RELATION OF SCIENCE TO HUMAN LIFE—-SEDGWICK. 673 
It is not difficult for us, though it may be difficult to our descendants, 
to understand how hard it was for man to attune himself to this new, 
this mighty conception, and the intellectual history of the last three 
hundred years is a record of the struggles to make it prevail. 
Trained through long ages to believe that the heavens were the 
abode of the gods, who constantly interfered in the daily affairs 
of life and in the smallest operation of nature, it seemed to men 
impious to maintain that the earth was in the heavens, and to peer 
into the mysteries which surrounded them, and the endeavor to do 
so has been stoutly resisted; but the conflict, in so far as it has been 
a conflict with prejudice, is now over. It vanished in the triumphs 
of the modern views on the origin of man which will be forever 
associated with the names of Lamarck, Spencer, and Darwin. 
The triumph of these views does not mean that they are correct or 
that we know anything more about the great mystery of life than we 
did before. He would be a bold and a prejudiced man who made 
that assertion. What it means is this, that man is grown up, that he 
has cast off the intellectual tutelage under which he has hitherto 
existed, that’ he has attained complete intellectual freedom, and that 
all things in heaven and earth are legitimate subjects of investiga- 
tion. But it means even more than this; it means that he has at last 
come to realize the true significance of the injunction of the old 
Hebrew teacher: “ Fear God and keep His commandments, for that 
is the whole duty of man; ” and of the psalmist when he said: “* Make 
me to go in the path of Thy commandments, for therein do I delight. 
In keeping of them there is great reward.” But in order to keep 
them he must first ascertain what they are, and this he is determined 
to do, so far as his capacities permit, by the only method open to 
him—that of minute and arduous research. 
Let us hear then the conclusion of the whole matter. We claim for 
science no less a scope than this, the discovery of what God’s com- 
mandments are. Some of these we already know, for they have 
been handed down to us in our sacred books or have been discovered 
for us by our forefathers. To discover others is our whole duty; but 
the task is endless, and to the end of time man’s prayer must ever 
be, in the words of that splendid old collect now being read in our 
churches, “ Give us grace that we may cast away the works of dark- 
ness and put upon us the armor of light.” 
increased by the opening lines of Perdita’s next speech, in which is implied the 
modern doctrine that acquired characters are not inherited, for he makes 
Perdita reply: 
T’ll not put 
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them; 
No more than were I painted, I would wish 
This youth should say, ’t were well, and only therefore - 
Desire to breed by me. 
