Modern knowledge makes these laws appear
very far-reaching, very rigid, and very much of the type that we call
mechanical. We have, therefore, most of us, learned not to expect
miraculous interferences with the course of nature as aids in our human
conflict with destiny. We have been taught to regard ourselves as the
products of a long process of natural evolution. We have come to think
that man's control over nature has to take the general form which our
industrial arts illustrate, and which our recent contests with disease,
such as the wars with tuberculosis and with yellow fever, exemplify.
Man, we have been led to say, wins his way only by studying nature and
by applying his carefully won empirical knowledge to the guidance of his
arts. The business of life--so we have been moved to assert--must
therefore be guided simply by an union of plain common sense with the
scientific study of nature. The real world, we have been disposed to
say, is, on the whole, so far as we can know it, a mechanism. Therefore
the best ideal of life involves simply the more or less complete control
of this mechanism for useful and humane ends.
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