ON IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 31 



If this talk were true, I, for one, should not 

 greatly care to toil in the service of natural know- 

 ledge. I think I would just as soon be quietly 

 chipping my own flint axe, after the manner of my 

 forefathers a few thousand years back, as be 

 troubled with the endless malady of thought 

 which now infests us all, for such reward. But I 

 venture to say that such views are contrary alike 

 to reason and to fact. Those who discourse in 

 such fashion seem to me to be so intent upon 

 trying to see what is above Nature, or what is 

 behind her, that they are blind to what stares 

 them in the face in her. 



I should not venture to speak thus strongly if 

 my justification were not to be found in the 

 simplest and most obvious facts, if it needed 

 more than an appeal to the most notorious truths 

 to justify my assertion, that the improvement of 

 natural knowledge, whatever direction it has taken, 

 and however low the aims of those who may have 

 commenced it has not only conferred practical 

 benefits on men, but, in so doing, has effected a 

 revolution in their conceptions of the universe and 

 of themselves, and has profoundly altered their 

 modes of thinking and their views of right and 

 wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seeking to 

 satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which 

 can alone still spiritual cravings. I say 

 natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the * 

 laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those 



