ho
shall give the most, not who shall take the most. Its animating spirit
is love of truth. Its pride is to do the greatest good to the greatest
number. It embraces not only the whole human race but all nature in its
scope. The public spirit of which this city is the focus has made the
desert blossom as the rose, and benefited humanity by the diffusion of
the material products of the earth. Should you ask me how it is in the
future to use its influence for the benefit of humanity at large, I
would say, look at the work now going on in these precincts, and study
its spirit. Here are the agencies which will make "the voice of law the
harmony of the world." Here is the love of country blended with love of
the race. Here the love of knowledge is as unconfined as your
commercial enterprise. Let not your youth come hither merely to learn
the forms of vertebrates and the properties of oxides, but rather to
imbibe that catholic spirit which, animating their growing energies,
shall make the power they are to wield an agent of beneficence to all
mankind.

XIX

THE UNIVERSE AS AN ORGANISM

[Footnote: Address before the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of
America, December 29, 1902]

If I were called upon to convey, within the compass of a single
sentence, an idea of the trend of recent astronomical and physical
science, I should say that it was in the direction of showing the
universe to be a connected whole. The farther we advance in knowledge,
the clearer it becomes that the bodies which are scattered through the
celestial spaces are not completely independent existences, but have,
with all their infinite diversity, many attributes in common.

In this we are going in the direction of certain ideas of the ancients
which modern discovery long seemed to have contradicted. In the infancy
of the race, the idea that the heavens were simply an enlarged and
diversified earth, peopled by beings who could roam at pleasure from
one extreme to the other, was a quite natural one. The crystalline
sphere or spheres which contained all formed a combination of machinery
revolving on a single plan. But all bonds of unity between the stars
began to be weakened when Copernicus showed that there were no spheres,
that the planets were isolated bodies, and that the stars were vastly
more distant than the planets. As discovery went on and our conceptions
of the universe were enlarged, it was found that the system of the
fixed stars