Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/535

of the first two classes. We should find it difficult, probably, to dispense with their company in so long a journey after becoming so well acquainted with them; for among them we may each recall not a few of those rarer individuals of the genus homo called angels on earth. But it must be said in all truth, to resume the figure, that they have neither improved much the means of transportation nor perfected much the art of navigation. They have been sufficiently occupied, perhaps, in allaying the fears of the timid and in restraining the follies of the mutinous. Other types of mind and other modes of thought than theirs have been essential to work out the improvements which separate the earlier from the later nautical equipments of men; such improvements, for example, as mark the distinction between the dug-out of our lately acknowledged relatives, the Moros and the Tagalogs, and the Atlantic-liner of to-day. At any rate, we are confronted by the fact that man's conceptions of the universe have undergone slow but certain enlargement. His early anthropocentric and anthropomorphic views have been replaced, in so far as he has attained measurable advancement, by views that will bear the tests of astronomy and anthropology. He has learned, slowly and painfully, after repeated failures and many steps backward, to distinguish, in some regions of thought, the real and the permanent from the fanciful and fleeting phenomena of which he forms a part. His pursuit of knowledge, in so far as it has led him to certainty, has been chiefly a discipline of disillusionment. He has arrived at the truth not so much by the genius of direct discovery as by the laborious process of the elimination of error. Hence he who has learned wisdom from experience must look out on the problem of the universe at the beginning of the twentieth century with far less confidence in his ability to speedily solve it and with far less exaggerated notions of his own importance in the grand aggregate of Nature, than man entertained at the beginning of our era. But no devotee to science finds humiliation in this departure from the primitive concepts of humanity. On the contrary, he has learned that this apparent humiliation is the real source of enlightenment and encouragement; for notwithstanding the relative minuteness of the speck of cosmic dust on which we reside, and notwithstanding the relative incompetency of the mind to discover our exact relations to the rest of the universe, it has yet been possible to measure that minuteness and to determine that incompetency. These, in brief, are the elements of positive knowledge at which we have arrived through the long course of unconscious, or only half-conscious, experience of mankind. All lines of investigation converge toward or diverge from these elements. It is along such lines that progress has been attained in the past, and it is along the same lines that we may expect progress to proceed in the future.