Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/724

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

derfulness, any of its perfection, but rather has disclosed new marvels behind those which first struck man's attention. The widening of the circle of the unknown has only served to confront us with deeper and deeper mysteries. Science has ruled out miracle and magic from the order of events, but it is to pick up the wizard's wand itself, bring up before us daily stranger and grander phenomena, only the more inexplicable and amazing because of the certainty we feel that somehow there is no exception in them to our most ordinary experience.

Science has expelled witch and elf, nymph and demon, and thus depopulated the supernatural world; but in the place of this uncanny brood, the thought of whose capricious intervention paralyzed the will and debauched the heart, the universe has been filled with the presence of One, Eternal and Infinite, from whose perfect law we can never escape. The more clearly we discern the path on which science has led the world, the less fear shall we have that it is all a preparation for precipitating us into some godless abyss. Put the case squarely before any one in its full significance, and there is no one, I think, who would prefer to go back to the cosmic baby-house of the middle ages. Who would vault in again the immensity of space? Who would cut down to six ordinary evenings and mornings the activity of Him who inhabiteth eternity? Who would relinquish the confidence and hope inspired by the unswerving progress of that single divine purpose that links the ages together?

Thus has science given to the cause of faith assistance which more than countervails whatever injury it may have done.

And so has Religion also, in reality, helped science—helped, I believe, even more than she has hindered.

It is to the understanding that the great achievements of physical inquiry are commonly referred. Science is spoken of as a domain of dry light and clear-cut facts, and religion is contrasted with it as the realm of emotion. But how could the intellect have ever gained its great victories without the aid of the heart? how could the senses have ever penetrated into Nature as they have done, had they not been carried on the wings of the spirit? What could science accomplish without the emotions of enthusiasm and devotion, the instructive feeling of truth and beauty, the love of Nature for its own dear sake? "It is in vain, I think," said Prof. Tyndall, at London, in 1869, "to separate moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force which push his intellect into action." The reading of the works of three men, he proceeds to say—Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte—neither of them friendly to the scientific spirit, carried him victoriously through mathematical studies and physical investigations, and made him the man of science that he is. To the same effect is the striking declaration of that other great leader of scien-