This time two hundred years ago—in the beginning of January, 1666—those
of our forefathers who inhabited this great and ancient city, took breath
between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quite past, although
its fury had abated; the other to come.
Within a few yards of the very spot 20 on which
we are assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady,
the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664; and, though no new
visitor, smote the people of England, and especially of her capital, with
a violence unknown before, in the course of the following year. The hand
of a master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in that
truest of fictions, The History of the Plague Year, Defoe 21
shows death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through
the narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a
silence broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead;
by the woeful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the madder
yells of despairing profligates.
But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to nearly its
ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only here and there, and the
richer citizens who had flown from the pest had returned to their
dwellings. The remnant of the people began to toil at the accustomed round
of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream of city life bid fair to flow back
along its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted vigour.
The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned
no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which
broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that
year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all
that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city within the walls.
Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each of these
calamities. They submitted to the plague in humility and in penitence, for
they believed it to be the judgment of God. But, towards the fire they
were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the malice of
man,—as the work of the Republicans, or of the Papists, according as
their prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or of Puritanism.
It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I now
stand, in what was then a thickly peopled and fashionable part of London,
should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now propound to
you—that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was
no more, in their sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of
any political, or of any religious sect; but that they were themselves the
authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look to themselves to
prevent the recurrence of calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly
beyond the reach of human control—so evidently the result of the
wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy.
And one may picture to one's self how harmoniously the holy cursing of the
Puritan of that day would have chimed in with the unholy cursing and the
crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys,22 and with
the revilings of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer had
gone on to say that, if the return of such misfortunes were ever rendered
impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud,23
or of that of Milton; and, as little, by the triumph of republicanism, as
by that of monarchy. But that the one thing needful for compassing this
end was, that the people of England should second the efforts of an
insignificant corporation, the establishment of which, a few years before
the epoch of the great plague and the great fire, had been as little
noticed, as they were conspicuous.
Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few calm and
thoughtful students banded themselves together for the purpose, as they
phrased it, of "improving natural knowledge." The ends they proposed to
attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the words of one of the
founders of the organisation:—
"Our business was (precluding matters of theology and state affairs) to
discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries, and such as related
thereunto:—as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation,
Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments; with
the state of these studies and their cultivation at home and abroad. We
then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the veins,
the venae lacteae, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the
nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape
(as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots on the sun and its turning on
its own axis, the inequalities and selenography 24 of the
moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of
telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air,
the possibility or impossibility of vacuities and nature's abhorrence
thereof, the Torricellian experiment 25 in
quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration
therein, with divers other things of like nature, some of which were then
but new discoveries, and others not so generally known and embraced as now
they are; with other things appertaining to what hath been called the New
Philosophy, which from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis
Bacon 26
(Lord Verulam) in England, hath been much cultivated in Italy, France,
Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England."
The learned Dr. Wallis,27 writing in 1696, narrates in
these words, what happened half a century before, or about 1645. The
associates met at Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, who was destined to
become a bishop; and subsequently coming together in London, they
attracted the notice of the king. And it is a strange evidence of the
taste for knowledge which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts
shared with his father and grandfather, that Charles the Second was not
content with saying witty things about his philosophers, but did wise
things with regard to them. For he not only bestowed upon them such
attention as he could spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but,
being in his usual state of impecuniosity, begged for them of the Duke of
Ormond; and, that step being without effect, gave them Chelsea College, a
charter, and a mace: crowning his favours in the best way they could be
crowned, by burdening them no further with royal patronage or state
interference.
Thus it was that the half-dozen young men, studious of the "New
Philosophy," 28 who met in one another's
lodgings in Oxford or in London, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
grew in numerical and in real strength, until, in its latter part, the
"Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already
become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen,
which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific
activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause it was formed
to support.
