Ten years ago an eminent American physician remarked to me: “In my country the ardor of scientific research is rapidly overriding the proper benevolent objects of my profession. The cure of disease is becoming quite a secondary consideration to the achievement of a correct diagnosis, to be verified by a successful _post mortem_.” How true this now holds of the state of things in English hospitals, that remarkable book, “St. Bernard’s,” and its still more important key, “Dying Scientifically,” have just come in time to testify.[5] No one who has read these books will deny that the purely Scientific Spirit is (at all events sometimes) a merciless spirit; and that Dr. Draper’s famous boast, so often repeated, that “Science has never subjected any one to physical torture” (Preface to “Conflict,” p. xi), is untrue. Irreverence appears to be another “note” of the Scientific Spirit. Literature always holds a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings will never be dethroned. But Science is essentially Jacobin. The one thing certain about a great man of science is that in a few years his theories and books, like French Constitutions, will be laid on the shelf. Like coral insects, the scientists of yesterday, who built the foundations of the science of to-day, are all dead from the moment that their successors have raised over them another inch of the interminable reef. The student of Literature, dealing with human life, cannot forget for a moment the existence of such things as goodness which he must honor, and wickedness which he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons to her votaries. There is nothing to revere even in a well-balanced solar system, and nothing to despise in a microbe. Taking this into consideration, it might have been foreseen that the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have been deficient in reverence; and, as a matter of fact, I think it will be conceded that so it is. It is a spirit to which the terms “imperious” and “arrogant” may not unfitly be applied, and sometimes we may add “overbearing,” when a man of science thinks fit to rebuke a theologian for trespassing on _his_ ground after he has been trampling all over the ground of theology. Perhaps the difference between the new “bumptious” Spirit of Science and the old exquisitely modest and reverent tone of Newton and Herschel, Faraday and Lyell, is only due to the causes which distinguish everywhere a Church Triumphant from a Church Militant. But, whatever they may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be in an age of Science that the prophecy will be fulfilled that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”[6]