Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/503

Rh former was that of national or racial aggrandizement, the conquest of territory and political control. The latter, contributed by the genius of Greece, was the humanistic idea of the intensive cultivation and refinement of human nature. These ancient ideas were superseded by Christian supernaturalism, which referred man's hope of salvation to another world which might be won by the repudiation of this. As christian Europe became secularized there developed the theocratic idea of a fixed system in which all human activities should be limited and controlled by religious authority. Finally, as a reaction against the established order, there appeared the idea of the Renaissance, an enthusiasm for antiquity, and desire to reverse the course of history. The modern idea, though it borrows something from all of these ideas, is fundamentally different. It bespeaks a solidarity of mankind in the enterprise of life, and in this manifests its Christianity; and it derives from paganism a respect for human capacities, and a confidence in man's power to win the good for himself. But these motives are so united in the modern spirit as to produce something genuinely new. The good is to be won by the race and for the race; it lies in the future, and can result only from prolonged and collective endeavor; and the power to achieve it lies in the progressive knowledge and control of nature. This is the Baconian idea. The incentive to knowledge lies in its application to life. "For fruits and inventions are, as it were, sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies." Therefore, Bacon would have men of learning begin and end their study with the facts of their present environment. "For our road does not lie on a level, but ascends and descends, first ascending to axioms, then descending to works." In the last part of the New Atlantis there is a remarkable description of the riches of Solomon's House, the great museum and laboratory, the treasure house and workshop, which was "the lantern of this kingdom." The words with which the father of Solomon's House receives his visitors are a terse and eloquent summary of that which Francis Bacon prophesied, and which posterity has steadily achieved. "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."