplasm, which 

 form part of the mental equipment of the average modern man. 

 But the difference appears when the knowledge is to be turned 

 into action. Microbes and molecules become more real the more 

 nearly one comes to deal with them. If one learns to use them 

 they become as real as rocks or dollars and as capable of influ- 

 encing human welfare. But those conceptions which are fig- 

 ments of ignorance and insanity become less real as we try to 

 deal with them, and the action based on them is not safe nor 

 effective. 



So clearly is knowledge linked to action that in general among 

 animals and men when action is not possible sensation is absent 

 or not trustworthy. Objects too small to be touched are invisible 



VOL L. 57 



