SCIENCE AND MORALITY. 757 



is coming, but, on the contrary, a great and universal improvement in 

 morality, might have more weight with us if we were sure that their 

 eyes were turned in the right direction. But their observation is apt 

 to be limited, or too much directed to the circle of scientific men 

 around them. Scientific men are pretty sure to be above the average 

 in point of morality ; they have dedicated themselves to a high calling, 

 they are elevated by its pursuits, they are free from the more violent 

 passions, and removed from the coarser temptations. For the signs of 

 change we must look rather to the scenes on which men struggle for 

 wealth or power, and the social regions in which the common vices 

 prevail. We must look to the multitudes, who, being now told that 

 they have no hope beyond this world, are apparently making up their 

 minds to have as large a share of the goods and pleasures of this world 

 as their force will give them. Communism, intransigentism, and ni- 

 hilism are not well represented in scientific reunions. They who sat 

 round the dinner-table of Helvetius, and congratulated each other on 

 the coming of an age of reason and happiness, were the destined vic- 

 tims, not the workers, of the guillotine. 



Moreover, as has been said before, the intellectual world, at all 

 events, is still in the twilight of religion. That expression is, indeed, 

 too weak in the case of the positivists, who, not only call themselves 

 a church, but make good their claim to the title by sermons which 

 would do the highest honor to any pulpit, and, though they prefer the 

 name of humanity to that of God, must be really worshiping a deity, 

 not an abstract term, which would be as deaf to prayers or praise as a 

 stock or a stone. An abstract term, in truth, would be rather less sus- 

 ceptible of adoration than that which, like a stock or a stone, has at all 

 events a real existence. But even the man of intellect who rejects all 

 churches and all worship has still sentiments, hopes, and a conscience 

 formed under the influence of Christianity. The same thing is indi- 

 cated by the repudiation of the name atheist, and the adoption of the 

 strange term agnostic. Blank absence of belief or inclination either 

 way is probably an impossible frame of mind ; in nine cases out of ten, 

 when a man calls himself an agnostic, he most likely means that he 

 retains his belief in the existence of a God, though without being able 

 to present the proof distinctly to himself. The very term law, which 

 physical science continues to use, though we can physically be cogni- 

 zant of nothing beyond general facts, has a theistic significance, and 

 carries with it a certain sense of religious elevation and comfort. 

 Small probably, as yet, is the number of those who have fairly looked 

 in the face blind force and annihilation. 



But to the pi'esent question. An heroic physician we remember to 

 have come across the case in some Italian history finding that a new 

 and mysterious plague is ravaging his city, devotes himself to the 

 preservation of his fellow-citizens, shuts himself up with a subject, 

 takes his observations, consigns them to writing, and, feeling the poison 