It was by the aid of the Royal Society 29 that
Newton 30
published his Principia. If all the books in the world, except the
Philosophical Transactions, 31 were destroyed, it is safe to
say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and
that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be
largely, though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of halting or
of decrepitude manifested themselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's
days, so in these, "our business is, precluding theology and state
affairs, to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But our
"Mathematick" is one which Newton would have to go to school to learn; our
"Staticks, Mechanicks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments"
constitute a mass of physical and chemical knowledge, a glimpse at which
would compensate Galileo 32 for the doings of a score of
inquisitorial cardinals; our "Physick" and "Anatomy" have embraced such
infinite varieties of beings, have laid open such new worlds in time and
space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that
the eyes of Vesalius 33 and of Harvey 34
might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their
grain of mustard seed.
The fact is perhaps rather too much, than too little, forced upon one's
notice, nowadays, that all this marvellous intellectual growth has a no
less wonderful expression in practical life; and that, in this respect, if
in no other, the movement symbolised by the progress of the Royal Society
stands without a parallel in the history of mankind.
A series of volumes as bulky as the "Transactions of the Royal Society"
might possibly be filled with the subtle speculations 35
of the Schoolmen;36 not improbably, the obtaining a
mastery over the products of mediaeval thought might necessitate an even
greater expenditure of time and of energy than the acquirement of the "New
Philosophy"; but though such work engrossed the best intellects of Europe
for a longer time than has elapsed since the great fire, its effects were
"writ in water,"37 so far as our social state is
concerned.
On the other hand, if the noble first President of the Royal Society could
revisit the upper air and once more gladden his eyes with a sight of the
familiar mace, he would find himself in the midst of a material
civilisation more different from that of his day, than that of the
seventeenth was from that of the first century. And if Lord Brouncker's 38
native sagacity had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long
reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these
telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without which the
whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of
stagnant and starving pauperism,—that all these pillars of our State
are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great
spiritual stream, the springs of which only, he and his fellows were
privileged to see; and seeing, to recognise as that which it behoved them
above all things to keep pure and undefiled.
It may not be too great a flight of imagination to conceive our noble
revenant 39
not forgetful of the great troubles of his own day, and anxious to know
how often London had been burned down since his time and how often the
plague had carried off its thousands. He would have to learn that,
although London contains tenfold the inflammable matter that it did in
1666; though, not content with filling our rooms with woodwork and light
draperies, we must needs lead inflammable and explosive gases into every
corner of our streets and houses, we never allow even a street to burn
down. And if he asked how this had come about, we should have to explain
that the improvement of natural knowledge has furnished us with dozens of
machines for throwing water upon fires, any one of which would have
furnished the ingenious Mr. Hooke, the first "curator and experimenter" of
the Royal Society, with ample materials for discourse before half a dozen
meetings of that body; and that, to say truth, except for the progress of
natural knowledge, we should not have been able to make even the tools by
which these machines are constructed. And, further, it would be necessary
to add, that although severe fires sometimes occur and inflict great
damage, the loss is very generally compensated by societies, the
operations of which have been rendered possible only by the progress of
natural knowledge in the direction of mathematics, and the accumulation of
wealth in virtue of other natural knowledge.
But the plague? My Lord Brouncker's observation would not, I fear, lead
him to think that Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purer in life,
or more fervent in religious faith, than the generation which could
produce a Boyle,40 an Evelyn,41 and a
Milton. He might find the mud of society at the bottom, instead of at the
top, but I fear that the sum total would be as deserving of swift judgment
as at the time of the Restoration.42 And it
would be our duty to explain once more, and this time not without shame,
that we have no reason to believe that it is the improvement of our faith,
nor that of our morals, which keeps the plague from our city; but, again,
that it is the improvement of our natural knowledge.
We have learned that pestilences will only take up their abode among those
who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them. Their
cities must have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulated garbage.
