266 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gdit0r^s %Mit. 



SCIENCE AND THE IDEAL. 



"TTTE have had frequent occasion 

 VV in these columns to refer to 

 the tirades against science indulged 

 in by writers who, because they can 

 not quite make ends meet in their 

 philosophy of the universe, strangely 

 allow themselves to think that sci- 

 ence must be at fault. At one mo- 

 ment it is M. Brunetiere, at another 

 Tolstoi, at another it is a Harvard 

 professor or a Western school su- 

 perintendent; but no very long time 

 elapses before we find somebody in 

 very unnecessary trouble, as it seems 

 to us, over the shortcomings of sci- 

 ence. The last sufferer to whom our 

 attention has been drawn is Dr. 

 John Beattie Crozier, the author of 

 two able works — Civilization and 

 Progress, and History of Intellec- 

 tual Development — who has lately 

 written a history of his own intel- 

 lectual development under the title 

 of My Inner Life. This writer de- 

 scribes the effect upon his mind of 

 a study of Mr. Spencer's Principles 

 of Psychology. " Then it was," he 

 says, " that the ideal within me, 

 struck to the heart, shriveled and 

 collapsed." This sad result was due 

 to the discovery, forced on him by 

 a study of the work in question, that 

 all our mental experiences have 

 equally a material basis, and that 

 from a material point of view or, as 

 ■we may say, seen from below, one 

 thought or feeling is as much justi- 

 fied as any other. Previously he 

 had considered that " such higher 

 faculties as veneration, benevolence, 

 conscientiousness, and the like, were 

 quite distinct in essential nature 

 from low ones, like revenge, lust, 

 vanity, cowardice, and deceit " ; but 

 now " all this was changed, and all 

 the faculties alike, the high and the 

 low, the noble and the base, the 



heroic and the self-indulgent, lay on 

 a dead level of moral and spiritual 

 equality ... all alike being but 

 vibrations, vibrations, vibrations, 

 nothing more." Consequently, " the 

 dethroned Ideal fell prone and head- 

 long like a false and usurping spirit ; 

 and my mind, bereaved of that 

 which had been its life, settled into 

 a deep and what, for a year or two, 

 threatened to be a permanent intel- 

 lectual gloom." 



It is a great pity that at this criti- 

 cal moment a very simple considera- 

 tion did not occur to this troubled 

 spirit. When we read the Ser- 

 mon on the Mount we read " words, 

 words, words " ; when we read some 

 horrible piece of profanity or inde- 

 cency it is again " words, words, 

 words " ; when we read the demon- 

 stration of a proposition in Euclid 

 it is " words, words, words " ; and, 

 again, when we take up Tennyson's 

 In Memoriam we find that its whole 

 tissue is " words, words, words." 

 But would it tend in the least to less- 

 en one's reverence for the Sermon 

 on the Mount to be reminded that it 

 was constructed out of the same 

 verbal elements as the piece of pro- 

 fanity? or would it diminish our 

 admiration for In Memoriam to be 

 told that it was constructed of words 

 just like the dullest piece of prose? 

 If not, then why should one be so 

 terribly disconcerted and depressed 

 to find' that all our mental life finds 

 its basis in vibrations? Or why 

 should the inference be drawn that, 

 because the basis is one, all that re- 

 poses on it must also be one in char- 

 acter and meaning? Is our delight 

 in the lily or the rose impaired by the 

 reflection that it springs from the 

 same soil that produces noisome 

 weeds; or do we gaze on the hum- 

 ming bird with less admiration be- 



