Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/779

Rh and clothing—that is to say, the necessaries and comforts of material existence. In the fact that the wages or earnings have risen while prices have fallen, and that those who do the physical work of production have secured decade by decade an increasing share of a constantly increasing product by the expenditure of their earnings when converted into terms of money, is to be found the disproof of the Malthusian theory so far as it may be disproved in a single century. In these facts is also to be found the necessity for the metaphysical treatment of the theory of evolution as yet only partially developed by Darwin, Wallace, and their successors.

One may even venture to cite the singular vagaries of Wallace in the matter of spiritualism in evidence of a lack of the faculty of observation in metaphysics on the part of a man who has been so eminent in his observations of purely physical conditions. May not Darwin's loss of enjoyment in music and art after his long application to the observations of Nature possibly indicate a tendency to one-sided development even in the mind of a man so supremely able? Men of far less ability often realize the loss in their power of enjoyment of the functions of the ideal after overmuch devotion to the study of material conditions. This is one of the dangers in dealing with statistics, yet the imagination is an absolutely necessary factor in statistical science. The mere compiler of figures, without comprehension of the subjects of which they are symbols and without capacity to read between the columns, is a mere drudge whose work always needs to be revised and often changed in the relation of all its parts, lest false impressions should be derived from figures which are themselves true. The statistics of a nation are but the trial balance of its accounts, corresponding to the balance sheet of a merchant. Nations may be betrayed by bad bookkeeping, as merchants often are.

It is also a matter of common observation that the man who devotes himself exclusively to the accumulation of wealth loses the very power of enjoyment which might ensue from its possession had he rightly comprehended his own function in the universe.

The mathematics and statistics of the astronomer disclose the order and unity which prevail throughout the universe. Universe itself is a synonym for unity. In my own mind it seems possible to predicate order and unity in the progress of mankind in material welfare on the simple ground that man is a part of the universe. The same creative mind or power by which the world is kept upon its way from an unknown beginning to an equally unknown ending (if there can be beginning or end in an eternal order) directs all the forces of creation of which mankind is a part. It seems to me that the man who comprehends that he himself is a unit and a factor