Their houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated. Their
subjects must be ill-washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed. The London of 1665 was
such a city. The cities of the East, where plague has an enduring
dwelling, are such cities. We, in later times, have learned somewhat of
Nature, and partly obey her. Because of this partial improvement of our
natural knowledge and of that fractional obedience, we have no plague;
because that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience yet
incomplete, typhoid is our companion and cholera our visitor. But it is
not presumptuous to express the belief that, when our knowledge is more
complete and our obedience the expression of our knowledge, London will
count her centuries of freedom from typhoid and cholera, as she now
gratefully reckons her two hundred years of ignorance of that plague which
swooped upon her thrice in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Surely, there is nothing in these explanations which is not fully borne
out by the facts? Surely, the principles involved in them are now admitted
among the fixed beliefs of all thinking men? Surely, it is true that our
countrymen are less subject to fire, famine, pestilence, and all the evils
which result from a want of command over and due anticipation of the
course of Nature, than were the countrymen of Milton; and health, wealth,
and well-being are more abundant with us than with them? But no less
certainly is the difference due to the improvement of our knowledge of
Nature, and the extent to which that improved knowledge has been
incorporated with the household words of men, and has supplied the springs
of their daily actions.
Granting for a moment, then, the truth of that which the depreciators of
natural knowledge are so fond of urging, that its improvement can only add
to the resources of our material civilisation; admitting it to be possible
that the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked for not other
reward than this, I cannot confess that I was guilty of exaggeration when
I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing between prominent
events and important events, the origin of a combined effort on the part
of mankind to improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the
Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught
with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the
damage done by those ghastly evils would shrink into insignificance.
It is very certain that for every victim slain by the plague, hundreds of
mankind exist and find a fair share of happiness in the world by the aid
of the spinning jenny. And the great fire, at its worst, could not have
burned the supply of coal, the daily working of which, in the bowels of
the earth, made possible by the steam pump, gives rise to an amount of
wealth to which the millions lost in old London are but as an old song.
But spinning jenny and steam pump are, after all, but toys, possessing an
accidental value; and natural knowledge creates multitudes of more subtle
contrivances, the praises of which do not happen to be sung because they
are not directly convertible into instruments for creating wealth. When I
contemplate natural knowledge squandering such gifts among men, the only
appropriate comparison I can find for her is to liken her to such a
peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily
burdened, and with mind bent only on her home; but yet without effort and
without thought, knitting for her children. Now stockings are good and
comfortable things, and the children will undoubtedly be much the better
for them; but surely it would be short-sighted, to say the least of it, to
depreciate this toiling mother as a mere stocking-machine—a mere
provider of physical comforts?
However, there are blind leaders of the blind, and not a few of them, who
take this view of natural knowledge, and can see nothing in the bountiful
mother of humanity but a sort of comfort-grinding machine. According to
them, the improvement of natural knowledge always has been, and always
must be, synonymous with no more than the improvement of the material
resources and the increase of the gratifications of men.
Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real mother of mankind, bringing
them up with kindness, and, if need be, with sternness, in the way they
should go, and instructing them in all things needful for their welfare;
but a sort of fairy god-mother, ready to furnish her pets with shoes of
swiftness, swords of sharpness, and omnipotent Aladdin's lamps,43
so that they may have telegraphs to Saturn, and see the other side of the
moon, and thank God they are better than their benighted ancestors.
If this talk were true, I, for one, should not greatly care to toil in the
service of natural knowledge. I think I would just as soon be quietly
chipping my own flint axe, after the manner of my forefathers a few
thousand years back, as be troubled with the endless malady of thought
which now infests us all, for such reward. But I venture to say that such
views are contrary alike to reason and to fact. Those who discourse in
such fashion seem to me to be so intent upon trying to see what is above
Nature, or what is behind her, that they are blind to what stares them in
the face in her.
I should not venture thus to speak strongly if my justification were not
to be found in the simplest and most obvious facts,—if it needed
more than an appeal to the most notorious truths to justify my assertion,
that the improvement of natural knowledge, whatever direction it has
taken, and however low the aims of those who may have commenced it—has
not only conferred practical benefits on men, but, in so doing, has
effected a revolution in their conceptions of the universe and of
themselves, and has profoundly altered their modes of thinking and their
views of right and wrong. I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy
natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual
cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws
of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the
foundations of a new morality.
