72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This second change leads to self-distrust, as the first led to distrust 

 of other men. As we learn not to take our truth at second-hand from 

 other thinkers, so we learn that we must not take it, if the expression 

 may be used, from ourselves. Truth is not wliat ice think, any more 

 than it is what famous men have thought. That which irresistibly 

 strikes us as true, that which seems self-evident, that which commends 

 itself to us, may nevertheless, we learn, not be true at all. It is not 

 enough to judge for ourselves, to examine the facts independently. 

 We must examine the facts according to a rigorous method, which 

 has been elaborated by a long series of investigators, and without 

 Avhich neither candor nor impartiality would save us either from see- 

 ing wrong, or from receiving unsound evidence, or from generalizing 

 too fast, or from allowina: some delusive name to come between us 

 and the reality. Distrust of others, distrust of ourselves if the first 

 of these two factors of the scientific spirit were separated from the 

 second, the result would be mere self-conceit, inere irreverence. As it 

 is, the scientific spirit is simply a jealous watchfulness against that ten- 

 dency of human nature to road itself into the universe, which will show 

 itself both in each individual and in the very greatest investigators, 

 and which can only be controlled by rigorously adhering to a fixed 

 process, and rigidly verifying the work of others by the same. 



Knowledge, not scientifically obtained and verified, might very fitly 

 be called by the name which Christianity uses. It might be called 

 "human knowledge," or "the wisdom of the world." For the diff'er- 

 ence between it and genuine knowledge is just this, that it is adulter- 

 ated by a human element. It is not the result of a contact between 

 the universe and the naked human intelligence. The perceiving mind 

 has mixed itself up with the thing perceived, and not merely in the 

 way in which it always must, in the way which constitutes cognition, 

 but in quite other and arbitrary ways, by wishes, by prejudices, by 

 crotchets, by vanities. Such humanized views of the universe have a 

 peculiar though cheap attractiveness. They naturally please the human 

 mind, because, in fact, they were expressly contrived to do so. They 

 adapt themselves readily to rhetoric and poetry, because, in fact, they 

 are rhetoric and poetry in disguise. To reject them is to mortify 

 human nature; it is an act of vigorous asceticism. It is to renounce 

 the world as truly as the Christian does when he protests against 

 fashionable vices. It is to reject a pleasant thing on the ground that 

 it is insincere that it is not, in fact, what it professes to be. The 

 moral attitude of the man who does it is just such as Hebrew prophets 

 assumed toward the flattering and lying court-prophets of their day; 

 just such as Christianity itself assumed toward Pharisaism ; just such 

 as Luther and Knox assumed toward mediaevalism ; just such as the 

 Puritans assumed toward prelacy. It is an attitude of indignant sin- 

 cerity, an attitude marking an inward determination to face the truth 

 of the universe, however disagreeable, and not to allow it to be adul- 



