Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/778

756 secured safety thus far is shown by his continued existence. He may choose his course for himself—not an easy thing to do, unless he scans most carefully the nature of the rocks and waves and his control of the boat itself. He may follow the course of others with some degree of the safety they have attained. He may follow his own impulses, in man's case inherited from those who found them safe guides to action. But in new conditions neither conventionality nor impulse nor desire will suffice. He must know what is about him in order that he may know what he is doing. He must know what he is doing in order to do anything effectively. Ignorant action is more dangerous than no action at all. The "sealed orders" under which live the lower animals and our "brother organisms the plants" are in a measure inadequate for man. With the power of movement and the "knowledge of good and evil," he has no choice but to accept the conditions. He must shape his own life. He must make his ideals into actuality. And thus it comes that there is "no alleviation for the sufferings of man except through absolute veracity of thought and action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is." For wisdom is only knowing what should be done next, and virtue is doing it. And thus it comes that it is well for man "not to pretend to know or to believe what he really does not know or believe"; for there is no safety in life, either for ourselves or others, if we guide our conduct by any influence less wise or potent than that developed from the co-ordination of human wisdom. We may play at philosophy, if we have pleasure in doing so. We may find intellectual strength through exercise of the mind even on its own products. But we must guide our lives by science. The appetites, impulses, passions, illusions, if you choose, which have proved safe in the past development of life, science would not destroy. But they must be subordinate to the will and intellect. And this subordination of the lower to the higher motives in life is the culmination of evolution, as it has been the ideal of those whose strivings for better relations of man to man and of man to Nature have been worthy of the name of religion.

The will is the soul of man in action. The intellect is its guide. If the life of man is hemmed in by the Fates, the human will is one of the Fates, and must take its place by the side of the rest of them. The man who can will is a factor in the universe.

As knowledge is in its essence only a guide to action, and as knowledge, being human, can be approximate only—not reality but a movement toward reality—we are brought to the oft-quoted words of Lessing:

"It is not the truth in man's possession that makes the worth of the man. Possession makes him selfish, lazy, proud. Not through possession, but through long striving, comes the