Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/705

pense of violence done to almost any kindly sympathy, though not "sympathy with fellow-men." Professor Tyndall had described how the origin and rationale, though not the cure, of certain painful diseases had been discovered, partly by the use of the microscope, partly by inoculating certain living creatures with the most terrible of those diseases at various stages; and this triumphant outburst over the results which Professor Tyndall anticipates in his scientific vision, — they are not yet attained, — is meant in great degree to persuade his audience that science must be allowed to be a law unto itself, — excepting, we suppose, it should invade the life of man himself with its experimentation, nor do we see that Professor Tyndall suggests ground for even this limitation, — in endeavoring to ascertain the sources of human suffering, and the remedies or alleviations which may be applied. Leave it alone, he says, — don't reproach it with cruelty because it causes a certain amount of limited suffering, — and "its dawn will open out by-and-by to perfect day." Now, our answer to that is twofold, — first, that it is quite certain that it will not open out to perfect day, but at best to a less dim twilight; and next, that the access of twilight so gained, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, instead of leading to action which extinguishes the evil, will only lead to action which will attenuate it to the individual at the expense of the race. That, of course, is no reason at all why this knowledge should not be diligently sought, and sought with all the fervor of Professor Tyndall himself, unless it is sought at the cost of principles and sympathies which are as precious as human life itself, and far more precious than a slight extension of the average term of life to individuals. But the dimness of our knowledge, — the uncertainty whether even our clearest knowledge of ills will suggest any adequate remedy for them, — the absolute certainty that the knowledge which saves and protects the weak does tend to lower the standard of complete health in the future of our race, even while it increases our available resources against individual ailments, should, we think, help to make us acquiesce gladly in every restriction which the healthy moral nature of man imposes on the sources of discovery, and to warn us that far more evil than good may come of the assumption that to the genuine search after knowledge, no means, however revolting to our nature, is forbidden. If we might be permitted to alter Professor Tyndall's address to the "men of Glasgow" so as to make it suit the impression which his lecture and the discussion to which he refers have made upon ourselves, we should couch it in terms something like these: "Preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering, sentient world. We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from imperceptible ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the dominions of our seeming foes. Even now that it is let in, its result is by no means unadulterated good. Destruction prevented, means, too often, weakness transmitted. The invisible thongs which scourged one generation not unfrequently saved the next from the scourges of thongs more frightful still. While the total result for good in human life has been to extend by a few years the average age of man in civilized countries, and to extinguish a good many of the worst spasms of human anguish, that result probably includes quite as much effect in transmitting hereditary feebleness or taints to future generations, as in saving men altogether from the assaults of disease. Let science grow as it will, human life will continue to be hemmed in by all sorts of visible and invisible ills with the totality of which we must never cease to struggle, but with which our struggle is never likely to be, on the whole, much more successful than it now is. What we gain in one way, we shall probably lose in another; as some of our unknown foes are discovered and defeated, the very means which discover and defeat them will make other foes more formidable; and after all, our chief resource will lie in the future, as it does in the present, in the undaunted courage of our fight, the unquailing fortitude of our endurance, and in our firm faith in God here, and a higher life with Him beyond. Considerations like these excite in us the thought that the rule and governance of this "universe is not very different from what in our youth we supposed it to be, — that the Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is not to be propitiated by any mere advance of knowledge. The first requisite towards such propitiation is right action in the light we have, — the second, to increase that light wherever we can do so by means which do not lower us in God's eyes and our own. The desire to know, like almost all other desires,