39 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



people will never be ripe for tbis form of religion, for where have they 

 ever realized the ideal of Christianity ? 



If we ask ourselves where in literature did this conception of the 

 universe first make its appearance, the answer will be, " In Voltaire." 

 That mental characteristic of Voltaire, to which David Friedrich Strauss 

 has not done full justice, namely, the scientific habit of thought which 

 he contracted in England and developed at Cirey, enabled him clearly 

 to perceive the difference between political history the only form of 

 history known down to his time and the history of civilization ; and 

 in the latter with a boldness and perspicacity all his own to show retro- 

 spectively and prospectively the part played by natural science. In a 

 hundred of his essays, letters, and philosophical novels, this fundamental 

 idea rises to the surface ; but, with the amazing versatility of his genius, 

 he to-day, as in the " History of Charles XII.," looks upon events from 

 the anthropocentric standpoint ; to-morrow, as in the " Micromegas," 

 from the Archimedean perspective. 



Following in Voltaire's footsteps, the encyclopedists further devel- 

 oped this conception. They still more positively than he called atten- 

 tion to the methodical utilization of the forces of Nature as perceived 

 in their regular working. Hence Diderot's partiality for the mechanic 

 and useful arts, a trait well noticed by Rosenkranz, in which Diderot 

 agreed with a man who also in a moral sense had come to meet him from 

 the other shore of an ocean with Benjamin Franklin, the father of 

 utilitarianism. 



What they dreamed is now more than accomplished. Man, whom 

 we first met as a tool-making animal, is now become a rational animal 

 who travels by steam, writes with lightning, and paints with the sun- 

 beam. The reconversion into work of the sunlight stored up in " black 

 diamonds " multiplies his energy a million-fold. The Seven Wonders 

 of antiquity, the engineering works of the Romans, bear no comparison 

 with the enterprises every day undertaken by our own generation. The 

 periphery of our planet threatens to become too narrow for man's genius. 

 Hardly any secrets do its heights and its depths still conceal from him. 

 Whithersoever man is powerless to go bodily, his mind penetrates with 

 the aid of the magic key of calculation. In the blackest night, on the 

 stormiest sea, his bark steers the shortest course ; she dexterously shuns 

 the track of the destroying typhoon. Geology does all that the divining- 

 rod was once supposed to do, giving us plentiful supply of water, salt, 

 coal, and petroleum. The list of the metals is ever growing, and yet 

 chemistry has not discovered the philosopher's stone ; some day that too 

 Avill be found, perhaps. In the mean time, it vies with organic Nature 

 in producing things both useful and agreeable. From the black, noisome 

 waste-products of coal-gas, which has transformed every city into another 

 Baku, chemistry derives coloring-matters before which the splendor of 

 tropic plumage pales. It prepares perfumes without sun and without 

 flower-beds. And though it mijrht not have solved Samson's riddle 



