ed with a certain amount of
indulgence--even when the intellect has received the full benefit of
modern scientific enlightenment. Unmorality, lack of restraint, lack of
faith and aspiration, self-indulgence and pleasure seeking in all its
forms--this is the natural and inevitable consequence of the kind of
progress which modern science is accomplishing, in connection with the
conduct of the individual.

Is not this a perfectly plausible explanation for the condition of
affairs which the English author describes so concisely, without
apparently comprehending?

"We are a nation without standards, kept in health rather by memories
which are fading than by examples which are compelling.... We have
become a mob breaking impatiently loose from the discipline and ideals
of our past.... Everything is sensual and ostentatious."

In our own country, among people of my class and kind, I may add the
testimony of first-hand information, that a large proportion of them,
at the present time, have come to regard passing pleasure and acts of
immediate self-interest as the chief object and motive of their lives.
It is the pleasure of eating and drinking which concerns them and not
the needs of hunger or thirst; the appeal of sex solely as a source of
pleasure, far removed from any thought or aspiration to create new life
and care for it; the pursuit of money for the pleasure of gain, and the
pleasure of out-witting others, and the gratification of vanities and
luxuries, far removed from essential needs; meaningless distractions and
entertainments, which tickle the wit and nerves of the material senses,
but by which neither the heart feelings, nor the soul feelings, nor even
the deeper esthetic feelings, are stirred or stimulated; jazz music,
bright colors, lively movement, jokes and snappy ideas, seasoned
preferably with spice and sex--this is the state, apparently, to which
modern methods and the rule of reason have led them.

To judge from observation and various information, which is only too
available, this tendency is steadily increasing; while, to judge it by
the light of the underlying causes which we have attempted to trace and
make plain, there is logical reason to expect that it will keep on
increasing.

What, then, of the future? Is our civilization, like that of the Roman
Empire, destined to decline and decay? If the present condition is
indeed an effect of modern science, either directly or indirectly, how
can it fail