ot indispensable. That vague community among
whom we arbitrarily place those with whom we disagree--the
Philistines--get on very well without them. But even Philistines have to
reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy.
That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so
cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay;
though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being
neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming
undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of
science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. Yet I suggest
that, as was pointed out in the case of the fine arts, certain branches
of the divine scholarship, if I may call it so, may be arrested
temporarily in any development they may have reached. Let us take
medicine. Medicine is primarily based upon the study of anatomy or
structure--physiology--or the scheme of structure carried out in life;
and upon botany and chemistry as representing the vegetable and mineral
worlds where the remedies are sought. Anatomy soon reaches a finite
position, when a sufficient number of careful dissections has been made;
the other divisions used to look like promising endless development; but
there is reason to suppose that they too, as far as medicine is
concerned, have reached a sterile perfection.

The microscope is perfected up to a point which mechanicians think cannot
be improved upon; so that those ultimate elements of physiology which
depend upon the observation of minute structure are known to us. To put
it crudely, we cannot discover any more germs, whose presence is hidden
from us by mere minuteness, unless we can improve our machinery, and
that, we are told, is an improbable event. I will not labour the point
by applying it to botany, which is very obvious, or to chemistry, where
it is not so clear. But it _is_ clear that owing to a feeling that not
much more is to be got from minute observation with the tools at our
disposal, the brightest intellects and most inventive clairvoyant work
are shunted into more imaginative channels. There are no men who guess
so brilliantly as men of science, so that science, in that respect, has
attained the dignity of Theology. I suppose that the startling theories
propounded by Sir Oliver Lodge and others will be taken as evidence of
the decay of science. But the human intellect, esp