Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/76

68 society to maintain and strengthen our professional loyalty, because upon that loyalty depends our success as a body, and as a body we have a great work to do. Loyalty implies generous co-operation, and secures that unity of feeling and action which breeds success. Our influence is not yet large enough, and I hope that it will be vastly increased by carrying out the scheme of affiliation between ourselves and kindred societies. Unity is power.

It is believed by many outside of our profession that a scientific career is narrowing in effect, and tends to obliterate human, artistic, and religious interests. They look upon Darwin's loss of sympathy with poetry as typical. The idea seems to me false. The naturalists whom I know are as genuinely interested in their friends and in art and in literature as any other group of liberally educated men. One of our foremost geologists is a learned musical enthusiast; one of our botanists, a loving student of the best European literature; one of our anatomists, an earnest participant in charitable work. I claim, in short, that the pursuit of pure science broadens and deepens the character. Science is full of sublimity, of charm, of inspiration; but the poet has not yet been found who will express this aspect of science. We are like colonists: our pioneers are continually advancing into new territories; we must work incessantly to secure mere possession; so it is not yet quite time for the poet.

Another characteristic of the naturalist is faith. He must preserve his faith in the possibility and value of knowledge of the truth. We often forget that this necessity exists. Although we know not whither truth will lead us, whether to happiness or to unhappiness, we nevertheless believe in it, trust in it, and strive for it. Let us therefore have a broad-minded respect for the faculty of faith, for the loss of it is a crushing disaster to a naturalist.

The loss of faith in the truth is rare; its opposite, an exaggerated confidence in the possibilities of science, is not rare. I think that we habitually measure science incorrectly, because we estimate its magnitude by our individual capacity for knowledge, and so come thoughtlessly to call that infinite which is merely large. I hold the opposite conception, that the extent of possible human knowledge is comparatively small so soon as we omit the details. Huet, Bishop of Avranches, thought that the real knowledge of his time, aside from the details of history, etc., could be put in ten folio volumes. He was probably not far from right. All the knowledge of our time could be brought within the compass of a moderate number of volumes. Nor does the future