THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 525 



of the first two classes. We should find it difficult, probably, to dispense 

 with their company in so long a journey after becoming so well ac- 

 quainted with them ; for among them we may each recall not a few of 

 those rarer individuals of the genus homo called angels on earth. But 

 it must be said in all truth, to resume the figure, that they have neither 

 improved much the means of transportation nor perfected much the art 

 of navigation. They have been sufficiently occupied, perhaps, in allay- 

 ing the fears of the timid and in restraining the follies of the mutinous. 

 Other types of mind and other modes of thought than theirs have been 

 essential to work out the improvements which separate the earlier from 

 the later nautical equipments of men ; such improvements, for example, 

 as mark the distinction between the dug-out of our lately acknowledged 

 relatives, the Moros and the Tagalogs, and the Atlantic-liner of to-day. 

 At any rate, we are confronted by the fact that man's conceptions 

 of the universe have undergone slow but certain enlargement. His 

 early anthropocentric and anthropomorphic views have been replaced, 

 in so far as he has attained measurable advancement, by views that 

 will bear the tests of astronomy and anthropology. He has learned, 

 slowly and painfully, after repeated failures and many steps backward, 

 to distinguish, in some regions of thought, the real and the permanent 

 from the fanciful and fleeting phenomena of which he forms a part. 

 His pursuit of knowledge, in so far as it has led him to certainty, has 

 been chiefly a discipline of disillusionment. He has arrived at the 

 truth not so much by the genius of direct discovery as by the laborious 

 process of the elimination of error. Hence he who has learned wis- 

 dom from experience must look out on the problem of the universe 

 at the beginning of the twentieth century with far less confidence 

 in his ability to speedily solve it and with far less exaggerated notions 

 of his own importance in the grand aggregate of Nature, than man 

 entertained at the beginning of our era. But no devotee to science 

 finds humiliation in this departure from the primitive concepts of 

 humanity. On the contrary, he has learned that this apparent hu- 

 miliation is the real source of enlightenment and encouragement; 

 for notwithstanding the relative minuteness of the speck of cosmic 

 dust on which we reside, and notwithstanding the relative incom- 

 petency of the mind to discover our exact relations to the rest of the 

 universe, it has yet been possible to measure that minuteness and to 

 determine that incompetency. These, in brief, are the elements of posi- 

 tive knowledge at which we have arrived through the long course of 

 unconscious, or only half -conscious, experience of mankind. All lines 

 of investigation converge toward or diverge from these elements. It 

 is along such lines that progress has been attained in the past, and it 

 is along the same lines that we may expect progress to proceed in the 

 future. 