Let us take these points separately; and first, what great ideas has
natural knowledge introduced into men's minds?
I cannot but think that the foundations of all natural knowledge were laid
when the reason of man first came face to face with the facts of Nature;
when the savage first learned that the fingers of one hand are fewer than
those of both; that it is shorter to cross a stream than to head it; that
a stone stops where it is unless it be moved, and that it drops from the
hand which lets it go; that light and heat come and go with the sun; that
sticks burn away in a fire; that plants and animals grow and die; that if
he struck his fellow savage a blow he would make him angry, and perhaps
get a blow in return, while if he offered him a fruit he would please him,
and perhaps receive a fish in exchange. When men had acquired this much
knowledge, the outlines, rude though they were, of mathematics, of
physics, of chemistry, of biology, of moral, economical, and political
science, were sketched. Nor did the germ of religion fail when science
began to bud. Listen to words which, though new, are yet three thousand
years old:—
. . . When in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the
winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley,
and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the
stars Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart.44
If the half savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, it is
irrational to doubt that he went further, to find as we do, that upon that
brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow,—the little light of
awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the
unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate
the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be
realised, of man's own nature. But in this sadness, this consciousness of
the limitation of man, this sense of an open secret which he cannot
penetrate, lies the essence of all religion; and the attempt to embody it
in the forms furnished by the intellect is the origin of the higher
theologies.
Thus it seems impossible to imagine but that the foundations of all
knowledge—secular or sacred—were laid when intelligence
dawned, though the superstructure remained for long ages so slight and
feeble as to be compatible with the existence of almost any general view
respecting the mode of governance of the universe. No doubt, from the
first, there were certain phenomena which, to the rudest mind, presented a
constancy of occurrence, and suggested that a fixed order ruled, at any
rate, among them. I doubt if the grossest of Fetish worshippers ever
imagined that a stone must have a god within it to make it fall, or that a
fruit had a god within it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such
matters as these, it is hardly questionable that mankind from the first
took strictly positive and scientific views.
But, with respect to all the less familiar occurrences which present
themselves, uncultured man, no doubt, has always taken himself as the
standard of comparison, as the centre and measure of the world; nor could
be well avoid doing so. And finding that his apparently uncaused will has
a powerful effect in giving rise to many occurrences, he naturally enough
ascribed other and greater events to other and greater volitions and came
to look upon the world and all that therein is, as the product of the
volitions of persons like himself, but stronger, and capable of being
appeased or angered, as he himself might be soothed or irritated. Through
such conceptions of the plan and working of the universe all mankind have
passed, or are passing. And we may now consider what has been the effect
of the improvement of natural knowledge on the views of men who have
reached this stage, and who have begun to cultivate natural knowledge with
no desire but that of "increasing God's honour and bettering man's
estate."45
For example, what could seem wiser, from a mere material point of view,
more innocent, from a theological one, to an ancient people, than that
they should learn the exact succession of the seasons, as warnings for
their husbandmen; or the position of the stars, as guides to their rude
navigators?46
But what has grown out of this search for natural knowledge of so merely
useful a character? You all know the reply. Astronomy,—which of all
sciences has filled men's minds with general ideas of a character most
foreign to their daily experience, and has, more than any other, rendered
it impossible for them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy,—which
tells them that this so vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom
among atoms, whirling, no man knows whither, through illimitable space;
which demonstrates that what we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but
that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles are
seething and surging, like the waves of an angry sea; which opens up to us
infinite regions where nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known,
but matter and force, operating according to rigid rules; which leads us
to contemplate phaenomena the very nature of which demonstrates that they
must have had a beginning, and that they must have an end, but the very
nature of which also proves that the beginning was, to our conceptions of
time, infinitely remote, and that the end is as immeasurably distant.
