Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/319

Rh make it a rule not to expose to any further risk. They avoid, as it were, meeting the universe in front, and endeavor to overcome it in detail. For its immediate purpose this plan is the best that can be pursued. If in all our actions we allowed ourselves to remember the greatness of the power with which we have to do, we should accomplish nothing; if, because Nature's laws are large and comprehensive, we never acted except on the largest principles, we should either fall a prey to unsound generalizations, the more ruinous because of their grandeur, or we should become paralyzed with a Turkish fatalism. Far better, no doubt, it is to make the utmost use of what precise knowledge we have, however little may be the amount of it, and, not to suffer our minds to be bewildered by coping too freely with an adversary whose play is beyond us. It is these humble, cautiously inductive people that prosper most in the world up to a certain point. To them belong the large populations, the thriving communities, the stable politics. They never dream of defying Nature; they win an endless series of small victories over her.

There is no reason why this cautiousness should necessarily degenerate into little-mindedness. It does not take its beginning in any deficiency in the feeling for what is great. On the contrary, it is the direct result of an overwhelming sense of the greatness and, so to speak, the dangerousness of Nature. Those who proceed thus warily, probing Nature as they go, may with most reason expect to penetrate far and to elevate their minds gradually until they can venture to cope with the grandeur of the world and become familiar with great ideas. And when this is done they will have escaped the danger of atheism. Their minds will become the mirror of an Infinite Being, and their whole natures will be conformed to his. But in the earlier stages of such a process the temptation to a kind of atheism is strong. From the habit of leaving out of account all larger considerations in every problem, on the ground that they are vague and not precisely calculable, they are led easily to forget the very existence of such considerations. In some cases this habit even leads to great practical miscalculations. It is evidently a mistake in algebra to assume that all unknown quantities $$=$$ 0; yet this mistake is constantly made by the practical men I am describing. When vague considerations are suggested to them, instead of assigning them an approximate value, which, since they cannot get the true value, is evidently what they ought to do, they leave them out of account altogether, though an indeterminate value may just as easily be large as small. But it is not with these practical mistakes that I am now concerned; practically these men are more often right than wrong, though in the exceptional cases, when every thing turns on a great principle, they fail deplorably. But the habit of never suffering the mind to dwell on any thing great produces often an atheism of the most pitiable and helpless kind. The soul of man lives upon the contemplation of laws or principles;