will rise victorious over all the ilia oi life. There is an im- 

 pulse in life to seek more life. The youth's dreams of rid- 

 ing' out into some wild country to deliver a captive maiden, 

 are the scouts of his life preparing for the time when he 

 will, not in dreame, but in reaJ life, do heroic deeds. Now, 

 since life socks a larger life, it is of intrcrest to kno\\- what 

 helps it, and what hinders it in the quest. W'e are ever in- 

 creasing in this knowledge. To-day we know better wliat 

 affects life for good or evil, than in any past age. And our 

 question here is: how doe«^ science affect life in its scope, 

 its character, and it-s humanitarian achievements? 



Om' subject, it will be seen, is practical. I have, in 

 my present inquiry, no concenx with the question whether 

 there is in matter the promirse and potency of all terrestrial 

 life. Neither shall I di&cusfs whether the atom, the ion, 

 or the vortex in omnipresent ether, is the final explanation 

 of the physical cosmos. Nor have I here any particular 

 interest in the question whether the protoplasmic cell is a 

 sufficient account of the energy of cosmic life, either in its 

 vegetable, animal or human form. I do not question the 

 value of these hypotheses as methods of measurement in 

 their own sphere, but, I may say in passing, it seems to 

 me they utterly break down as explanatiorifs of the cosmic 

 life which reveals itself in the conscious experience of each 

 human life. What is before me ifs the action of living 

 science: iscience as it lives in the living man, and by which 

 the blacksmith cunningly hammers a piec-e of iron into a 

 well-fitting horse shoe. It was said in Scotland, in my 

 young days, of the man who could strongly, and at the same 

 time rythmically, svring the scythe in the hay field, that 

 he had the "art o't," or, better still, it was said "that he 

 had it in him." lie had not merely the idea of mowing: 

 the idea had transmitted itself into instinctive action. And 

 in these days of applied science the transforming of mere 

 knowledge into instinctive knowledge has increased beyond 

 computation. At first it is an intellectual scheme, at last 

 it is an impulse to act, alert with all the energy of life. It 



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