Industrial Influences.
The causes which mostly disturbed or accelerated the normal progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great men. In modern times the appearance of great inventions. Printing has secured the intellectual achievements of the past, and furnished a sure guarantee of future progress. Gunpowder and military machinery have rendered the triumph of barbarians impossible. Steam has united nations in the closest bonds. Innumerable mechanical contrivances have given a decisive preponderance to that industrial element which has colored all the developments of our civilization. The leading characteristics of modern societies are in consequence marked out much more by the triumphs of inventive skill than by the sustained energy of moral causes. (“Lecky’s History of European Morals,” vol. 1, p. 126.)
It is not necessary to point in what way the printing press, art, commerce, and science, have promoted the progress of the race. It is so apparent to every intelligent reader that these have been the stepping stones over which we have passed from barbarism to civilization, that amplification is unnecessary.
The splendid results of science are everywhere so manifest that we hardly need refer to them. What transformations the world has undergone through the uses of the steam engine, the spinning jenny, telegraph, ocean cable, railroads, sewing machines, photography, spectrum analysis, and thousands of other useful inventions. We see advancement achieved in free government, free schools, free libraries, free trade, labor reform, prison reform, and reform in the treatment of lunatics, paupers and criminals, and reform seeking to adjust the wrongs perpetrated upon women.
Besides all these improvements there is every indication in the spirit of to-day that we are soon to witness greater improvements, if not radical changes in government; changes affecting capital and labor.
Skepticism.
Skepticism played a prominent part in the eighteenth century. Doubt instead of faith, possessed the minds of many of the most distinguished men of thought, such as Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Rousseau, D’Holbach, Gibbon, and others. Some of the more prominent skeptics rejected Christianity on the common ground of incredibility of the scriptures. But as they had no form of belief or knowledge to substitute in place of the dogmas they rejected, it was not difficult for the clergy with specious explanations to cover up the doubts and disbeliefs which the skeptics raised. Something more was needed to break the spell of superstition and arouse the minds of men to thought and action. In the first part of the present century the philosophy of Evolution began to find place in the minds of most profound thinkers. Science has done what skepticism failed to accomplish; it has given knowledge instead of faith. It has cultivated intense intellectual habits in modern society and given mankind a sure test of truth, in its method of verification, by means of experiment, observation and deduction.