wisest philosopher who gives to us
its best practical solution.

I wish now to invite your attention to mistakes that men have made in
supposing that their knowledge was the _ne plus ultra_ of human wisdom.
Time was when the alchemists thought they possessed the _ne plus ultra_
of human knowledge, and that wisdom would die with them; yet their
knowledge is now to chemistry what astrology is to astronomy. It is a
superstition on whose claims no scientist would dare to risk his
reputation. Now chemistry is the _ne plus ultra_ of human wisdom, and
every man is a fool who does not hold the key to the secret chambers of
its hidden treasures! But how long till we shall have a new chemistry
that will render the old a bundle of laughable folly? The fact is, by
the advancement of human knowledge we demonstrate that our ancestors
were a set of fools, and our posterity will doubtless pay us the same
compliment! The philosophy of history should teach us to be modest, and
to keep as our motto _plus ultra versus ne plus ultra_.

Modern science has demonstrated that of all unreliable things, ancient
science is the most unreliable. We should, therefore, expect to
eventually see modern science remanded to the same category. One of the
greatest inventors of the age, Mr. Edison, whose inventions have had to
do wholly with modern science, tells us that he has been constantly
thrown off the track and misled by the frauds of science. He thus
expresses his estimate of the authorities in modern science:

"They [the text-books] are mostly misleading. I get mad with myself
when I think I have believed what was so learnedly set out in them.
_There are more frauds in science than anywhere else_.... Take a
whole pile of them and you will find uncertainty, if _not
imposition_, in half of what they state as scientific truth. They
have time and again set down _experiments as done by them_,
curious, out-of-the-way experiments, _that they never did_, and
upon which they have founded so-called scientific truths. I have
been thrown off my track often by them, and for months at a time.
You see a great name, and you believe it. Try the experiment
yourself, and you find the result altogether different.... I tell
you I'd rather know nothing about a thing in science, nine times
out of ten, than what the books would tell me--for practical
purposes, for applied science, the best science, the only science