Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/268

264 earlier wisdoms and virtues the modern reprobate may hardly attain. Such is the theological mind, whose vision of the truth is a distant and completed revelation; such is the legal mind which judges a current moral problem wholly by the legal precedents. The one hallows the ten commandments; the other glorifies the constitution. Of such mind are we all when we uncritically accept the conventions of our group or yield thoughtless obedience to the traditions of our race. To capitulate to custom or resign ourselves to habit is to accept the past as virtuous and final.

Against this view of the world both science and democracy resolutely oppose an exuberant faith. The bulk of men is wiser and better than it has ever been; it can be infinitely better and wiser than it is. The critics of science have gratified themselves in pointing out the limitations of its method. But science replies by pushing those limitations further back. The whole achievement of experimental psychology has been made against the settled belief on the part of many that it could not be done. Twenty years ago it seemed that physics had finished its task. There was then a pessimistic feeling that all the interesting things had been discovered. To-day men are undertaking experiments that would have been thought fantastic at that time, and the undiscovered territory seems greater than ever. They said we could not fly, but Professor Langley and the Wright Brothers did it. They said you can not predict the weather, but we can tell it a week ahead of time. Once it was thought a miracle to cure the blind, but now we do it every day. Once disease was regarded as the visitation of an offended god, but to-day we meet it and destroy it with the instruments of science. Once insanity was the evidence of evil spirits, but to-day the legion of devils is put to flight by medicine and psychology. Once marriage was regarded as a holy ordinance to be approached in the spirit of religious humility; to-day its holiness depends in part upon its religious sanctions; it also depends upon its effects upon possible posterity as these are indicated by biology and pathology.

Nor is your individual scientist confused or disheartened when you point out to him how science fails in hosts of cases. He knows that aviators fall, that the weather does not turn out as predicted, that there are far more diseases for which we do not know the cure than there are of those for which we have an antitoxin, that there are forms of insanity that are supposedly incurable, that we do not know all the laws of heredity, that the subtle processes of human thinking and education are baffling to our present psychological methods. But he is not a pessimist. He is one of an advancing army, and he believes that all about him there are the solid achievements of the campaign; points have been taken and citadels have been established back of which the forces of science will never need to retreat. That many of the supposed