CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 393 



ning, " Light was," because then the first eye opened, so " Darkness 

 will be," because then the last eye closes. 



But from this fate millions of years still separate our race. A 

 young man does not allow himself to be thwarted either in his pleasures 

 or in his ambitions by thoughts of the infirmities of age which await 

 also him, or of the inevitableness of death. So, too, we are but little 

 concerned about the fate that threatens our unimaginably remote pos- 

 terity. Should we feel greater alarm for the immeasurably nearer dan- 

 ger which threatens our present civilization in the exhaustion of our 

 coal-fields within a calculable period of time ? No one, who knows how 

 difficult it is to substitute another source of power, can contemplate 

 without solicitude our scandalous waste of coal. The present demands 

 of manufacturing industry are not very easily checked, it is true ; be- 

 sides, "the living are always in the right," ' and later generations must 

 find out for themselves a means of navigating the ocean without coal ; 

 nevertheless, the British Parliament would be better employed in de- 

 vising measures to prevent the waste of coal (which is greater in Eng- 

 land than elsewhere), than in busying itself with questions of experi- 

 mental physiology, as it has lately been doing to the injury of science 

 and the impairment of its own dignity. 8 



Civilization is also threatened in another quarter. In the face of a 

 new barbaric invasion, it need have no fear; but in the heart of everjr 

 great city, in the busy hives of industry, civilization has itself brought 

 forth a race which, misguided by insane or reprobate leaders, may be 

 to it a source of greater danger, by their ignorance and brutality, than 

 were the Huns and Vandals to the civilization of the ancient world. 

 So wrote Macaulay, and Macaulay did not live to see the year 1871. 

 Again, he takes too dark a view. In point of fact, these dangers are 

 confined to certain points in time and space. Culture in general has 

 nothing to fear even from the Red Internationale. The Servile War, 

 the War of the Peasants, and the Revolt of the Anabaptists, were class- 

 psychoses of the same character as the present disturbances. As we 

 regard the former, so will future generations regard the insurrection of 

 June and the Commune ; and they will themselves have to deal with 

 the same disease under other forms. 



The peril of which I would here speak is not one which directly 

 threatens the stability of civilization. We are concerned rather about 

 the questionable form which civilization tends to assume, judging from 

 the direction in which it is at present developing. It is not easy to 

 define this peril, inasmuch as it is the product of a multitude of trivial 

 circumstances, amid which we ourselves live, and whose influence steals 



1 " Der Lebende hat Recht." Schiller. 



2 See Ludimar Hermann, "Die Vivisectionsfrage," Leipzig, 1877. Translated into 

 English by Archibald Dickson, under the title of " The Vivisection Question popularly 

 discussed," London, 1877. E. Du Bois-Reymond, "Der physiologische Unterricht sonst 

 und jetzt," Berlin, 1878, 21-23. 



