642 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE STABILITY OF TRUTH.* 



By DAVID STARR JORDAN, 



PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY. 



WITHIN the last few years three notable assaults have been 

 made on the integrity of science. Two of these have come 

 from the hostile camp of mediteval metaphysics, another from the 

 very front of the army of science itself. Salisbury, Balfour, and 

 Haeckel agree in this, that "belief" may rest on foundations un- 

 known to "knowledge," and that the conclusions of science may 

 be subject to additions and revisions in accordance with the 

 demands of " belief." To some considerations suggested in part 

 by Balfour's Foundations of Belief and Haeckel's Confession of 

 Faith of a Man of Science I invite your attention to-day. 



The growing complexity of civilized life demands with each 

 age broader and more exact knowledge as to the material sur- 

 roundings and greater precision in our recognition of the invis- 

 ible forces or tendencies about us. We are in the hands of the 

 Fates, and the greater our activities the more evident become 

 these limiting conditions. The secret of power with man is to 

 know its limitations. To this end we need constantly new acces- 

 sions of truth as to the universe and better definition of the truths 

 which are old. Such knowledge, tested and placed in order, we 

 call science. Science is the gathered wisdom of the race. Only a 

 part of it can be grasped by any one man. Each must enter into 

 the work of others. Science is the flower of the altruism of the 

 ages, by which nothing that lives " liveth for itself alone," The 

 recognition of facts and laws is the province of science. We only 

 know whit lies about us from our own experience and that of 

 others, this experience of others being translated into terms of 

 our own experience and more or less perfectly blended with it. 

 We can find the meaning of phenomena only from our reasoning 

 based on these experiences. All knowledge we can attain or hope 

 to attain must, in so far as it is knowledge at all, be stated in 

 terms of human experience. The laws of Nature are not the 

 products of science. They are the human glimpses of that which 

 is the " law before all time." 



Thus human experience is the foundation of all knowledge. 

 Even innate ideas, if such ideas exist, are derived in some way 

 from knowledge possessed by our ancestors, as innate impulses to 

 action are related to ancestral needs for action. 



But is human experience the basis also of belief as it is of 

 knowledge ? 



* President's address, California Science Association meeting, Oakland, December, 1895. 



