THE HIGHEST AIM OF THE PHYSICIST 677 



life according to the approach to knowledge that we possess. , Nature is 

 inexorable; it punishes the child who unknowingly steps off a precipice 

 quite as severely as the grown scientist who steps over, with full knowl- 

 edge of all the laws of falling bodies and the chances of their being 

 correct. Both fall to the bottom and in their fall obey the gravitational 

 laws of inorganic matter, slightly modified by the muscular contortions 

 of the falling object but not in any degree changed by the previous 

 belief of the person. Natural laws there probably are, rigid and un- 

 changing ones at that. Understand them and they are beneficent: we 

 can use them for our purposes and make them the slaves of our desires. 

 Misunderstand them and they are monsters who may grind us to powder 

 or crush us in the dust. Nothing is asked of us as to our belief: they 

 act unswervingly and we must understand them or suffer the conse- 

 quences. Our only course, then, is to act according to the chances of 

 our knowing the right laws. If we act correctly, right; if we act incor- 

 rectly, we suffer. If we are ignorant we die. What greater fool, then, 

 than he who states that belief is of no consequence provided it is sincere. 

 An only child, a beloved wife, lies on a bed of illness. The physician 

 says that the disease is mortal; a minute plant called a microbe has 

 obtained entrance into the body and is growing at the expense of its 

 tissues, forming deadly poisons in the blood or destroying some vital 

 organ. The physician looks on without being able to do anything. 

 Daily he comes and notes the failing strength of his patient and daily 

 the patient goes downward until he rests in his grave. But why has the 

 physician allowed this? Can we doubt that there is a remedy which 

 shall kill the microbe or neutralize its poison? Why, then, has he not 

 used it? He is employed to cure but has failed. His bill we cheerfully 

 pay because he has done his best and given a chance of cure. The 

 answer is ignorance. The remedy is yet unknown. The physician is 

 waiting for others to discover it or perhaps is experimenting in a crude 

 and unscientific manner to find it. Is not the inference correct, then, 

 that the world has been paying the wrong class of men? Would not 

 this ignorance have been dispelled had the proper money been used in 

 the past to dispel it? Such deaths some people consider an act of God. 

 What blasphemy to attribute to God that which is due to our own and 

 our ancestors' selfishness in not founding institutions for medical re- 

 search in sufficient number and with sufficient means to discover the 

 truth. Such deaths are murder. Thus the present generation suffers 

 for the sins of the past and we die because our ancestors dissipated their 

 wealth in armies and navies, in the foolish pomp and circumstance of 



