THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO MODERN CIVILIZATION. 
BY MAJOR CLARENCE E. DUTTON. 
Bead before the Texas Academy of Science, March 8, 1S95. 
My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester F. Ward, one of the profoundest 
thinkers, and a most luminous writer, in one of his fugitive papers 
draws a very forcible contrast between the world’s moral and its material 
progress — between its advancement in the principles and practice of 
justice founded upon benevolence, or, as Herbert Spencer terms it, al¬ 
truism, on the one hand, and its advancement in the production of those 
things which minister to our bodily comfort and sensual enjoyment. 
Ward thinks that moral progress has not been great. Some of it there 
has been, but much less than there ought to have been. Whatever has 
been gained along this line has been at a snail’s pace, and when the much 
greater enlightenment of the world is considered it is now a little, and 
only a little, better morally than it was 2000 years ago. But when we 
contemplate its material progress, how vast the change! how swift of 
late, and yet swifter and swifter, the advancement! 
Whoever inquires into the state of prevailing morality, with a view of 
estimating human progress, will probably reach conclusions which are 
largely dependent upon his own temperament and intellectual training. 
In all periods of the world there have been many good men, and some 
great ones, whose feelings have been harrowed b} r the prevailing deprav¬ 
ity of their kind, and who are remembered cliiefty for their lamentations 
over it, and for their exhortations to a better life. The spirit of Jere¬ 
miah never has been, and probably never will be, wholly laid. To such 
men the moral world presents a dark and dismal aspect, and they feel 
impelled to assume the attitude of the warning prophet. The colors of 
the rainbow look brighter the darker the pall of storm clouds behind 
them, and those who are chasing the rainbow of moral perfection and 
calling upon the world to follow them, seem to strengthen their appeals 
by painting the moral conditions of the present in the darkest possible 
shades. 
On the other hand, the most optimistic must admit that the amount of 
vice and misery in the world is vastly greater than it ought to be. If 
old crimes have gone out of vogue, new ones have been invented. Jails 
are still big and roomy and well tenanted, and it may be said in all seri¬ 
ousness that if justice were fully done they would be bigger and more 
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