Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/546

542 reaction, a mutual pressure exerted by each upon the other. Religion is the fulcrum and science the lever which together raise mankind.

Recent debate on these matters is marked by a great improvement in tone as contrasted with that prevalent thirty or forty years ago. Not only is the spirit of the controversy altered, but its ground has shifted. Both parties have changed their positions. The religious partisans no longer dispute the verdict of the scientists in scientific things and many scientific men have abandoned the position that "matter holds the promise and potency" of everything in the universe, and now assign this "promise and potency" to energy, regarding matter merely as a symbol of thought.

Now the concept of energy is a good deal more closely related to that of spirit than is the concept of matter, so that it has become easy for the scientific men so to extend the bounds of their own field as to claim all that which was formerly regarded as the exclusive domain of religion. To make this new position clear, I might attempt to give a bird's-eye view of the utterances of several recent scientific writers, to construct a composite picture, so to speak. But to do this briefly would be impossible, so that I have perforce elected a different procedure, namely, to present in outline the views of a single author, selected as highly typical of the modern drift of thought along these lines. The writer chosen for this purpose is Wilhelm Ostwald, formerly, for many years, professor at the University of Leipzig, distinguished as a scientific man and now editor of the Annalen der Naturphilosophie.

In what follows, it shall be my aim to lay before you a brief summary of the position taken by Ostwald on the relations of science to religion, in a manner as devoid as possible of any color reflected from my own views. With this object, I shall not break into the presentation by any comment or criticism, and shall follow Ostwald's own phraseology so far as may be compatible with necessary condensations and omissions.

Self-respect and happiness are, in the last analysis, the motives of human conduct in those things that lie beyond mere maintenance of existence. In fact, the greatest happiness which can come to a man in advancing years is to diffuse happiness about him by the production of creative ideas which relieve mankind of heavy burdens and increase the general opportunities for happiness. The creative ideas which bring happiness most directly are, in the first line, those furnished by science, in so much as science lessens or removes many forms of disease and misery which plague or threaten man in consequence of his biological relationships. What no one of the many religions has been able to do has been accomplished, in an ever-increasing degree, in bettering those conditions of life which make for happiness, not alone through the advance of medical knowledge in the treatment of disease, but still more in teaching man how to minimize the causes of disease. The surprising