494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



steam-engine has given to mankind. He who utilizes a new material, 

 improves a method of production, or introduces a better way of carry- 

 ing on business, and does this for the purpose of distancing competi- 

 toi's, gains for himself little compared with that which he gains for the 

 community by facilitating the lives of all. Either unknowingly or in 

 spite of themselves, Nature leads men by purely personal motives to 

 fulfill her ends : Nature being one of our expressions for the Ultimate 

 Cause of things, and the end, remote when not proximate, being the 

 highest form of human life. 



Hence no argument, however cogent, can be expected to produce 

 much effect : only here and there one may be influenced. As in an 

 actively militant stage of society it is impossible to make many 

 believe that there is any glory preferable to that of killing enemies ; 

 so, where rapid material growth is going on, and affords unlimited 

 scope for the energies of all, little can be done by insisting that life 

 has higher uses than work and accumulation. While among the most 

 powerful of feelings continue to be the desire for public applause and 

 dread of public censure while the anxiety to achieve distinction, now 

 by conquering enemies, now by beating competitors, continues pre- 

 dominant while the fear of public reprobation affects men more than 

 the fear of divine vengeance (as witness the long survival of dueling 

 in Christian societies) this excess of work which ambition prompts 

 seems likely to continue with but small qualification. The eagerness 

 for the honor accorded to success, first in war and then in commerce, 

 has been indispensable as a means to peopling the earth with the 

 higher types of man, and the subjugation of its surface and its forces 

 to human use. Ambition may fitly come to bear a smaller ratio to 

 other motives, when the working out of these needs is approaching 

 completeness ; and when also, by consequence, the scope for satisfying 

 ambition is diminishing. Those who draw the obvious corollaries 

 from the doctine of evolution those who believe that the process of 

 modification upon modification which has brought life to its present 

 height must raise it still higher, will anticipate that " the iast infirmity 

 of noble minds " will in the distant future slowly decrease. As the 

 sphere for achievement becomes smaller, the desire for applause will 

 lose that predominance which it now has. A better ideal of life may 

 simultaneously come to prevail. When there is fully recognized the 

 truth that moral beauty is higher than intellectual power when the 

 wish to be admired is in large measure replaced by the wish to be 

 loved that strife for distinction which the present phase of civili- 

 zation shows us will be greatly moderated. Along with other benefits 

 may then come a rational proportioning of work and relaxation ; and 

 the relative claims of to-day and to-morrow may be properly balanced. 



