Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/85

Rh sorts. In the experience of a single human life there is little to correct even the crudest of theological conceptions. From the supposed greater importance of religious opinions in determining the fate of men and nations, theological ideas have dominated all others throughout the ages; and in the nature of things, the great religious bodies have formed the stronghold of conservatism against which the separated bands of science have hurled themselves, seemingly, in vain.

But the real essence of conservatism lies not in theology. The whole conflict, as I have already said, is a struggle in the mind of man. From some phase of the warfare of science no individual is exempt. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought in human history. There is no better antidote to bigotry than the study of the growth of knowledge. There is no chapter in history more encouraging than that which treats of the growth of open mindedness. The study of this history leads religious men to avoid intolerance in the present, through a knowledge of the evils intolerance has wrought in the past. Men of science are spurred to more earnest work by the record that through the ages objective truth has been the final test of all theories and conceptions. All men will work more sanely and more effectively as they realize that no good to religion or science comes from 'wishing to please God with a lie.'

It is the mission of science to disclose—so far as it goes—the real nature of the universe. Its function is to eliminate, wherever it be found, the human equation. By methods of precision of thought and instruments of precision of observation and experiment, science seeks to make our knowledge of the small, the distant, the invisible, the mysterious as accurate, as practical, as our knowledge of common things. Moreover, it seeks to make our knowledge of common things accurate and precise, that this accuracy and precision may be translated into action. For the ultimate end of science as well as its initial impulse is the regulation of human conduct. Seeing true means thinking right. Bight thinking means right action. Greater precision in action makes higher civilization possible. Lack of precision in action is the great cause of human misery; for misery is the inevitable result of wrong conduct. 'Still men and nations reap as they have strewn.'

A classic thought in the history of applied science is expressed in these words of Huxley: 'There can be no alleviation of the sufferings of man except in absolute veracity of thought and action, and a resolute facing of the world as it is.' 'The world as it is,' is the province of science. 'The God of the things as they are, is the God of the highest heaven.' And as to the sane man, the world as it is is glorious, beautiful, harmonious and divine, so will science, our tested and ordered knowledge of it, be the inspiration of art, poetry and religion.

Pure science and utilitarian science merge into each other at every point. They are one and the same thing. Every new truth can be