METAMORPHOSES IN EDUCATION. 753 



implications of which I speak were not perceived until long after- 

 ward, and had these been seen by Newton or by his contempo- 

 raries, and had they been pointed out, the probabilities are that 

 Newton himself would have joined the great band of martyrs for 

 truth that had preceded him. It is now seen that the whole doc- 

 trine of what we call the conservation of energy is involved and 

 implied in his laws of motion. If that had been seen in Newton's 

 day it would have been interpreted as an attempt by Newton to 

 dethrone the Almighty by a mathematical process, as such work 

 has been so often stigmatized within the last hundred years. 

 Happily, we live in the post-martyr age, and we have no fears for 

 our lives. But while the laws of mechanism had been accepted 

 and taught for a hundred and fifty years, they were taught 

 mostly as abstract propositions or as applicable to appreciable 

 motions of inanimate matter, not at all as applicable to such a 

 problem as the formation of the earth and of the solar system. 

 So, when Laplace developed the nebular theory on the basis of 

 Newton's laws, the attempt was denounced as impious and tend- 

 ing to overthrow all religious teachings; but the multiplication 

 table holds good, no matter who denounces it or for what pur- 

 pose ; and now, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, men 

 have become able to contemplate the nebular theory without 

 danger of vertigo, and the proposition that the solar system has 

 been evolved from a nebulous mass through the operations of 

 simple mechanical laws is held by all astronomers and others 

 capable of rational effort. When it was perceived that energy 

 existed in several forms, and that these were transformable into 

 each other and stood in quantitative relations to each other, 

 another mechanical step was taken, for the chemistry and geol- 

 ogy of the earth were brought under physical laws and relation- 

 ships, but it was still held that all this could be granted as appli- 

 cable to inorganic matter, without trenching at all upon the idea 

 that life, and especially mankind, held divine prerogatives, and 

 were not to be included as a part of the general scheme of the 

 development of the earth. The educational institutions were hos- 

 tile to these various advances, and decided that if true they were 

 premature and not proved, even long after they were accepted 

 by those competent to judge ; but, so long as life and humanity 

 were not involved in the problem, they did not need to feel much 

 concern. And wherever, in any college or university in the land, 

 the above advances in physical science were taught or mentioned, 

 it was always with the carefully added statement that it was all 

 outside of humanity, its interests, its hopes, or its fears, and that 

 the statements made by other persons who taught differently in 

 scientific matters were untrue, and were instigated by hatred to 

 Christian beliefs and the institutions founded and maintained by 



vol. xxxix. 54 



