702 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



easily be done, hundreds and thou- 

 sands of parents throughout the 

 country would be to initiate perhaps 

 the most important reform move- 

 ment that our century has witnessed. 



A CRITIC CRITICISED. 



A FEW months ago there ap- 

 peared in France a French transla- 

 tion of Mr. Balfour's work on The 

 Foundations of Belief, with an in- 

 troduction by the well known editor 

 of the Revue des Deux Mondes, M. 

 Ferdinand Brunetiere. In this in- 

 troduction M. Brunetiere took occa- 

 sion to repeat many of the arguments 

 already used by him in his article of 

 a year or so ago on The Bankruptcy 

 of Science. He was greatly pleased 

 to think that Mr. Balfour had shown 

 that science could not lay claim to 

 any greater certainty than theology, 

 and he quoted with much satisfac- 

 tion Mr. Benjamin Kidd's disparage- 

 ments of the reasoning faculty and 

 exaltation of the irrational or supra- 

 rational as the source of everything 

 good and excellent in human society 

 and in the history of the race. It is 

 a little wonderful that men of the 

 general intelligence of M. Brunetiere 

 and Mr. Kidd do not recognize the 

 futility of such intellectual exerci- 

 tations as those in which they in- 

 dulge; but the former of these gen- 

 tlemen can at least see how his atti- 

 tude strikes a common-sense observer 

 in a very sprightly article published 

 in La Nouvelle Revue of the 15th of 

 January last. 



The writer, M. Gustave Tery, be- 

 gins by ohserving that M. Brunetiere 

 only a few years ago was one of the 

 most severely scientific writers of the 

 time. In physical science he was an 

 evolutionist and in literary criticism 

 as rigid and inflexible as Sarah Battle 

 over her game of whist. One fine 

 day he turned round on evolution, 

 and shortly afterward he declared 



war on science. Now there is no 

 knowing where to find him. He is 

 here, there, and everywhere, show- 

 ing different colors at different an- 

 gles, and taking pi'ide in nothing so 

 much as an infinite flexibility of 

 mind and conviction. His present 

 condition seems traceable in the main 

 to an interview he had a couple of 

 years ago with the Pope, who showed 

 him all the kingdoms of the world in 

 a moment of time, and, if he did not 

 convert him outright to Catholic or- 

 thodoxy, filled him with a holy zeal 

 for persuading the world that science 

 is the one thing least worthy of trust. 

 In pursuance of this mission he has 

 charged science with having under- 

 taken to "explain the universe" and 

 with having egregiously and shame- 

 fully failed to do so. But, as M. 

 Tery says in the article before us: 

 " What savant ever claimed to ex- 

 plain Nature in the ontological sense 

 that is to say, to reveal the nature 

 of Being ? All that science under- 

 takes is to connect phenomena with 

 one another, to relate them to their 

 causes and formulate their laws." 

 If, he further observes, M. Brune- 

 tiere will only make this elementary 

 distinction, he will not be so scandal- 

 ized as he appears to be at the reply 

 attributed to Laplace when some one 

 the pious Napoleon Bonaparte, was 

 it not ? asked him what place God 

 occupied in his speculations. The 

 reply was that he did not need that 

 hypothesis, by which he meant that 

 a speculation as to a first cause had 

 no place in a series of inquiries re- 

 lating to secondary causes. 



One of the amiable remarks of 

 M. Brunetiere apropos of reason is 

 that while it is easy enough to see 

 the ruins it has wrought, it is by no 

 means so easy to see what it has con- 

 structed. This in face of the fact 

 that day by day all the solid and en- 

 during work in the world is done by 

 the aid of reason and in accordance 



