Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/428

412 Now, what is the answer to all this? The first answer we feel disposed to make is that the illustrious critic does not seem to have taken up as definite a standpoint as could be wished. He says at one moment that science can not rise to the point of view necessary for supplying-moral guidance to the people—that religion alone can do it. A moment after he says that ninety-nine hundredths of all the suffering in the world would disappear if men of science "were to teach men more about religious, moral, and social truths." How are they to do it if science is powerless to deal with these things? Waiving this point, what may be said is this, that science reaffirms all the important moral truths that the experience of the ages has imparted to mankind, and places them on something better than an empirical basis. Mr. Spencer's two volumes on the Principles of Morality are full of valuable observations and illustrations bearing on the conduct of life; and other writers have dealt with the same general subject with various degrees of force and impressiveness. There is this distinction, however, to be drawn between moral truths and other truths, say the truths of purely physical science: the latter only require to be intellectually apprehended, the former require to be lived. We heard long ago of the servant who knew his master's will and did it not. Was any one but himself to blame for his disobedience? We are not told so; and Count Tolstoi has a great respect for the writings in which this type is given to hs. Unhappily, the type is eternal; which of us can say with assurance that we have never fallen into like transgression?

This simple consideration, it seems to us, serves to show the folly of blaming men of science because the world is not better than it is, or for pursuing, while society is still so imperfect, their researches into distant regions of space and time, into the infinitely great or the infinitely small. Let the accusers of science say what moral truth of importance to mankind science has weakened. Let them say to what moral truth it has not at least added some strength. The Founder of Christianity did not rail at science. He did not say that it was because the Scribes and Pharisees did not teach sound and penetrating moral doctrines that the world was as bad as it was. As reflected in the fourth Gospel, what he taught was that there was a light which was ready to lighten every man that came into the world, but that "men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil." To day there are thousands of agencies in operation for instructing men in their duties and teaching them the significance of life, and there is reason to hope that they are not all working in vain. Only we must bear in mind that all moral teaching is a summons to moral effort, a summons to rise above our everyday selves, a summons to more or less of self-renunciation. Why should men of science be blamed because they are not infinitely more successful than ministers of the gospel in enlightening dark minds and strengthening weak wills? If it is the function of religion, as Count Tolstoi says, to take the total view of life and seize its true significance, why does it not fulfill that duty? It really is most singular that no sooner has the eminent critic got to the point of seeing where the responsibility lies for the proper instruction of mankind, than he turns savagely round on the men of science, and tells them that if they would deal out religious, moral, and social truths to mankind, the miseries and hardships of our present social state would all but disappear.

Mankind, let us trust, is slowly