326 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SCIENCE AND MORALS. 



By P. M. BEETHELOT. 



SCIENCE, held under the ban through the long course of the 

 middle ages, has now conquered its independence, by virtue of 

 the services it has rendered to man. It has fulfilled the promises 

 made in its name by the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries, and has transformed since then, as it has in- 

 deed been doing from the beginning, the material and moral condi- 

 tions of the lives of the people. The changes accomplished from the 

 beginning of civilization have had a most effective promoter in sci- 

 ence, although its real importance was long hidden or obscured by the 

 mixture of elements borrowed from the imagination. For two cen- 

 turies and a half only has the scientific method been disengaged from 

 all strange alliance, and been manifest in its purity; its efficiency has 

 been attested in the most various ways by a constantly accelerated 

 industrial and social evolution. 



There exist, indeed, and always will exist, many deplorable 

 things, much suffering, and much wickedness in the world; but it is 

 to the credit of science that, instead of lulling mortals with the feel- 

 ing of their powerlessness into the passivity of resignation, it has 

 urged them to react against destiny, and has taught them the sure 

 way by which they can diminish the sum of woe and injustice, and 

 increase their happiness and that of their fellows. It has not 

 accomplished this by means of verbal exhortations or a 'priori rea- 

 soning, but by virtue of processes and words really efficacious, be- 

 cause they are acquired from the study of the conditions of existence 

 and the causes of evils. 



The words mystery and miracle are alike excluded from scientific 

 language and methods, not by virtue of purely logical deductions, 

 but because wherever it has been possible to take deep soundings of 

 phenomena we have found that they were constantly produced in 

 accordance with a determined relation between effects and causes. 

 It is exactly this a posteriori determination that constitutes the 

 scientific method. We do not, indeed, pretend to say the last word 

 concerning the universe. We profess, on the contrary, that that 

 word can not be formulated in advance, and we know that among 

 the infinite variety of phenomena we never succeed in meeting and 

 observing more than the most infinitesimal part. We know the 

 whole extent of our ignorance, and have the modesty consonant with 

 it, but it should not be represented by a universal skepticism; no 

 more should it cause us to depend upon the existence of supernatural 

 verities, and paralyze our efforts to the profit of mysticism. The 



