Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/84

74 to the full success of the experiment. To this end, special instruction in methods of personal hygiene and the hygiene of the house will be given to all, while the training of experts in public sanitation will be provided for by the public. On account of his special acquaintance with the principles of physiology and their hygienic applications, the physician will naturally become the teacher of the people in these matters, thus acting the part of a reformer in the best sense of that much-abused word, since he is the true representative of modern science as applied to the art of living in a manner alone worthy of human beings.

The moral training of children will make a part of the daily education of all their faculties, by methods which conform, in a general way, with Froebel's system. Public instruction in practical methods of moral training of children will also be provided for parents, who may not themselves have experienced the advantages of such training, and who may not fully realize that the foundations of the moral character, as of the physical health, are laid in early infancy and childhood.

To the necromancer of old was attributed the power of subverting the forces of Nature and setting her laws at defiance; but modern science has realized the pretensions of these charlatans, not by defying but by investigating the laws of Nature, and she has not only read the secrets of the stars in her magic mirror, but has penetrated to the hidden sources of human character; and while recognizing the constraining influence of external conditions in human development, she also discerns the power of human invention, human energy, and, above all, human sympathy in modifying the environment, not only by subduing the natural forces, but by directing and controlling social conditions. Under the guiding star of science, human nature reacts upon Nature, remolding her forms and redirecting her forces in accordance with its own desires and needs.

But the triumph of the scientific method is, as yet, far from complete; and not until a science of morals is as definitely recognized as a science of eclipses, or of any physical phenomenon whatever, can the era of science be said to have more than begun. When she shall have mastered the principles of morals, as she already has the principles of physics, and when the science of morals, thus formulated, shall have become an applied science, then real progress in morals will be assured, and will be as much more rapid than it has hitherto been, as the advance in physical science in these modern times has surpassed the slow growth of the pre-scientific era.

The doctrine that morality is to a certain degree subordinate to the physical status, though contrary to commonly received views, is evidently true. The opium-inebriate is abnormally egoistic, unsympathetic, untruthful, in short, immoral; the alcohol-inebriate is morally as well as physically weak and often cruel; as it has been forcibly expressed, "Alcohol reduces its subject first to a child, then to a brute."