Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/392

378 longer expect to work miracles, but we do expect and hope by wisely concerted measures to accomplish better and greater results than were ever accomplished by the enthusiasms and fanaticisms of the past. Miss Cobbe says that "the man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime, ... but he has no longing to enthrone in their place a lofty virtue demanding his heart and life's devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness." Is not this weak and almost meaningless language? What is meant by "enthroning a lofty virtue" in the place of vice and crime? The phrase has a fine sound, but it seems to be a case of præterea nihil. What a man of science would like to see would be a society organized and governed according to the best knowledge of the time. He would like to see the laws of life and health respected, justice maintained among men, and free scope given to individual development. As to the lofty virtue which Miss Cobbe so strongly desiderates, the scientific man would like to do away with the necessity for it by a general leveling up of human life. He believes, with Jean Jacques Rousseau, that prudence is a virtue which enables us to dispense with many others; and that, if the human race could be taught prudence, great reformers and missionaries might have an easy time of it, and perhaps be enabled to practice a little of their charity at home—an excellent starting-point, according to the proverb. The scientific man's ideal is necessarily a prosperous community of fairly self-sufficing individuals, not a world of misery lightened by the angel visitations and exertions of a few heroic souls. Some may think bis ambition a low one, but he does not feel it to be so himself; he does not really see how any one who wishes well to the mass of his fellow-men can have any different ambition.

"Another threatening evil from the side of science is the growth of a hard and pitiless temper." So Miss Cobbe; and this in face of the fact that never in the history of the world was there so much sympathy with suffering, or so ready a recognition of the rights of humanity, as there is to-day. Reference is made to certain vague charges brought in an anonymous book against hospital physicians and students; but, even admitting these charges as true in some substantial measure—and we should be sorry to do so without further proof—no good reason can be assigned for charging on the scientific world at large a morbid temper displayed by a few representatives of one single profession. Compare the average practicing physician of to-day with the Slops and Sangrados of former times, and we fancy there is no visible falling off in humanity or any other respectable quality. What can not be denied is that science has done a great work in mitigating suffering and lengthening human life; and it would