Even the narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most dogmatic of British sceptics, has recently said:
“The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all science, means the demonstration of order and natural causation among phenomena which had not previously been brought under those conceptions. Nobody who is acquainted with the progress of scientific thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of the last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces have been added to the realm of science, or to doubt that the next two centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system is it justifiable to conclude from the progress that has been made in analyzing the relations between material and psychical phenomena that vast further advances will be made, and that sooner or later all the so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will have, not only their relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena, connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined. In other words, while at present we know only the nearer moiety of the chain of causes and effects by which the phenomena we call material give rise to those which we call mental, hereafter we shall get to the further end of the series.”
The “further end of the series,” however, is vastly different from anything within the mental range of the distinguished professor, whose ultra materialism led him to revamp the old Cartesian doctrine that animals were only machines, like clocks or mills, running automatically, and destitute of sensation, and intelligence.
The science and philosophy of the future will be distinguished by their mastery of the realm of mind, and the closer approximation of the human to the Divine, not only in intelligence, but in ethics.
The Journal of Man, as the first periodical organ of the new philosophy, will attempt gradually to initiate the archetypal forms of thought of the coming period, in which the disappearance of old philosophy and ethics shall leave room for growth.
Not that all ethics shall be changed among the civilized races, for there are simple primary and true conceptions which are universally recognized, and are embalmed in all religions. Yet these few universal ideas are but the rudiments of ethics, and no more constitute an ethical system worthy of the name, than the four primary processes of arithmetic constitute a system of mathematical science. The future is to evolve the true ethics, and therewith the educational system that will bring the true ethics into all spheres of human life.
In all past time there has been no ethical system competent to establish a perfectly harmonious social state, and no system of education competent to lift society to a higher life. Education as it has been brightens life with literature and art, but does not elevate it. The same old element of poverty, misery, disease, crime, and insanity marches on, hand in hand with the college and the church, as it formerly went hand in hand with the hunting and warring barbarians of the forest. And the dull, blunted conscience of the time, lulled by the softly solemn platitudes of the pulpit and the soulless system of education, rebels not against the old social order. In full view of the past twenty-five centuries, may we not exclaim with Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps on this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;