Page:Poet Lore, volume 4, 1892.djvu/642

 but to satisfy both; therefore I ask your permission to finish my talk, and then the experiment shall immediately follow.”

“Very well!” all cried on the right, on the left, and in the centre; and my friend resumed,—

“The modern man’s proud boast of progress is really pitiable. It seems that a moment’s success, often questionable, of some ingenious head, dazzles a thousand others with a false vision of an amazing progress; and yet man’s powerlessness appears daily in a more and more intensive light. ‘The master and king of Nature,’ whose spirit is said to force Nature herself to bow to him,—this proud, vain, conceited giant among creatures will, in the light of exact science and logic, be shown to be a dwarf who really deserves pity. Early in our youth our teachers told us that the human sight was feebler than that of the eagle or the falcon; that man’s hearing, smell, touch, and other senses were duller than those of many animals. Man has known this long, hence his dreadful chase after some means to sharpen his senses. He strengthened them artificially, to be the more convinced how powerless, miserable, and wretched a being he is. He took a dissecting-knife, found and classified his organs, endeavored to find out their functions, established their importance and necessity, and became convinced that the life of the master of all creation, created ‘in God’s own image,’ did not and does not substantially differ from the life of the most subordinate creatures. He has traced the operations of his mind; he has gone far, but the boundary line between good and evil he has not yet defined exactly. He has penetrated deeply into the interior of the earth, and still deeper into the universe, with his physical and mental eye; he has endeavored to ascertain the laws of the world; but with all this he has been unable to repel the awful truth that merciless death and oblivion are awaiting him. Be born, live, and suffer, then perish, crumble into atoms, and vanish forever,—such is the horrible perspective which the progress of science opens to man. To feign ignorance, to console oneself with illusions and Utopian fiction, does not help any, and is cowardly. Let us remember to what we have come. Yet how do we regard human life in view of this horrible truth? Do we put a just value