The evolutionist, in particular, is consumed with an
irresistible desire to stretch the ethical ideal on his procrustean
couch and to show how, like everything else, it has been the subject of
painfully slow growth and development, and that when the stages of that
growth have been accurately ascertained by research into the records of
the past, the essence of morality is fully explained. Originally
non-extant, it has become at length, after aeons of struggle, the chief
concern of man, the "business of all men in common," as Locke puts it,
all of which philosophy is tantamount to saying, that morality is
merely a flatter of history. When you know its history, you know
everything, very much as a photographer might claim to exhaustively
know an individual man, because he had photographed him every six
months from his cradle to his grave. A very inadequate philosophy of
ethic, this.

But, before coming to close quarters with this extremely interesting
problem, I would protest that we are sincere in our loyalty and
enthusiasm for physical science, sincere in our deep admiration for its
chief exponents. We claim to be students of the students of nature,
for, after all, nature herself is the great scientist. The secrets are
all in her keeping. The All-Mother is venerable indeed in the eyes of
every one of us. "The heated pulpiteer" may denounce modern science as
the evil genius of our day, the arch-snare of Satan for the seduction
of unwary souls and the overthrow of Biblical infallibility, but we are
not in that galley. As true sons of our age, we are loyal to its
spirit, and that spirit is scientific. The late Professor Tyndall said
of Emerson, the veritable prophet and inspiration of ethical religion:
"In him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really
and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present and
prospective, and in his case poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes
her graver brother science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal
laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted
into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal world." It is in no
spirit, therefore, of hostility to physical science or her methods that
we venture to point out that the term science is not synonymous with
experimental research. The most brilliant work of Darwin, Kelvin or
Edison in no wise alters the fact that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are re