Galileo gave us accurate clocks and accurate artillery-practice; the
chemists flood us with new medicines and dye-stuffs; Ampere and
Faraday have endowed us with the New York subway and with Marconi
telegrams. The hypothetical things that such men have invented,
defined as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary
fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce
from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then
bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there
before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly
put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the
scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of
increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may
even fear that the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers,
that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand
the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost
divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more
enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a
bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.
The philosophic stage of criticism, much more thorough in its
negations than the scientific stage, so far gives us no new range of
practical power.
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