< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

it is found where the breakers surge against the shores of the unknown. But in the consciousness, the stable, the crystallized, the permanent combinations are formed; the new world is organized, surveyed, mapped, and the frontier is widened. Here everything proceeds under hard supervision.

Finally, the research student, the investigator, must have a burning love for the search for truth, as well as for the truth itself. And when in his somber moods he asks, what does it signify in the end? he finds the answer at the close of Poincaré's "Value of Science." He expresses the significance of science in these clear terms:

Civilizations are measured only by their science and their art. Some persons are surprised at the formula: science for science's sake; yet it is quite as good as life for life's sake, if life is only misery; and even as happiness for happiness' sake, if one does not place all pleasures on the same level, if one does not admit that the end of civilization is to furnish more alcohol to people who like to drink.

Every action must have an aim. We have to suffer, we have to work, we have to pay for our seat at the show, but it is in order that we may see, or at least that others may sometimes see.

What is not thought is nought; since we can think only thoughts, and every word we use in talking about things stands for a thought, to assert there is anything else than thought is a senseless affirmation.

Meanwhile—a strange contradiction for those who believe in time—geologic history teaches that life is only an episode between two eternities of death; and even in this episode conscious thought has endured and will endure but a moment. Thought is but a flash in the midst of a long night.

Yet this flash indeed is everything.

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