308 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



beings, in whom thinking determines action, and whose 

 highest concern it is that thought shall be brought into the 

 exactest harmony with things and this is the supreme 

 purpose of education. 



If, in this statement of the scope and work of science, 

 we have not laid stress upon those great achievements by 

 which it has given man power over the material world, it 

 is not because we undervalue them. They are noble re- 

 sults, but they are abundantly eulogized, and their very 

 splendour has operated to dim the view of other conquests 

 less conspicuous but even more important. Telegraphs, 

 steam engines, and the thousand devices to which science 

 has led, are great things ; but what, after all, is their value 

 compared with the emancipation of the human spirit from 

 the thralldom of ignorance, which the world owes to this 

 agency ? Rightly to appreciate what science has accom- 

 plished for humanity, we must remember not only that it 

 has raised men to the understanding and enjoyment of the 

 beautiful order of Nature, but that it has put an end to the 

 baneful superstitions by which for ages men's lives were 

 darkened, to the sufferings of witchcraft, and the terrors of 

 the untaught imagination which filled the world with malig- 

 nant agencies. 



It is this immense extension of the conception of sci- 

 ence, in which all the higher subjects of human interest are 

 now included, that .gives it an ever-increasing claim on the 

 attention of the public. Besides its indispensable use in 

 all avocations, and its constant application in the sphere of 

 daily life, it is also profoundly affecting the whole circle of 

 questions, speculative and practical, which have agitated 

 the minds of men for generations. Whoever cares to know 

 whither inquiry is tending, or how opinion is changing, 

 what old ideas are perishing, and what new ones are rising 

 into acceptance briefly, whoever desires to be intelligent 

 as to contemporary movements in the world of thought 



