n their more sober moments "the beaters of the
drum" scientific would appear to be well aware of the fact. For
instance, Mr. Huxley himself, oblivious of all he had claimed in the
name of physical science, asked with surprise, in what laboratory
questions of aesthetics and historical truth could be tested? In what,
indeed? we may well ask. And yet the physical science which is
avowedly incapable of deciding the comparatively insignificant matters
of taste and history is prepared to take over with the lightest of
hearts the immense burden of morality and to become the
conscience-keeper, I had almost said the Father Confessor, of humanity!
I imagine Mr. Huxley himself would have shrunk before the assumption of
such responsibility.

But let us approach the matter more closely. To physical science, one
act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular
movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy and
profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same
thing--a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction,
and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain. A burglar shoots a
policeman dead and the public headsman decapitates a criminal. To
physical science, those two acts differ in no respect. They are
exercises of muscular energy, expenditure of nervous power, the
effecting of molecular change, and there the matter ends. But surely,
you would urge, the scientist would discriminate between those two
acts. Most assuredly. The one he would reprobate as immoral, and the
other he would approve as lawful. But, be it carefully noted, he would
do this, not as a scientist, but as a citizen respecting law and order
and upholding good government based on morality and justice. As a
moralist, then, but not as a scientist does he pass judgment, for there
is no experimental science which deals with such matters. Physics
concerns itself solely with what it can see and handle--nothing else.
The actions, therefore, of right and wrong, justice and injustice,
morality and immorality are simply unintelligible to it, just as
unintelligible as they are to the most highly developed animal. It is
the fully developed mind or intelligence alone which apprehends the
sublime conception of duty, and the indefeasible claims which it has
upon the allegiance of the will, and, in consequence, the scientist who
denounces injustice and iniquity is no longer on the tripod of the
p