But need makes for perspicuity. Time passed, and some few caught a glimpse of the vision of science; caught it, widened it, brightened it and passed it on. Perhaps their lives were not very happy in a world where they were much alone; but it is easier to tell of their ostensible hardships than of their enthusiasms--who knows but that even they found here their compt? Time went on, and that Nature which had begun by being so cruel and capricious a mistress became through man’s science more and more his slave. Human eyes were not so often turned to the gods in supplication. A Greek slave rang out to his fellows, “Why call ye upon the gods? Ye have hands? Wipe your own nose.” The earth yields; step by step death itself gives ground; and shall we think of the stars only to fear them and to read our fate in them? Shall they forever whisper to us their old taunting questions: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?”--And shall we always answer, Alas! But I am dreaming a dream. Is it though so ill a thing to dream, if one does not forget how to laugh the while? Yes, I know, the stars are rather big for our frail hands to play with even as all Nature once played with us. But how else am I to say that there is nothing in Nature that can forever resist the onward march of science? What else am I to say when the same master equations hold in heaven as on the earth, and Arcturus with all his sons is but a falling pebble painted large? Let us dream then and laugh with Aesop at his frog. It is certain that neither our laughter nor our dreams can hurt our wise neighbor very much, and if we go the toilsome way toward the conquest we dream of, he or one that comes after may sometime look back on us and say, Yes, that was Progress. _The measure of man’s coöperation with man in the conquest of nature measures progress._ X ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY A Footnote in Illustration [Something we had to say, in clarifying the thought of Kant, of a quality of human _love_ that holds its object single and unique. And again, in estimating the part played by morality in the ideal of progress, we had occasion to remark the unwillingness of some to admit the finality of those sacrifices _loyalty_ calls for.