Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/376

372 fostered and encouraged in the future, and secondly, as to how the results of research may be applied for social advantage.

The first and perhaps the finest thought of all is that research must be pursued with the highest ideals of the imaginative mind apart from all desired applications or all wished for material advantages. If we might personify nature, it would seem that she does not love that researcher who only seeks her cupboard, and never shows her finest treasures to him. She must be loved for her own beauty and not for her fortune, or she will ne'er be woedwooed [sic] and won. Not even the altruistic appeal of love for suffering mankind would seem to reach her ears; she seem to say: "Love me, be intimate with me, search me out in my secret ways, and in addition to the rapture that will fill your soul at some new beauty of mine that you have discovered and known first of all men, all these other material things will be added, and then I may take compassion on your purblind brothers and allow you to show them these secret charms of mine also, so that their eyes may perchance grow strong, and they, too, led hither by you, may worship at the shrine of my matchless beauty." By all the master's discoveries in all the paths of science, Nature is ever teaching us this great doctrine to which we have closed our ears so long. She tells us the creation of the world is not finished, the creation of the world is going on, and I am calling upon you to take a part in this creation. Never mind that you can not see the whole, love that you see, work at it, and be thankful that I have given you a part to play with so much pleasure in it, and so doing you will rise to the highest ideal.

This is religion with thirst for knowledge as its central spring; does it differ much from those aspirations which have made men of all nations worship throughout all the ages? Anthropology teaches us that the religious system of a race of men gives a key to their advancement in civilization. If this be so, growth in natural knowledge must elevate our highest conceptions, furnish purer ideals and give us more of that real religion that is to be found running so strongly in the minds of great individuals such as Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Auguste Comte. A great man may be strongly opposed to the orthodox creeds of his day, he may even sneer at them, he may be burnt at the stake by their votaries, and yet be a man of strong religious feelings and emotions which have furnished the unseen motive power, perhaps unsuspected even by himself, that leads to a whole life of scientific heroism and enthusiasm.

The practical lesson for us to learn from all this is that we must consider research as sacred and leave it untrammelled by fetters of utilitarianism. The researcher in functional biology, for example, must be left free to pursue investigations as inspiration leads him on any living structure from a unicellular plant to a man, and must not be expected