64 SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 
grows steadily. It is there; you can see it. That I conceive 
to be the ultimate value of its material side; it proves that 
your progress is real. Science is not a philosophical or 
metaphysical system, a scheme of thought, which may be over- 
come by a greater scheme of thought to be developed in the 
future. It may look like it. You may hear men discussing, 
like the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, how many fairy 
electrons can dance on the point of a needle; but there issues 
from the discussion not a nightmare literature to hold men’s 
minds in bondage and mystification, but something like wire- 
less telegraphy to relieve an anxious heart that is yearning for 
the safety of a friend in peril a thousand miles away. Science 
is a revelation, a revelation that will stand the test of time. 
‘Poets may sing, and eternal truth may be in their song. The 
great races of the world may each have their own prophet, 
and what they have said about what was and what is to be may 
have eternal truth in it. You may believe one or you may 
believe the other. It depends, I suppose, on where you were 
born, or on the measure of authority some human being has 
exercised upon you, or the extent to which your hope or fear 
allows you to be-swayed by some enchanting vision. Science 
does not enter here. It pretends to no final knowledge of the 
ultimate or the infinite. It has gone after all but a little way 
yet into the mysteries of great Nature. What it has revealed 
is there for all the races and generations of mankind to see 
and acknowledge, and for none to deny, unless forsooth, in the 
strange wanderings of the human spirit, it pleases them to 
deny everything outside that spirit. So much as is revealed 
we may believe. How much we may hope is at our option— 
an indulgence that few will resist in its clamorous onset. Yet 
there is something stronger still that can come, and should 
come to give peace to our spirit—reverence and humility, as 
we gaze upon the little fragments of truth that our Titanic 
efforts have quarried from the illimitable store. 
