August 30, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



307 



that we come at last, even among ourselves 

 in scientific societies, to the unity of opinion 

 and the unity of purpose which lead from 

 ideas to their fruitful applications. 



From the earliest historic times certainlj'^, 

 if not from the dawn of primitive humanity, 

 down to the present day, the problem 

 of the universe has been the most attract- 

 ive and the most illusive subject of the 

 attention of thinking men. All systems of 

 philosophy, religion and science are alike 

 in having the solution of this problem for 

 their ultimate object. Many such systems 

 and sub-systems have arisen, flourished and 

 vanished, only to be succeeded by others 

 in the seemingly Sisyphean task. Gradu- 

 ally, however, in the lapse of ages there have 

 accumulated some elements of knowledge 

 which give inklings of partial solutions ; 

 though it would appear that the best current 

 opinion of philosophy, religion a.nd science 

 would again agree in the conclusion that we 

 are yet immeasurably distant from a com- 

 plete solution. Almost equally attractive 

 and interesting, and far more instructive, as 

 it appears to me, in our own time, is the con- 

 templation of the ways in which man has 

 attacked this perennial riddle. It is, in- 

 deed, coming to be more and more im- 

 portant for science to know how primitive, 

 barbarous and civilized man has visualized 

 the conditions of, and reached his conclu- 

 sions with respect to, this problem of the 

 centuries ; for it is only by means of a lively 

 knowledge of the baseless hypotheses and 

 the fruitless methods of our predecessors 

 that we can hope to prevent history from 

 repeating itself unfavorably. 



Looking back over the interval of two to 

 three thousand years that connects us by 

 more or less authentic records with our 

 distinguished ancestors, we are at once 

 struck by the admirable confidence they 

 had acquired in their ability to solve this 

 grand problem. Kot less admirable, also, 

 for their ingenuity and for the earnestness 



with which they were advanced, are the 

 hypotheses and arguments by which men 

 satisfied themselves of the security of their 

 tenets and theories. Roughly speaking, it 

 would appear that the science of the uni- 

 verse received its initial impulse from 

 earliest man in the hypothesis that the 

 world is composed of two parts ; the first 

 and most important part being in fact, if 

 not always so held ostensibly, himself, and 

 the other part being the aggregate of what- 

 ever else was left over. Though dimly per- 

 ceived and of little account in its effects, 

 this is, apparently, the working hypothesis 

 of many men in the civilized society of to- 

 day. But the magnitude of the latter part 

 and its inexorable relations to man seem 

 to have led him speedily to the adoption of 

 a second hypothesis, namely, that the latter 

 part, or world external to himself, is also 

 the abode of sentient beings, some of a 

 lower and some of a higher order than 

 man ; their role tending on the whole to 

 make his sojourn on this planet tolerable and 

 his exit from it creditable, while yet wield- 

 ing at times a more or less despotic influence 

 over him. 



How the details of these hypotheses have 

 been worked out is a matter of something 

 like history for a few nationalities, and is a 

 matter absorbing the attention of anthropol- 

 ogists, archeologists and ethnologists as it 

 concerns races in general. Without going 

 far afield in these profoundly interesting 

 and instructive details, it may sufiice for 

 the present purposes to cite two facts which 

 seem to furnish the key to a substantially 

 correct interpretation of subsequent de- 

 velopments. 



The first of these is that the early dual- 

 istic and antithetical visualization of the 

 problem in question has persisted with 

 wonderful tenacity down to the present 

 day. The accessible and familiar was set 

 over against the inaccessible and unfa- 

 miliar ; or what we now call the natural, 



