Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/730

702 thoroughly studying-them, instead of sitting in her study patching dogmas out of scriptural shreds. She should learn from science the method of studying facts, as well as its importance, how to criticise, to sift, to throw away the chaff and keep only the solid grain. And, having mastered the secret of modern knowledge, she should proceed to put theology upon a solid inductive basis, and build it up into the genuine science of which it is capable.

And similarly science ought to obtain the help of religion to elevate and perfect it. From the ideal aspirations of faith science should enlighten its vision and ennoble its aims. It should not restrict its studies merely to the lower realm of facts. Science fails to fulfill its appointed mission in the world if it ceases its researches on the threshold of the grandest discoveries open to it, the questions above all in interest to humanity. It should learn from theology to study the laws of mind and soul as well as those of matter; to recognize that the fundamental truths of morality and religion are self-evident, as well as those of geometry, and that the belief in a God and in a future state is as primitive, universal, and necessary, as the belief in the uniformity of Nature or the indestructibility of force. It should look at the upraised finger of Faith and be pointed from the law to the Law-giver; from the effect to a cause; from the force to the living well.

To widen, purify, and make stable; to save from the building of unsubstantial air-castles, and from blind clasping of objects unworthy of worship—this is what science should do for religion.

To inspire and enable and crown; to turn from peering and picking altogether in the dust; to look up to the heavens—this is what religion should do for science. Playing no hostile nor rival, nor even independent strains—but each in sweet concord and divine respondence, joining in the same holy anthem—thus knowledge and reverence, mind and soul, all "according well, may make one music as before, but vaster."



OTHING distinctly answering to a brain is to be found in the lowest animals in which a nervous system exists. It is thus, for instance, with star-fishes and the larger nematoid entozoa, in which what most nearly resembles a brain consists of a mere band of nerve-fibres surrounding the commencement of the œsophagus, and containing a few nerve-cells, partly between its fibres and partly in groups slightly removed therefrom.