December 18, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



909 



formed the world and owes little debt of 

 obligation to any past age. It has driven 

 mystery out of the Universe ; it has made 

 malleable stuff of the hard world, and laid 

 it out in its elements upon the table of 

 every class-room. Its own masters have 

 known its limitations ; they have stopped 

 short at the confines of the physical uni- 

 verse; they have declined to reckon with 

 spirit or with the stuffs of the mind, have 

 eschewed sense and confined themselves to 

 sensation. But their work has been so 

 stupendous that all other men of all other 

 studies have been set staring at their meth- 

 ods, imitating their ways of thought, ogling 

 their results. We look in our study of the 

 classics nowadays more at the phenomena 

 of language than at the movement of spirit ; 

 we suppose the world which is invisible to 

 be unreal ; we doubt the eflfieacy of feeling 

 and exaggerate the efficacy of knowledge ; 

 we speak of society as an organism and be- 

 lieve that we can contrive for it a new en- 

 vironment which will change the very 

 nature of its constituent parts ; worst of all, 

 we believe in the present and in the future 

 more than in the past, and deem the newest 

 theory of society the likeliest. This is the 

 disservice scientific study has done us ; it 

 has. given us agnosticism in the realm of 

 philosophy, scientific anarchism in the field 

 of politics. It has made the legislator con- 

 fident that he can create, and the philoso- 

 pher sure that Grod cannot. Past experi- 

 ence is discredited, and the laws of matter 

 are supposed to apply to spirit and the 

 make-up of society. 



Let me say once more, this is not the 

 fault of the scientist ; he has done his work 

 with an intelligence and success which can- 

 not be too much admired. It is the work of 

 the noxious, intoxicating gas which has 

 somehow got into the lungs of the rest of 

 us from out the crevices of his workshop — 

 a gas, it would seem, which forms only in 

 the outer air, and where men do not know 



the right use of their lungs. I should 

 tremble to see social reform led by men who 

 had breathed it; I should fear nothing bet- 

 ter than utter destruction from a revolution 

 conceived and led in the scientific spirit. 

 Science has not changed the laws of social 

 growth or betterment. Science has not 

 changed the nature of society, has not made 

 history a whit easier to understand, human 

 nature a whit easier to reform. It has won 

 for us a great liberty in the physical world, 

 a liberty from superstitious fear and from 

 disease, a freedom to use nature as a 

 familiar servant; but it has not freed us 

 from ourselves. It has not purged us of 

 passion or disposed us to virtue. It has 

 not made us less covetous or less ambitious 

 or less self-indulgent. On the contrary, it 

 may be suspected of having enhanced our 

 passions, by making wealth so quick to 

 come, so fickle to stay. It has wrought 

 such instant, incredible improvement in all 

 the physical setting of our life, that we have 

 grown the more impatient of the unreformed 

 condition of the part it has not touched or 

 bettered, and we want to get at our spirits 

 and reconstruct them in like radical fashion 

 by like processes of experiment. We have 

 broken with the past and have come into a 

 a new world. 



Can any one wonder, then, that I ask for 

 the old drill, the old memory of times gone 

 by, the old schooling in precedent and 

 tradition, the old keeping of faith with the 

 past, as a preparation for leadership in days 

 of social change? We have not given sci- 

 ence too big a place in our education, but 

 we have made a perilous mistake in giving 

 it too great a preponderance in method over 

 every other branch of study. We must make 

 the humanities human again ; must recall 

 what manner of men we are; must turn 

 back once more to the region of practicable 

 ideals. 



Of course, when all is said, it is not learn- 

 ing, but the spirit of service, that will give 



