get new ideas into their heads by keeping their heads on than it is by taking their heads off—­some of us seem to have passed over.  Living as we do in a world to-day with our new explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are—­has gone by.  We have not time for revolutions nowadays.  They may be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution all together, suit us better.  We are in a world in which we are seeing men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of thought—­by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see them as they are.  The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded, implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.

There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded, romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people.  The real adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with good cheer, acting on them.  The human race has a new temperament.  The way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to look for the most people.  The way we win a revolution or bring the enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with cooeperation, with understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably, obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will, of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned.  We had an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of him.  We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside first and then dealing with outside things together.

We see the inside.  It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.

The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a kind of chemistry.

Hercules is a bust now.

We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph Lister, or like Wilbur Wright—­the courage that faces material facts, that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.