SCIENCE AND CONSCIENCE. 13 



SCIENCE AND CONSCIENCE. 



By Professor THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY. 



WHENEVER we find men's thoughts concerning any one of the 

 main questions of life inclining steadily in a certain direction, 

 there is some probability that we shall not be far astray if we expect 

 to find a similar tendency in the way in which other questions are re- 

 garded by the same persons. Our experience tells us that this is true 

 of individuals : a radical in politics is likely to be a radical in religion, 

 and what is true of individuals is true of the race. The more we study 

 the past, the more we shall be convinced of the uniformity of thought 

 at different periods of history. Thus, the general awakening of inter- 

 est that we call the Renaissance was not confined to art and litera- 

 ture ; it became a reaction against every form of medievalism. It aided 

 the great movement of religious thought and produced the Reforma- 

 tion, as it also followed the new channels of scientific investigation. 

 The decay of feudalism that accompanied these new interests was far 

 from being an accidental coincidence. 



The pedantic sequel of the Renaissance, the limitation of interest 

 to what was called good sense, which distinguished the age of Louis 

 XIV in France, and, to speak somewhat crudely, what we may call 

 the literature of the last century in England, was far-reaching in its 

 effects : government and religion, as well as letters, rested on conven- 

 tionalities. They were all affected by the prevailing reaction in favor 

 of authority. In government, this took the form of monarchism ; in 

 literature, that of relying on Latin models, and abandoning all the na- 

 tional forms of composition. The French Revolution was more than 

 a mere political outbreak : it was but one form of a wide-spread revolt 

 against the narrow limits which pseudo-classicism and monarchism had 

 imposed on intellectual and personal freedom. The very logical co- 

 herence of the French, which had made their chains more binding than 

 the clumsy imitations which other countries forged for themselves, 

 made the revolution, when it came, thorough and terrible. What was 

 a smoldering discontent burst then into a flame of vengeance. Ro- 

 manticism, again, was not simply a literary movement ; its roots lay 

 deep in the recognition of the fact that all human beings, without 

 regard to their social position, are equally objects of interest to lit- 

 erature and art. The discovery was made gradually and almost 

 simultaneously in literature and politics, that the aristocracy had no 

 monopoly of importance. In short, toward the end of the last century 

 there was a Renaissance of humanity ; and aristocratic principles re- 

 ceived a blow from which they can never wholly recover. The revo- 

 lution is not yet complete, and its course hitherto has been uneven. 

 Some of the leaders, who in their hatred of classicism discovered that 



