Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/314

310 new civilization from the old, 'and the word which expresses this difference is science.' "The height of any civilization," says Dr. Ostwald, "may be directly measured by the thoughtfulness with which the prophets of civilization understand their calling and are able to predict this future. In the struggle for existence the man will be most efficient who can answer these questions: what will happen? and with what certainty, more accurately than his fellow men."

"If we ask," continues Dr. Ostwald: "What is the most general force which has been active in historical times within our knowledge, and is still active, we recognize that it is the conquest of all intellectual fields by science. If we imagine the most primitive conditions in the development of mankind, we see that there is no doubt that the individual and the race which is finally successful in the struggle for existence is the one that learns to see most clearly into the conditions of the future and thus learns to influence them. There are conditions in which the war of physical force seems to settle the question; but even here we see skill, that is, the intellectual or scientific factor, offset a large part of the brute strength, and this factor increases as development advances. The greatest leaders of men have been those who saw most clearly into the future.

"Thus every political and moral organization is dependent upon biographical conditions; and these fields are evidently those which are destined to be irresistibly conquered by science."

To us, as 'prophets of civilization,' to use again Dr. Ostwald 's illuminating phrase, every line of scientific research has its danger—the danger of inadequacy. In causal interpretation, the impulse is toward superficiality, to premature proclamation of opinions issuing from the heart rather than sanctioned by the head, the tendency toward futile speculation, barren epistemology, or florid sentimentalism. While magister fit species, tyro novit classes, a beginner can frame great generalizations and a great many of them, which it would take a master of masters to define and sustain. *A flaw in thought an inch long'—this is a Chinese proverb—'may be felt for a thousand miles.' It is the flaw in thought, the flaw in fundamental conception, which distinguishes the sage in science from the speculative philosopher. In this matter we are fortunately not without adequate models. The boldest speculator in biology was also the one of all his century most careful as to his facts. In the twenty-five years of building the hypothesis of the origin of variety in life, Darwin scrutinized each least fact as though it were the center of the whole system. From which it followed that there was no unsound material in the fabric he built. And for this attention to each detail, rather than for the greatness of his final conception, we place Darwin first among the naturalists of all time. Other men had thought of natural selection, had imagined the survival of the fittest, had shown the divergence of forms of life