Science has made it possible. The traditions of science are so diffused among the people at large that fools find it safe to defy them. Those who take dreams for realities; those whose memory impressions and motor dreams are uncontrolled through defective will; those who mistake subjective sensations produced by disease or disorder for objective conditions—all these are sooner or later dropped from existence, taking with them the whole line of their possible successors. The condition of mind which is favorable to mysticism, superstition, and revery is unfavorable to life, and the continuance of such conditions leads to death. On the billboard across the street I saw just now the advertisement of a lecture on the "ethical value of living in two worlds at once." Whoever thus lives in two worlds is certain soon to prove inadequate for either.
If all men sought healing from the blessed handkerchief of the lunatic, or from contact with old bones or old clothes; if all physicians used "revealed remedies," or the remedies Nature finds for each disease; if all business were conducted by faith; if all supposed "natural rights" of man were made the basis of legislation; if all the protean phases of that which Zangwill has cleverly called the "higher foolishness" were worked out in action—the insecurity of these beliefs would speedily appear. Not only civilization but civilized man himself would vanish from the earth. The safe shelter of the cave and hollow tree would be the cradle of the "new man" and the "new woman." The long and bloody road of progress through fool-killing would for centuries be traversed again. The fool lives in society only by sufferance of the sane; the weak, by the altruism of the strong. That is strong which endures. Might does not make right, but that which is right will justify itself by becoming might. What we call social virtues are the elements of race stability.
In the ordinary affairs of life it may be as safe to believe in mahatmas and magic, in cobolds and norns, as to have the vague notions of microbes and molecules, atoms and protoplasm, which form part of the mental equipment of the average modern man. But the difference appears when the knowledge is to be turned into action. Microbes and molecules become more real the more nearly one comes to deal with them. If one learns to use them they become as real as rocks or dollars and as capable of influencing human welfare. But those conceptions which are figments of ignorance and insanity become less real as we try to deal with them, and the action based on them is not safe nor effective.
So clearly is knowledge linked to action that in general among animals and men when action is not possible sensation is absent or not trustworthy. Objects too small to be touched are invisible
