The Gifts of Science 133 



must be psychic, its only limit psychic perfection in all 

 its wonderful outgoings and infinite possibility of exis- 

 tence and expression, an ideal condition in all that we 

 know as the most lovable, spiritual, and best. 



Human perfection, for example, lies not in individual- 

 ism but in some form of socialism, since the ideal man is 

 related to his fellow, and his evolution will be complete 

 only as his relation to his fellow man is that of perfect 

 harmony, that is, of perfect love. 



The highest gift of science is, therefore, an added hope, 

 a new impulse to human faith. Science is optimistic in 

 the extreme. The golden age is yet to be. For the older 

 civilizations the age of gold was always in the past; but 

 the pessimism of that thought brought all the old em- 

 pires to wreck and ruin. Christianity attempted to 

 remedy the mischief by recapturing the golden era as an 

 article of faith absolutely essential to the highest concep- 

 tions of God, and the highest possibilities of man; and 

 now in these later days, comes our boldest speculative 

 scientific thought, demonstrating that as a fact, the gold- 

 en age has always been in the future, that every present 

 is a golden age to that which has gone before; we have 

 caught the equation of the terrestrial order, and every 

 fixed point known proclaims a curve whose sweep is not 

 downward, nor backward, but upward and outward and 

 onward to limitless perfection. 



There is no such thing as a level in scientific thought 

 or effort, no more than there is a level in a tree ; nothing 

 creeps, everything rises or disappears. Every advance 

 has infinity for its own. Suppose the dictum of science 

 had been, as once it was, that all the various forms of 



