Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/347

Rh this university three or four hundred years hence looking back on the history of man. With larger perspective they will see two grand thought movements; the first, oriental, marked by oriental lack of curiosity about natural law, a great moral and spiritual movement developing along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, out of five thousand years of hard human experience, culminating in Judea in the faith that nature is the continuous handiwork of God, in a supreme standard of righteousness, and in the simple expression of the human law "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Another movement begins six centuries earlier in the inquiring mind of the west, always characterized by curiosity about nature. It was the search for natural law. Its rapid progress among the Greeks sadly terminates with the fall of Greece. After nineteen centuries it revives with Copernicus and Galileo and culminates in Darwin. Man is a part of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the laws of nature man finds his physical welfare.

The conflict of opinion aroused by Darwin will subside like the evil passions of our Civil War. Surely the reverent study of nature can not lead man astray. These two great movements of love and of knowledge, first of the spiritual then of the intellectual and physical well-being of man, will be seen to be a harmony and not a discord.