70 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as they may be, will acknowledge that there is a wisdom beyond 

 their own, which the humblest Christian may possess, the wisdom 

 of simple belief and love. 



We are less familiar as yet with the invectives of scientific men 

 against what has long passed for learning and philosoj^hy in the world. 

 Difterent sections of the scientific school bring the accusation in dif- 

 ferent language. Yet the same feeling, the same strong and con- 

 temptuous conviction, pervades the whole school. "What they reject 

 and assail is, in two words, knowledge based on authority, and knowl- 

 edge wanting an inductive basis. 



That the utterances of great and famous philosophers are to be 

 taken as truth ; that in science, as in the civil law, the responsa pru- 

 dentum have a binding force ; has been accepted in some departments 

 of knowledge up to the present day. Long after the authority of 

 Aristotle had been shaken, new thinkers were allowed to occupy a 

 similar place in some brandies, and from Descai'tes to Hegel a sort of 

 monarchical rule has prevailed in metaphysics. The scientific school 

 tolerates notliing of this kind. Not that it refuses to reverence su- 

 perior minds, not perhaps that it is altogether incapable of yielding to 

 the temptation of trusting a particular authority for a while too much, 

 or following a temporary fashion. But as a general rule it rejects as 

 a superstition the notion that the most superior mind is at all infal- 

 lible ; it dissents without scruple from those whom it reverences most ; 

 and on the other hand the most eminent members of it encourage this 

 freedom, are well pleased to be conti'adicted, and avoid assuming an 

 oracular style as a mark of charlatanry. Such a cotip (Tetat in phi- 

 losophy as that of Auguste Comte is resolutely resisted, and the 

 autocracy of Hegel comes to an end, not by the accession of a new 

 monarch, but rather by the proclamation of a republic in German 

 philosophy. 



By the introduction of this new principle a large proportion of the 

 doctrine current in the world is branded with the mark of spurious- 

 ness. In theology, metaphysics^ moral philosophy, history, politics, 

 the princij^le of authority has reigned hitherto with more or less 

 exclusiveness. The repudiation of it is a revolution in those depart- 

 ments of knowledge. It converts whole libraries into waste-paper, 

 silences controversies that have raged for ages, reduces to worth- 

 lessness the whole store of learning hived np in many capacious 

 memories. It throws discredit at the same time upon the very 

 name of erudition ; not as such, for there is a kind of erudition 

 much appreciated by the scientific school; but because erudition, 

 as hitherto understood, has commonly gone along with, has in a 

 great degree grown out of, an excessive reverence for the opin- 

 ions of famous men. All that part of erudition, in particular, which 

 is to knowledge what relic-worship is to religion, the laborious col- 

 lection of minute facts that concern illusti'ious men, begins to seem 



