Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/390

376 that lay "behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearings on man's deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rocks and plants." A little definition would come in well here. What are the interests that lie beyond the facts? "What are man's deepest yearnings? What are his sublimest hopes? Are his sublimest hopes also his best-founded and most rational hopes? Are his deepest yearnings at all of a practical character? If these yearnings can be appeased at all by scientific conclusions, why not by those arrived at in our day as well as by the less correct ones arrived at in former days? Finally, what can science do more than put the most rational construction on facts? If more than this is wanted—some surplusage of belief—it can be got from other quarters; science should not be held responsible for furnishing it, or blamable for not furnishing it. Miss Cobbe does not seem to be of this opinion, however. She says that, as "Science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects, she has ... abandoned her claim to be man's guide to truth." But surely, if at any time in the past Science made good her claim to transcend the sequence of physical causes and effects, we need not concern ourselves with her present denegation of authority in the higher region. If a teacher has really succeeded in teaching us the calculus, we need not trouble ourselves much if he should at some future time take it into his head that he never knew it himself. Supposing even that he never did know it, and that we only worked into it by the aid of his blunders, does not our knowledge remain? And what, in that case, can we do better than turn round and teach our teacher? On the other hand, if our teacher never knew what he thought he knew, and if we never learned what we thought we had learned, what can we both do better than acknowledge the true state of the case, and begin over again, should it seem desirable?

We are told that Darwin "has destroyed, for those who accept his views, the possibility for a rational reverence for the dictates of conscience." How? By raising a doubt as to "whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value." We should suppose that, the further back an organism could be traced, the more authority might be attached to what seem to be its laws. Who would not much rather trust a conscience that had a long history behind it, one stretching back even into the brute creation, than a brand-new article of whose genesis no satisfactory account could be given? Moreover, how is it that we think so little of another man's conscience when it enjoins acts of which we disapprove; and that he thinks so little of ours when it enjoins acts of which