But it is not alone those who pursue astronomy who ask for bread and
receive ideas. What more harmless than the attempt to lift and distribute
water by pumping it; what more absolutely and grossly utilitarian? Yet out
of pumps grew the discussions about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and
then it was discovered that Nature does not abhor a vacuum, but that air
has weight; and that notion paved the way for the doctrine that all matter
has weight, and that the force which produces weight is co-extensive with
the universe,—in short, to the theory of universal gravitation and
endless force. While learning how to handle gases led to the discovery of
oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the notion of the
indestructibility of matter.
Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the attempt to
keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the wheel turns round very
fast? How useful for carters and gig drivers to know something about this;
and how good were it, if any ingenious person would find out the cause of
such phaenomena, and thence educe a general remedy for them. Such an
ingenious person was Count Rumford;47 and he and
his successors have landed us in the theory of the persistence, or
indestructibility, of force. And in the infinitely minute, as in the
infinitely great, the seekers after natural knowledge of the kinds called
physical and chemical, have everywhere found a definite order and
succession of events which seem never to be infringed.
And how has it fared with "Physick" and Anatomy? Have the anatomist, the
physiologist, or the physician, whose business it has been to devote
themselves assiduously to that eminently practical and direct end, the
alleviation of the sufferings of mankind,—have they been able to
confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful? I fear they
are the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before us
the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the
duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have
demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the
practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike
proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and
succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all
these, but have added more startling theses of their own. For, as the
astronomers discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an
eccentric 48
speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world,
but one amidst endless modifications of life; and as the astronomers
observe the mark of practically endless time set upon the arrangements of
the solar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient forms
of existence peopling the world for ages, which, in relation to human
experience, are infinite.
Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent for its
manifestation of particular molecular arrangements as any physical or
chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order
and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of
Nature.
Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion.
Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and
interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken
the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or
Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative
merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my
purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of
the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more
scientific than that of the past; because it has not only renounced idols
of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in
pieces the idols built up of books and traditions and fine-spun
ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of cherishing the noblest and most human of
man's emotions, by worship "for the most part of the silent sort" at the
Altar of the Unknown.
Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in our minds by the
improvement of natural knowledge. Men have acquired the ideas of the
practically infinite extent of the universe and of its practical eternity;
they are familiar with the conception that our earth is but an
infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe which can be seen; and
that, nevertheless, its duration is, as compared with our standards of
time, infinite. They have further acquired the idea that man is but one of
innumerable forms of life now existing on the globe, and that the present
existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of predecessors.
Moreover, every step they have made in natural knowledge has tended to
extend and rivet in their minds the conception of a definite order of the
universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy
metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the
force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as
arise out of that definite order itself.
Whether these ideas are well or ill founded is not the question. No one
can deny that they exist, and have been the inevitable outgrowth of the
improvement of natural knowledge. And if so, it cannot be doubted that
they are changing the form of men's most cherished and most important
convictions.
And as regards the second point—the extent to which the improvement
of natural knowledge has remodelled and altered what may be termed the
intellectual ethics of men,—what are among the moral convictions
most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people?
They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief;
that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting
disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin; that when good authority
has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason
has no further duty. There are many excellent persons who yet hold by
these principles, and it is not my present business, or intention, to
discuss their views. All I wish to bring clearly before your minds is the
unquestionable fact, that the improvement of natural knowledge is effected
by methods which directly give the lie to all these convictions, and
assume the exact reverse of each to be true.
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge
authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind
faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every
great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of
authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of
the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his
firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not
because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his
experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions
into contact with their primary source, Nature—whenever he thinks
fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation—Nature
will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in
justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise the practical results of
the improvement of natural knowledge, and its beneficial influence on
material civilisation, it must, I think, be admitted that the great ideas,
some of which I have indicated, and the ethical spirit which I have
endeavoured to sketch, in the few moments which remained at my disposal,
constitute the real and permanent significance of natural knowledge.
If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more and more
firmly established as the world grows older; if that spirit be fated, as I
believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought, and
to become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if, as our race
approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there is
but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then we, who
are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to recognise the
advisableness of improving natural knowledge, and so to aid ourselves and
our successors in our course towards the noble goal which lies before
mankind.
