COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 325 



knowledge through experience, wisdom through un- 

 derstanding, and profit through obedience. 



But that profit is small indeed that cannot be com- 

 pounded, added up, rightly placed, conserved, and 

 handed on from life to life, for life again to supple- 

 ment. The vital power of science is so compounded. 

 Science lives and grows only so far as her profits are 

 conserved, and transmitted through her own peculiar 

 instruments of conveyance to fertile soil, from genera- 

 tion to generation. She shelters no self-corrupting se- 

 crets. In the very catholicity of her altruistic give 

 and her egoistic take, in her incoming endowments of 

 truth, and in her educational outgivings of truth, is the 

 warm vital power of an unsatiable appetite and an 

 unstinting benevolence. Science, like life itself, freely 

 gives to fructify, and herself is fructified through her 

 receiving. 



In the same way, religion and philosophy blossom 

 into art and constructive action wherever there is this 

 vital reciprocity of egoism and altruism. In the subtle 

 religion and philosophy of the ancient East, and in 

 the religion and philosophy of the modern West, the 

 underlying motives and questions were and are the 

 same as those of science: How was the world created? 

 Why do things live and grow? What is good and evil, 

 right and wrong? What creates, what preserves, and 

 what destroys? What must man obey? How may 

 man profit by his obedience, and what shall the profit 

 be? 



While science answers in terms of exact measure- 

 ments and natural laws, rather than in terms of an 

 anthropomorphic will to create and a will to destroy, 

 she contributes nothing more to the answers, nor can 



