Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/480

 a peculiar people." Nothing henceforth is too good for us, no "waiting upon Providence" unjustifiable. If, on the other hand, we have no guarantee that we are in any special sense the nurslings of Heaven, then it rests with us to make the best of whatever endowments we find ourselves actually possessing. We dismiss conceit from our minds, and apply ourselves simply to know what is, in order that we may be able to exert the widest and most potent influence possible on our environment.

In further illustration of the superior dignity of our planet, it is observed that "that divine spark, the soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook," etc. Admitting that the soul had a free choice in the matter, we must credit it with a good deal of sense in not betaking itself to a globe in which it could never by any possibility have found a body. But again, I ask, is this the voice of Science? No; it is the voice of the non-scientific and theological Mr. Fiske, who has undertaken to edit, much to the latter's hurt, the scientific Mr. Fiske. I really do not believe that the scientific Mr. Fiske knows anything about any exercise of choice by the soul as to what sphere it should inhabit. The latter simply knows that, under certain terrestrial conditions, what we commonly call "soul" manifests itself—no more.

A fine sentiment is uttered in the following passage: "To pursue unflinchingly the methods of science requires dauntless courage and a faith that nothing can shake. Such courage and such loyalty to Nature brings its own reward." Then what is the "own reward" of such admirable conduct? It is that we are enabled to see distinctly "for the first time how the creating and perfecting of man is the goal toward which Nature's work has all the while been tending." Here I must enter a respectful protest. I can not conceive that any special conclusion whatever, however edifying or comfortable, can be correctly spoken of as the natural (for that is the force here of "own") reward of loyalty to truth. If loyalty to truth brings its own reward, that reward can only consist in a confirmed habit of intellectual sincerity, and whatever of other moral excellence springs from such loyalty. Surely the strict scientific stand-point which our author promised to maintain has been badly deserted, when we are told that, if we are only loyal to truth, all our conclusions will come out in the most satisfactory shape. "Be loyal to truth," I should prefer to say, "and your reward will be that you will discover the truth in larger measure than you would otherwise do, and will have the signal advantage of being able to adapt your life to the truth instead of to fiction." That, in connection with strengthened moral character, seems to me to be the appropriate reward of loyalty to the truth, not the confirmation of any cherished theories. "The Darwinian theory," we are told, "makes it (human life) seem more than ever the chief object of that