Optimism

Transcript

Optimism "And now, of all consolidators, science is showing its supreme fitness and its kinship with the sense of common humanity. It would be a fascinating and untrodden path, its follow in the ancient world the extension of scientific knowledge and note its coincidence with the growth of a more humane spirit in religion, in poetry, and in law. We believe the agreement would be close and that it is more than a mere coincidence. But here the evidence would be slighter and less conclusive. In the modern world the case is clear. Side by side with the growth of science, [Page #2] which is also the basis of the material prosperity and unification of the world, has come a steady deepening of human sympathy, and the extension of it to all weak and suffering things... Science, founding a firmer basis for the co-operation of mankind, goes widening down the centuries, and sympathy and pity bind the courses together." F.S. Marvin, The Living Past, Oxford 1923 pp. 270, 271