88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



structure of nature herself. Nature is a great system of things wherein 

 mediately or immediately everything is related to everything else, and 

 the scientific problem is the discovery of these relations. That many 

 of them are so remote that no man could have foreseen them, is not 

 our fault. 



It is this remoteness of natural relations that so frequently startles 

 us when discovered, and it is likewise the remoteness of things that 

 justifies every stroke of work on problems the solution of which no 

 man can evaluate in gold or silver. Indeed our usual standards break 

 down completely here, for the measure of science is not in money, but 

 in happiness, and the market value of this is uncertain, since no man, 

 consciously or at least voluntarily, places his own happiness on sale. To 

 ask for the monetary equivalent of the scientific discovery that our 

 bodies are derived from a single cell, is like asking for the price of a 

 friend. Brooks, in a suggestive paper on universities, wrote : 



While the benefits which learning confers are its only claims to considera- 

 tion, these benefits will cease as soon as they are made an end or aim. All men 

 prize the fruit, but . . . the tree will soon be barren if they visit it only at 

 the harvest; they must dig about it and nourish it, and cherish the flowers, 

 and green leaves. The gifts of learning are like health which comes to him 

 who does not seek it, but flies farther and farther from him who would lure it 

 back by physic or indulgence. 



If material benefits, however, had been the only products of scientific 

 explanation in his day, Huxley, according to his own confession, would 

 not have been cared greatly to toil in the service of science, but would 

 have enjoyed equally well the less complicated activities connected with 

 quietly chipping his flint ax after the manner of forebears a few thou- 

 sand years back. He tells us: 



The growth of scientific explanation has not only conferred practical benefits 

 on men, but in so doing has effected a revolution in their conception of the 

 universe and of themselves, and has profoundly altered their modes of thinking 

 and their views of right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seeking to 

 satisfy natural wants has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. 

 I say that natural knowledge in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has 

 been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new 

 morality. 



It is more important, infinitely more important, that I should know 

 and understand the immediate as well as the remote consequences of 

 any action of mine, than it is that I should travel in seventeen hours, 

 in luxury, to New York, and scientific explanation enables me to do 

 both. 



It is because we are apt to be so much more impressed by a practical 

 application than by the conditions under which such application is 

 possible, so much more by prominence than by importance, so much 

 more by the gun than by the man behind it, and lastly because science 

 modestly acknowledges her limitations, that she has fallen into ill 



