Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/41

Rh to the conclusion that this 'purposiveness' no more exists than the much-talked-of 'beneficence' of the Creator. These optimistic views have, unfortunately, as little real foundation as the favorite phrase, 'moral order of the universe,' which is illustrated in an ironical way by the history of all nations. The dominion of 'moral' popes, and their pious Inquisition, in the mediæval times, is not less significant of this than the present prevailing militarism, with its 'moral' apparatus of needle-guns and other refined instruments of murder."

This passage, as will be seen, takes us into the region of morals. There is no question here of permitting the hypothesis of an originating force outside of matter, if we feel such an hypothesis intellectually necessary; but we have instead a denial ex cathedra of the existence of such a thing as a moral order or of such a person as a beneficent Creator. This is not merely atheous; it is atheistic. An investigator of nature has a right to say that the question of the existence of a beneficent Creator or the non-existence of such a Being does not affect his investigations; but he has no right, upon the strength of investigations purely physical, to deny the existence of beneficence as an attribute of the Creator, if a Creator there be.

But I am not surprised to find utterance given to some expression of opinion as to the moral character of the Creator, when once the legitimate boundary of physical science has been transgressed. If a man can be satisfied with examining nature as he finds it, whether as an observer or as a mathematician, the question of a Creator need no more trouble him than it troubles the man who is busied with integrating equations or devising a new calculus; but if he is not satisfied with this, then he can scarcely stop short of a complete investigation of the whole question of theism; and the elements necessary to this complete investigation are certainly not to be found in physics, any more than you can find in physics the material for a complete treatise on poetry or music or painting.

For, in truth, physical science does not afford the basis even for a complete investigation of ourselves. When anthropology is classed among the physical sciences, it is necessary to confine the investigations comprehended under the title to the consideration of man as a creature having certain material attributes and leaving certain material marks of his existence in past ages: a study of the highest interest, and one which students have a right to call anthropology, if they please: but manifestly anthropology can not be translated by the words "the science of man," for the science of necessity leaves out of consideration all that is most interesting to man or which makes man most interesting.

To say that physical science does not include the study of man is perhaps nearly the same thing as saying that man is not a part of nature; and though such an assertion may seem paradoxical, there is