SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 65 
It is because I see in science the surest and most permanent 
springs of reverence that I care to fight for it, that I grow 
vehement in its defence, urgent with itsclaims. Iam outraged 
when I hear it subject to the flippant jests of some self-styled 
humanists—half-educated men I should rather call them, who 
stand deaf amid the deepest harmonies of nature. 
I deplore, like other men, and more than most, the mud of 
materialism that fringes the path of science. I do not know 
that a bigoted man of science is more harmful than any other 
kind of bigot, but he is sufficiently unedifying, and I will gladly 
join in suppressing him. But that the essential tendency of -~ 
f science is materialistic I would deny with my last breath, and if 
there is anything unprovable about which I feel confident, it 
is that science is destined to provide humanity with the abiding 
reverence, the love of truth, the freedom and sanity of mind 
and spirit, without which religion and morals are but names 
and life is not worth living. 
a 
2461 I 
