The physical world has attained to its present advanced
geological condition through much of violence and pain; the same is true
in a moral sense of mankind at large; and there may be still quite a
great deal of this same career to run.
Sympathy of itself is blind, and may 'kill with kindness.' It has often
done so. But it is a noble emotion: let it play its role, since, in the
working out of destiny, 'the will may be taken for the deed,' and a good
accomplished which was not intended or foreseen.
Governments may not be greatly at fault for not proposing 'high moral
aims.' We need only recall the names of Watt, Fulton, Stevenson, Morse,
and others of that class, to perceive that great moral changes are
brought about when no moral purpose is intended. It is not affirmed that
these benefactors of mankind never thought of the moral consequences
which their purely physical labors would produce, but only that the
moral consequences were not the incentive to the mechanical achievement.
The genius of invention had to work out its legitimate results through
the innate force of its own peculiar constitution. The impetus was that
of essential genius, not of moral calculation.
The same thing is true of the cultivation of science for its own sake.
The stargazer with his telescope, the chemist with crucible and retort,
the physiologist with his chemical and optical aids, the purely
scientific thinker--all who prosecute science for the love of it--have
wrought out results which are breaking as light of the clear morning sun
upon the history of nations, thus enabling us to avail ourselves of the
past in order to comprehend the status of the present and the
possibilities of the future.
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