946 
It has wrought a revolution in the whole 
industrial system. The day of the small 
workshop is gone. The day of the great 
factory is come. Every phase of human 
life is affected by those arts which have 
arisen from the applications of science, 
Comforts and luxuries which a hundred 
years ago were beyond the reach of the 
most wealthy, are now available for the use 
of even the poor. Aniline dyes give to 
fabrics used for clothing or decoration colors 
beside which those of the rainbow are pale 
neutral tints. Sanitary science arrests the 
massacre of the innocents, and increases 
the average duration of human life. Ances- 
thetics and antiseptics take away from sur- 
gery its pain and its peril. 
But, though our Association is an Acad- 
emy of Arts and Sciences, it has, at least in 
its later life, devoted itself chiefly to the 
cultivation of pure science, leaving to other 
organizations the development of the appli- 
cations of science. Fitly, then, our thoughts 
to-day dwell, not upon the vast progress of 
the useful arts, but upon the progress of 
pure science. Not the economic and the in- 
dustrial, but the intellectual history of our 
century claims our attention. 
I do not propose, in the few moments 
allotted to me this afternoon, to give an 
inventory of the important scientific dis- 
coveries of the nineteenth century. The 
time would not suffice therefor, even were 
my knowledge of the various sciences suffi- 
ciently encyclopzedic to justify me in the at- 
tempt. I wish rather to call your attention 
to a single broad, general aspect of the 
intellectual: history of our age. I wish to 
remind you in how large a degree those 
general ideas which make the distinction 
between the unscientific and the scientific 
view of nature have been the work of the 
nineteenth century. 
‘The first of these ideas is the extension 
of the universe in space. The unscientific 
mind looks upon the celestial bodies as 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. X. No. 261. 
mere appendages to the earth, relatively of 
small size, and at no very great distance. 
The scientific mind beholds the stellar 
universe stretching away, beyond meas- 
ured distances whose numerical expression 
transcends all power of imagination, into 
immeasurable immensities. 
The second of these ideas is the exten- 
sion of the universe in time. To the un- 
scientific mind, the universe has no history. 
Since it began to exist, it has existed sub- 
stantially in its present condition. Among 
Christian peoples, until the belief was cor- 
rected by science, the Hebrew tradition of 
a creative week six thousand years ago was 
generally accepted as historic fact. If, on 
the other hand, unscientific minds not pos- 
sessed of any supposed revelation in regard 
to the date of the world’s origin, thought 
of the universe as eternal, that eternity 
was still conceived as an eternity of unhis- 
toric monotony. The scientific mind sees 
in the present condition of the universe the 
monuments of a long history of progress. 
The third of these ideas is the unity of 
the universe. To the unscientific mind the 
universe is a chaos. To the scientific mind 
it becomes a cosmos. ‘To the unscientific 
mind, the processes of nature seem to be 
the result of forces mutually independent 
and often discordant. Polytheism in re- 
ligion is the natural counterpart of the un- 
scientific view of the universe. To the 
scientific mind, the boundless complexity 
of the universe is dominated by a supreme 
unity. One system of law, intelligible, 
formulable, pervades the universe, through 
all its measureless extension in space and 
time. The student of science may be theist 
or pantheist, atheist or agnostic ; polytheist 
he can never be. 
What then, let us ask ourselves, has been 
the contribution of our century to the de- 
velopment of these three ideas, which char- 
acterize the scientific view of nature :—the 
spatial extension of the universe, the his- 
