Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/73

Rh discovery to-day, which explores the laws of the highest organic life. If I can point out a few of the common features which give a meeting-ground with you for one who is, like myself, a physician of the soul—for studies that bear on the riddles of our mental life and the largest aims of moral education—my essay will not he thrown away.

It is plain to all that the marked feature of our modern culture is the enthusiastic study of Nature; and the fact demands our impartial thought. This change, even within the last thirty years, is a striking one. It comes in part from the magnificence of the discoveries gained in every part of natural inquiry. It comes again from the reaction of the mind, after a time of overstrained ideal pursuits; nor is it strange, when the philosophy which began with noble thinkers had evaporated at last into a misty pantheism, that we should ask a more robust sense, and a positive knowledge. It is amusing to meet to-day those who awhile ago were talking of the infinite soul in man, and are now quite proud of their pedigree from a West-African ape. But I attribute this feature of our culture not merely to such reaction. It betokens a solid growth in the method of inquiry. Although I distinguish it from many of the theories which call themselves science, yet the principle which begins with the study of facts, verifies them by sure experiment, and rests in ascertained laws, is the key of all discovery. Our modern intellect did not, indeed, originate it. Nor can I ever admit that the great thinkers of the past have not done immeasurable service in their spheres of knowledge; rather, I claim that there is not a single foundation truth, in regard to the mind or moral nature, which was not known, even before a Plato or an Augustine. Our philosophy does not give essential truth; it only opens it in its clearer relations. The fixed stars have shed the same light aforetime, although the glasses of to-day have pierced into the nebulous fields. But it is the peculiar character of natural science, and the grandeur of its march on this high-road, which have established, as never before, its critical method. You are familiar with this in the wide range of inductive study. The knowledge of the heavens is quite another thing to us than in the day when Aristotle reasoned from the ideal perfectness of the circle to the planetary motions; and "made the world," in Bacon's phrase, "out of his categories." Or, to illustrate from your own field, the ancient theories of material and spiritual substance, which led to such fruitless speculation even to recent days, have been exchanged for exact analysis.

But this method is not confined to the interpretation of Nature; it is the common law of advance in all knowledge. Mental science must now begin with the related facts of biology and psychology, in order to rise by clear analysis to the laws of thought or will. History obeys the same principle, and it has so passed, since the day of Niebuhr, out of the cloud-land of legend to terra firma. Our vast researches into language have come from the dismissal of the old