534 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gooned by the voice of authority, and therefore they are not all 

 working on the same lines ; but they are working, and their sin- 

 cere labors will not be in vain. 



The question, however, at present is whether the various lib- 

 eral schools referred to by Mr. Mallock stand committed to the 

 new dogmatic system which he has described. The first thing 

 that strikes a careful reader of his article is that he has not given 

 a single quotation from any leader of modern thought indicating 

 acceptance of the views in question — a thing which it would cer- 

 tainly have been easy to do if these views were, as he maintains, 

 fundamental with them all. It is an illusion into which a man 

 easily falls, whose own thought has run in dogmatic lines, to sup- 

 pose that others must have constructed for themselves a philo- 

 sophical or logical framework of equal rigidity. The truth can 

 not, therefore, be too often repeated that the essential mark of 

 modern thought is the taking of the world just as it is, and the 

 reduction of all theories more or lees to the rank of working hy- 

 potheses. "Whether the changes in human affairs support the 

 theory of a great secular drift toward better conditions is a ques- 

 tion to be decided simply according to the evidence, which can 

 hardly under any circumstances be of a demonstrative character 

 in the full sense. The simple fact that men have the power of 

 rationally adapting means to ends is enough to prompt to effort 

 and inspire hope, for in this power lies the key to the highest pos- 

 sibilities of advancement. He who knows can, and, as long as 

 this is the case, the path of knowledge will be the upward path. 

 Knowledge, to be sure, is sometimes abused. Why ? For want 

 of more knowledge. There may come periods in the history of a 

 people when the virtue of such knowledge as they possess has 

 become exhausted, and when in the rude school of experience they 

 may have to learn other practical lessons as the necessary condi- 

 tion of further advance ; but how all this may be is a matter for 

 which no individual man is responsible, and one who should wait 

 to devise a practical philosophy for himself until he had cast the 

 horoscope of humanity would not be wise. The late Mr. Arnold 

 thought he had discovered clear traces of " a power, not ourselves, 

 that makes for righteousness " ; but he did not wait for the formu- 

 lation of that discovery, if such it was, before striving to order his 

 own life on principles of righteousness. And if some one comes 

 forward and points out, as one critic at least of Mr. Arnold did, 

 that whether "the power" is making for righteousness or not 

 depends upon the stage of a nation's development, there being 

 periods when the general forces make rather for unrighteousness, 

 no one is obliged, even though he may regard the criticism as 

 pertinent and well-founded, to abandon his previously adopted 

 plan of life. 



