Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/264

260 lightning, the slime, the refuse of the world, is yielding up the truth by which we live. Your earlier philosopher would escape from the sensuous world; the modern savant eagerly penetrates its depths, making his implements of research as he goes. Compare Thomas Aquinas in an age which rotted with physical uncleanness withdrawing from the world, exalting divine reason above natural reason and refusing the evidence of his natural reason in order to conserve a difficult faith, with Metchnikoff studying the embryology of sponges, the structure and digestion of polyps, and the blood of water fleas to discover the phagocytes, which mean so much for the preservation of human health and the extension of earthly life. To our scientific minds the slimiest, vilest bit of earth may have the truth we need and will hold it forever locked from him who merely sits and thinks. Because this is so, the whole world of matter has assumed a higher value in our thinking than in any age before. To this exaltation of material things all the advances in evolutionary biology and the studies in physiology and experimental psychology contribute. We see now as not before how much is man of a piece with nature, in his ancestry, in his composition and in his future. And we see that the world of matter in which he lives has much in common with himself. Not to escape this world, but to understand it; not to despise it, but to control it, is our modern aim.

In this altered view of the world and man's relation to it, the man who works with his hands has assumed a new status. Both he and his work are objects of general concern, and manual labor that is skilled takes on dignity and honor with the work of the laboratory. No man who has worked with his hands in any of our modern laboratories will long despise his neighbor whose handiwork is in a shop, or in the cab of a locomotive, grimy as that work may be. This world of ours is fast ceasing to be a world of privilege and war, as it long has been, and is becoming through and through a world of work. Faster than he likes the king is being replaced by the scholar, and the soldier is giving way to the engineer. The province of the priest is suffering encroachment by the physician, and the lawyer is having to recognize the contentions of the social worker. In a score of fields the privilege of dogmatism is being crushed by established facts, and the privilege of contempt must more and more disappear as we see how near akin are all the men who work. In the process of our civilization's making, we see that all who labor must share in the glory of the final achievement. In this new view both the worker and his work are lifted to a more elevated place in our view of things. We realize the human value of the work and we see that through his work the worker himself is made.

A third and more subtle relation between science and democracy consists in this, that they are both unwilling to close the books. Neither can accept a closed scheme of thought. Science can not abide a finished