CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 389 



lem beneath the elms of Cambridge. Who at the beginning of this 

 century ? Not, amid the ruins of Moscow, the indomitable man who 

 invented chauvinism as the instrument of his ungovernable selfishness, 

 but Alessandro Volta, contriving, at his villa on Lake Como, the artificial 

 electrical organ which gave to man the power of omnipresence, as it 

 were ; or that other conqueror of space, George Stephenson, setting in 

 motion, in his coal-blackened cottage at Killingworth, the model of his 

 rail way -locomotive. 



It were a noble task to describe the revolution that natural science 

 has quietly produced in the condition of the human race during the last 

 two or three centuries. Just as it has lifted from over our heads the 

 confining roof of a solid firmament, so, too, has it liberated us intellect- 

 ually. For every one who hearkens to her teaching she has fulfilled 

 the aspirations of the poet, who, amid the throng of courtiers in the 

 antechamber of Octavian and all the splendor of historical greatness, 

 wistfully bethought him of the disciple of Epicurus as he reposes in 

 powerful calm : 



" Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 

 Atque metus omnes et inexorabile faturu 

 Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acberontis avari." x 



" How blest the sage whose soul can pierce each cause 

 Of changeful Nature and her wondrous laws ; 

 Who tramples fear beneath his foot, and braves 

 Fate and stern Death, and hell's resounding waves! " 



Sotheby's translation. 



In the place of miracle, natural science has substituted law. Ghosts 

 and spectres have disappeared before it as before the first rays of light 

 in the east. It has broken the power of ancient lies ; it has put out 

 the fires in which witches and heretics used to be burned ; it has placed 

 a keen-edged weapon in the hands of historical criticism. But it has 

 also curbed the pride of speculation. It has discovered the limits of 

 knowledge, and taught its disciples to look down without dizziness 

 from the airy heights of sovereign skepticism. How easy and free one 

 breathes on those heights ! How nearly inaudible to the mind's ear 

 the hum of the vulgar multitude in the torrid lowland, the complainings 

 of disappointed ambition, the battle-cries of nations ! As of the anthro- 

 pocentric, so, too, of the Europocentric idea natural science has made 

 an end. As it opened the Ghetto, so it burst the fetters of the negro. 

 How different its conquest of the world from that of Alexander or the 

 Romans ! If literature is the true intranational bond of nations, their 

 international bond is natural science. Voltaire could abhor Shakespeare, 

 but Newton he revered. The triumph of the scientific view of Nature 

 will to future ages appear as a step in human development comparable 

 to the triumph of monotheism 1,800 years ago. It matters not that the 



1 Virgil, " Georgics" ii., v., 490, et scq. 



