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. 



