SCIENCE AND MORALS. 327 



scientific method has been recognized, bj the experience of ages that 

 have passed as by that of present ages, as the only efficacious method 

 of arriving at knowledge. This is the significance of the exclusion 

 of mystery in the study of man and the universe, and in the govern- 

 ment of individuals and societies, which is, or rather ought to be, 

 the consequence of this study. The mystic who assumes to direct 

 his life and business according to the ideas of the marvelous would 

 very soon be lost; general history and mental pathology show that 

 peoples and persons who have adopted mystery and divine inspiration 

 as exclusive guides have been precipitated at once into irreparable 

 moral, mental, and material ruin. We may, then, leave the mystics 

 to enjoy their dreams, but must not permit their intolerance to impose 

 these dreams upon us as the rule of social activity. Man has, indeed, 

 always sought to escape the severity of determinism in this way, 

 just as he formerly tried to impose his will upon the superior powers 

 by the conjurations of magic, or to turn aside the rigor of destiny by 

 incoherent prayers. But such illusions need not make us depart from 

 the rigor of our method of proceeding, or be allowed, by an irrational 

 confusion, to destroy the exactness of our results. This irrevocable 

 separation between the scientific method and mystery has not always 

 been; it is the product of a long elaboration, in which empirical and 

 experimental conceptions have been associated and confounded. 

 For better comprehension, let us try to summarize in general outline 

 the historical evolution of science. In all things we can best com- 

 prehend the present by going back to the beginning. 



Let us carry ourselves back to those distant periods during which 

 our species was gradually disengaging itself from animality. We 

 can do this to a certain extent by the aid of archaeological discov- 

 eries, and by comparing them with the stories of travelers who have 

 observed savage tribes which have been arrested at different steps of 

 the evolution that has been accomplished since the primitive ages by 

 civilized peoples. Thorough examination of the habits and instincts 

 of animal species, knowledge of the laws of the psychological and 

 physiological development of the individual, especially in his in- 

 fancy, unite with history to cast a strong light on the problems with 

 which we are here concerned. The sum of these studies has shown 

 how the human races, each according to its degree of intelligence, 

 have gradually created the instruments, arms, and customs by the 

 aid of which they achieved their first triumphs over Nature and 

 accomplished their first organizations. The family and the state, 

 morality and virtue, gradually issued from the social instincts which 

 we see in action, now, as formerly, among the animal races. 



The intelligence of the first men was too^f eeble, however, to con- 

 ceive either the abstract laws of their own development or those of 



