What, now, is the reason why we should help each other? This carries us
back to the other illustration with which we started. We may
philosophize as coolly and correctly as we choose about our duties and
about the laws of right living; no one of us lives up to what he knows.
The man struck by the falling tree has, perhaps, been careless. We are
all careless. Environed as we are by risks and perils, which befall us
as misfortunes, no man of us is in a position to say, "I know all the
laws, and am sure to obey them all; therefore I shall never need aid
and sympathy." At the very best, one of us fails in one way and another
in another, if we do not fail altogether. Therefore the man under the
tree is the one of us who for the moment is smitten. It may be you
to-morrow, and I next day. It is the common frailty in the midst of a
common peril which gives us a kind of solidarity of interest to rescue
the one for whom the chances of life have turned out badly just now.
Probably the victim is to blame. He almost always is so. A lecture to
that effect in the crisis of his peril would be out of place, because
it would not fit the need of the moment; but it would be very much in
place at another time, when the need was to avert the repetition of
such an accident to somebody else. Men, therefore, owe to men, in the
chances and perils of this life, aid and sympathy, on account of the
common participation in human frailty and folly. This observation,
however, puts aid and sympathy in the field of private and personal
relations, under the regulation of reason and conscience, and gives no
ground for mechanical and impersonal schemes.

We may, then, distinguish four things:

1. The function of science is to investigate truth. Science is
colorless and impersonal. It investigates the force of gravity, and
finds out the laws of that force, and has nothing to do with the weal