Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/55

Rh How vehemently the most earnest exponents of religion have repudiated the idea that it could be identified with morality, in however comprehensive a form, need not be insisted on.

To do justice to science it is not necessary to represent it as the unfailing minister of truth, or to assign to it any absolute character whatever. The less we deal in personifications and abstractions the better, when historical or social problems are demanding solution. To understand the function of science in the world we have simply to remind ourselves that man possesses a faculty of comparison and judgment by which he is compelled to recognize, unless overmastered by his imagination, likeness or unlikeness, equality or inequality, agreement or disagreement, in the things which occupy his attention. The exercise of this faculty leads to classification, which, in the higher form of generalization, is the source and vital principle of all knowledge. The more knowledge man acquires, the more certainly he can interpret and correlate the data of sense. Among his impressions and inferences there is a continual struggle as to which shall survive; and those which, by their deeper conformity to unchanging facts, assert their viability, go to form the tissue of what we call science. To talk, therefore, of what "science" does or does not do is very apt to be misleading. Science is like a coral reef, built up of innumerable accretions, the result of the life processes of organic bodies. We may from one point of view define science as the enduring products of man's intellectual activity. That the history of science should be largely a record of errors and failures follows of necessity from the fact that the work of science consists essentially in the attacking of ever-new problems with more or less inadequate means of investigation. But the very failures of science are necessary to its successes; and it never turns aside from its main function and purpose of harmonizing, consolidating, and extending human knowledge. Its permanent relation to religion can thus easily be understood. Religion, appealing to imagination and resting more or less upon myth, incorporates in its creed statements or assumptions which fall within the domain of science, and which, if inacurateinaccurate [sic], the latter is obliged to challenge; but there is no necessary hostility between the scientific impulse to know that which can be known and the religious impulse to worship a Power that can not be known, and to frame higher sanctions for life than those of the market place and the law courts. Religion, which is essentially emotional, is slow to recognize the rights of science; and science, in the conflicts which ensue, is in danger of overlooking the fact that religion is something more than a misinterpretation of the world and of history.

The signs of the times all give us reason to hope, however, that a better modus vivendi than the past has ever known is