3 88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



able trifles ? How odd, from the Archimedean perspective, appear the 

 fevered imaginings of mankind about higher beings inhabiting some- 

 where above our heads the icy, ether-filled cosmical space, vibrating with 

 force-radiations, and pervaded by meteor-streams ! How utterly absurd 

 is the idea of an assembly of the gravest, most learned, and most pro- 

 found men of their times sitting to decide whether Father and Son are 

 of the same or of like substance ! How ridiculous, were it not so tragi- 

 cal, was the scene of Galilei's abjuration, when we think of him and his 

 judges being carried along together " in the ever-rapid course of the 

 spheres ! " But oh, how doubly hideous appear the massacre of St. Bar- 

 tholomew and those autos da fe, whose atrocities reach their culmi- 

 nation in the burnings of Giordano and Servetus ! For the objects of 

 veneration to whom these hetacombs were immolated there is no place 

 in infinite space from the Archimedean standpoint, and they will have 

 to be collocated in the fourth dimension. 



In truth, in this so-called " universal history," there is but one light 

 to guide us, which, however, has not often been employed hitherto : 

 that is the doctrine of epidemic mental disease. As in mental diseases 

 occurring in individuals, so here, it is hard to draw the lines of distinc- 

 tion between insanity and depravity. But the few who contemplate, 

 as it were, from the lofty summit of an intellectual crag, in an Archi- 

 medean way, the doings of mankind here below, cannot be very far 

 wrong in holding that to be the true history of the human race which, 

 through all its ups and downs of fortune, its crimes and its errors, traces 

 for us its gradual rise out of a state of semi-brutishness, its progress in 

 arts and sciences, its growing dominion over Nature, its daily increasing 

 well-being, its liberation from the bonds of superstition, and its steady 

 approximation to those ends which make man what he is. In polity 

 and war, whose unprofitable and monotonous oscillations are the sub- 

 ject-matter of political history, man had predecessors among invertebrate 

 animals even ; but the human race alone offers a history of civilization. 

 Hegel calls the horse and iron the " absolute organs for establishing 

 civilized power." With greater justice we say that natural science is 

 the absolute organ of civilization, and hence that the history of natural 

 science is the proper history of the humayi race. 



The punier man seems to be, as viewed from the Archimedean stand- 

 point, the grander appear his achievements in the face of Nature, the 

 nobler his efforts to subdue her, the more attractive the history of his 

 intellectual conquests. As this history has memorable days and places 

 different from those of political history, so, too, of course its kings and 

 heroes differ from the kings and heroes to whom the thoughtless world 

 is wont to pay homage. Who is it that in this history rivets our atten- 

 tion at the beginning of the eighteenth century ? Not that king, sur- 

 rounded by his confessors, his mistresses, and his incendiary marshals, 

 against whom, as Ranke said to Thiers, Ave still bore arms after Sedan ; 

 but that greatest of men, Sir Isaac Newton, deeply pondering on a prob- 



