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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or moral. He admits that Judaism is 

 materialistic in this sense, that it con- 

 cerns itself exclusively with the present 

 life, and he maintains that, just because 

 it does so limit the scope of its calcu- 

 lations and efforts, do things, so far as 

 this world is concerned, go well with 

 it. "The substantial difference," he ob- 

 serves, "between Judaism and Chris- 

 tianity is, that the one desires to teach 

 us how to live, the other how to die. 

 Judaism discourses of the excellence 

 of temporal pleasure, the divinity — if I 

 may be permitted to use the expres- 

 sion — of length of days; Christianity, 

 on the other hand, emphasizes the ex- 

 cellence of sorrow and the divinity of 

 death. It is no wonder, then," he con- 

 tinues, "if, when competition arises 

 between a race trained and hardened 

 for worldly conflict and communities 

 who have been taught to regard it as 

 a duty to lay up their chief treasure in 

 another world and to despise this, suc- 

 cess should fall to the former rather 

 than to the latter." 



There is probably a measure of truth 

 in these views. The Jews have, on the 

 whole, been objected to because they 

 have been too thrifty. The complaint 

 has not been that they could not keep 

 up with the pace of the rest of the 

 world, but rather that they had a pace 

 of their own, with which the rest of 

 the world found it difficult to keep up. 

 It is true also that a great bane, per- 

 haps the chief bane, of the Christian 

 world, has been a want of adaptation of 

 means to ends, and a certain indispo- 

 sition to take the laws of life — par- 

 ticularly its physical laws — seriously. 

 "Whence, if not from this cause, the 

 huge pauper population with which 

 Christendom has ever been burdened ? 

 Whence the failures of every kind with 

 which the whole extent of society is 

 strewn? There are people by the thou- 

 sand who do not know a fact when 

 they see it. There are thousands who 

 dash themselves against the irresistible, 

 or seek to flee the inevitable, instead 



of recognizing that what must be must 

 be, and that the part of wisdom is to 

 bow to inexorable law and seek to make 

 with it the best terms possible. The 

 world abounds with incapacity arising 

 apparently from a kind of fateful 

 wrongheadedness. We have thinkers 

 who can not act, and actors who can 

 not think, and people overflowing with 

 sentiment who do more mischief with 

 their good intentions than others with 

 their bad. We have nothing to do with 

 any of the theological implications of 

 Mr. Wolfs article — which we need 

 hardly say was not written with any 

 theological purpose — but we incline to 

 think that the main lesson which it 

 contains is one which even those who 

 would repudiate those implications 

 most strongly might well consent to 

 learn. That lesson we take to be this : 

 that so much of " materialism " as con- 

 sists in taking a clear view and firm 

 grasp of facts, and in looking to facts 

 rather than to fancies or sentiments 

 for guidance, constitutes an important 

 element of success in life, and should 

 be so recognized in every scheme of 

 education. To organize education, in- 

 deed, on any other basis, is but to in- 

 vite failure, defeat, and misery. What- 

 ever superiority may be assigned to the 

 spiritual nature of man as contrasted 

 with his physical part, the dependence 

 of the former on the latter can hardly 

 be questioned. When the bodily estate 

 sinks into wretchedness, the moral 

 character too often finds the same 

 level. On every ground, therefore, we 

 want a system of teaching that will 

 help a man to help himself, thus pro- 

 viding at once for his physical comfurt, 

 his self-respect, and his intellectual and 

 moral development. Mr. Spencer has 

 said all this, as well as it can be said, 

 in his treatise on education ; and Mr. 

 Lucien Wolf, following a very different 

 path, and with very diflferent objects in 

 view, brings us again face to face with 

 truths which we can not take too seri- 

 ously to heart. 



