The search

"It is not the truth in man's possession that makes the worth of man. Possession makes him selfish, lazy, proud. Not through possession, but through long striving, comes the ever-growing strength. If God should hold in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand only the ceaseless struggle to reach after truth, and he should say to me, Choose, I would fall in humbleness before his left hand, and say:

for truth.

"Father, give; the perfect truth is but for thee alone.'"

XV.

THE STRUGGLE FOR REALITIES.

The price of truth.

Ir is said that every tie in the Panama Railway cost a man his life. Whether this be true or not, it may serve as an illustration of the progress of human knowledge. Every step in the advance of science has cost the life of a man. And this price of truth has been paid in two different ways. It may take a lifetime of the severest labour to find out a new fact. No truth comes to man unless he asks for it; and it takes years of patience and devotion to ask of Nature even one new question. He is already a master in science who can suggest a new experiment.

In the second place, the truth-seeker has had to struggle for his physical life. Each acquisition. of truth has been resisted by the full force of the inertia of satisfaction with preconceived ideas. Just as a new thought comes to us with a shock which rouses the resistance of our personal conservatism, so a new idea is met and repelled by the conservatism of society.

And as each individual in his own secret heart believes himself in some degree the subject of the favour

The mystic sanction.

of the mysterious unseen powers, so does society in all the ages find a mystic or divine warrant for its own attitude

toward life or action, whatever that may be.

The institutions that survive spring out of man's need for them. The existence of the Church has divine warrant in this. Should every fragment of the historic churches disappear, every memory, every ceremony, every trace of creed or form, the Church would rise again, renewed as to all its essentials; and with each variant race of man there would be a corresponding variation in the form of the Church. You could not make Buddhists out of the Puritans, nor transplant the New England Sabbath to the sunny isles of Greece. Monarchy, in turn, exists by the same divine right; and when it fails, the same divinity that hedged the king is invoked to sustain the rights of the people. Once the king was God's anointed, as he still is in many lands. But when "God said, 'I am tired of kings; I suffer them no more, the self-rule of the people acquired the same divine right—no less, no more, for the warrant rests in the heart of man. We know God's purposes only by what he lets man do. We know what he wills only by what he permits. That which exists in the nature of things men have worshipped as divine, especially if its relations have been dimly understood. Thus the struggle of science with prejudice and tradition has become a warfare with religion; for men have always sought to strengthen their traditional opinions by giving them a religious sanction.

The struggle

against tradition.

The history of the progress of science has been the record of the physical resistance of organized society. "By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track." He who sees that the world does move is burned at the stake, that other men may be convinced that it does not. He who is sure that the rocks were once molten, finds the force of social pressure between him and his studies. He who would give the sacred books of our civilization

the faithful scrutiny their vast importance deserves, finds the doors of libraries and universities closed to his research. He who has seen the relation of man to his brother animals, finds the air filled with the vain chatter of those to whom whatever is natural seems only pro"Extinguished theologians," Huxley tells us, "lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of the infant Hercules."

The struggle against learning.

Wis

But this, again, is not the whole story. This fact is only an incident in human development. Not only theologians lie strangled about the giant's cradle, but learned men of all ciasses and conditions. Learning and wisdom are not identical; they are not always on speaking terms. Learning looks backward to the past. The word "learn " involves the existence of some man as teacher. dom looks forward to the future. In so far as science is genuine, it is of the nature of wisdom. "To come in when it rains" is the beginning of the science of meteorology. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die," is the practical basis of personal ethics. To be wise is to be ready to act; but learning in all the ages has condemned wisdom and despised action.

The struggle in the human mind.

It seems to me that the warfare of science is not primarily, as Draper has called it, a conflict with religion, nor even, as President White would have it, a struggle with "dogmatic theology." It is all of these, but it is more than these-a conflict of tendencies in the human mind which has worked itself out into history. The great movements of history in general are written in the human mind before they are worked out on the great stage of the world. When history is enacted, we perform deeds and recite sentences "written for us generations before we were born." "He hath his exits and

his entrances." He is a rare man who can add a new meaning to his lines or give a better cue to him that follows.

Nature of the mind.

The nervous system of man and animals is primarily a device for making locomotion safe. The mind-using the word in the broadest sense-is a collective term for the operations of the nervous system. It is not an entity existing apart from organization. To it consciousness is related much as the flame is to fire. The mind is in operation whether we realize it or not. The reflex action of the nerve centre is the type of all mind processes. Through the sensory nerves, impressions of the external world are received by the brain or central ganglion. The brain has no source of knowledge other than through sensation. All human knowledge comes through human experience. The primal function of the brain, sitting in darkness, is to convert sensory impressions into impulses of action. To this end are developed the motor nerves which pass from the nerve centre outward to the muscles. The sensory organs are the brain's sole teacher; the muscles are its only servants. The essence of the intellect, as distinguished from reflex or instinctive action, is the choice among different motor responses to the stimulus of external conditions. As the conditions of life grow more complicated, the possible ways in which sensation may pass over into action grow more numerous. It is the function of the intellect to consider these, and of the will to choose. The growth of the intellect causes and permits complexity of life. Safety in life depends upon choosing the right response. Wrong choice leads to failure and death. The power of choice implies the necessity of choosing right.

From this, by the process of natural selection, arises