Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/319

Rh whether they affect great men or small. He knows no tradition large enough to check the movement of science. Among the Scandinavians and the Dutch, in nations too small to obscure the democracy of learning, we find much the same feeling. In France, in Germany, even in England, the tradition of great names, the customs of great museums, largely outweigh the testimony of the things themselves. It has taken a long time to bring about in these countries the application of the simple and necessary law of priority in nomenclature. To this law all naturalists have assented in theory, but with the reserve of exceptions in favor of great men or the traditions of great museums. The willingness to adopt new views, to utilize new classifications, to see things in new lights, is, broadly speaking, in proportion to the spirit cf democracy by which a worker is surrounded. A perfect democracy means a perfect perspective—each man, each idea, each theory standing for what it is, with all the 'covering of make-believe thrown off.' For the zealous search in which we meet as comrades is the worship of the greatest God known to religion, the God of the things as they are. And here come the reasons why even the prophets of civilization should cultivate the virtue of modesty. The universe, of which we have explored a few points, is so gigantic in space, so monstrous in duration, that it baffles all our powers of collective thought to conceive of its existence. 'Time is as long as space is wide.' We can not picture the universe as limitless in space or in time, nor can we think of it as having bounds in distance or in duration. And with all its grandeur, it is so finely put together, so delicately adjusted, so eternally interdependent, that the smallest of all its parts is as large as the largest, that if another atom could be brought in from beyond the range of space and added to its infinite side, even if this were done only a moment after time should cease to be, the whole mass of eternity might be thrown from its bearings, its adjustment destroyed and the creation of aeons of evolution flung back into primitive chaos. Or again, may be not this, but something else might happen, for likely enough matter is nothing substantial at all, but each molecule merely the vortex of a whirling current of force. Wherefore, bearing on our scientific shoulders the vastness of a universe whose elements are unknowable, unthinkable, 'solid and substantial, vast and unchanging,' we may well, to-night, as Thackeray once said on a similar occasion, say, 'We may well think small beer of ourselves and pass around the bottle.'