THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES 529 



S 10. — Conclusion 



I have passed hastily and superficially across the vast 

 field of knowledge, omitting doubtless many things and 

 misplacing others. But still even this survey will not 

 have been fruitless if it has convinced the reader of the 

 immense variety and the enormous range of facts which 

 modern science is called upon to classify and resume. 

 Here before us — it may be but obscurely and as from 

 behind a veil — we see the wide heritage of science, upon 

 which hundreds of toilers in many countries have spent 

 their best years and their ripest powers, for the past two 

 centuries — and once for centuries two thousand years 

 before these. Here we see Egyptian and Greek, 

 American and European, alike working to a common 

 end, alike animated by a common zeal, by the same 

 steady enthusiasm of purpose. Here in the field of 

 knowledge we have the one meeting-ground for all ages 

 and for all nations ; here, indeed, age and nation cease to 

 be ; names like those of Galilei and Keppler, Newton 

 and Laplace, Dalton and Faraday, Linnaeus and Darwin 

 have become household words, kindling admiration, and 

 even devotion, wherever civilised man has established his 

 communities. 



How, we may ask, has it come to pass that mankind 

 has devoted all this time and toil in pursuit of knowledge 

 — why should men reverence the great pioneers of 

 science ? The answer is clear and definite. Man has 

 mastered all other forms of life in the struggle for exist- 

 ence by the development of a more complex perceptive 

 faculty and a more perfect reasoning power. In the 

 capacity he has evolved for resuming vast ranges of 

 phenomena in brief scientific formulae, in his knowledge of 

 natural law, and the foresight this knowledge gives him, 

 lie the sources of man's victory over other forms of life, 

 from the brute power of the wild beast to the subtle 

 power of the microscopic bacillus of some dread disease. 

 As the bull in its horns, or the eagle in its wings, so man 

 proudly rejoices in the strength of his mental powers, for 



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