264 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



earlier wisdoms and virtues the modern reprobate may hardly attain. 

 Such is the theological mind, whose vision of the truth is a distant and 

 completed revelation; such is the legal mind which judges a current 

 moral problem wholly by the legal precedents. The one hallows the 

 ten commandments ; the other glorifies the constitution. Of such mind 

 are we all when we uncritically accept the conventions of our group or 

 yield thoughtless obedience to the traditions of our race. To capitulate 

 to custom or resign ourselves to habit is to accept the past as virtuous 

 and final. 



Against this view of the world both science and democracy resolutely 

 oppose an exuberant faith. The bulk of men is wiser and better than it 

 has ever been; it can be infinitely better and wiser than it is. The 

 critics of science have gratified themselves in pointing out the limita- 

 tions of its method. But science replies by pushing those limitations 

 further back. The whole achievement of experimental psychology has 

 been made against the settled belief on the part of many that it could 

 not be done. Twenty years ago it seemed that physics had finished its 

 task. There was then a pessimistic feeling that all the interesting 

 things had been discovered. To-day men are undertaking experiments 

 that would have been thought fantastic at that time, and the undis- 

 covered territory seems greater than ever. They said we could not fly, 

 but Professor Langley and the Wright Brothers did it. They said you 

 can not predict the weather, but we can tell it a week ahead of time. 

 Once it was thought a miracle to cure the blind, but now we do it every 

 day. Once disease was regarded as the visitation of an offended god, 

 but to-day we meet it and destroy it with the instruments of science. 

 Once insanity was the evidence of evil spirits, but to-day the legion of 

 devils is put to flight by medicine and psychology. Once marriage was 

 regarded as a holy ordinance to be approached in the spirit of religious 

 humility; to-day its holiness depends in part upon its religious sanc- 

 tions; it also depends upon its effects upon possible posterity as these 

 are indicated by biology and pathology. 



Nor is your individual scientist confused or disheartened when you 

 point out to him how science fails in hosts of cases. He knows that 

 aviators fall, that the weather does not turn out as predicted, that there 

 are far more diseases for which we do not know the cure than there are 

 of those for which we have an antitoxin, that there are forms of insanity 

 that are supposedly incurable, that we do not know all the laws of 

 heredity, that the subtle processes of human thinking and education are 

 baffling to our present psychological methods. But he is not a pessi- 

 mist. He is one of an advancing army, and he believes that all about 

 him there are the solid achievements of the campaign ; points have been 

 taken and citadels have been established back of which the forces of 

 science will never need to retreat. That many of the supposed con- 



