ON THE DREAD AND DISLIKE OF SCIENCE. 413 



styled " a bore " by all whose opinions have been adopted quite irre- 

 spective of evidence ? Is it not pronounced " narrow " to hesitate 

 in accepting wide conclusions without a keen appreciation of their 

 data? 



The distaste for accuracy, and the impatience at any restriction of 

 the divine right of judging without evidence, will disappear with the 

 advance of knowledge ; and with this advance will also disappear cer- 

 tain mistakeu pretensions of scientific men too ready to step beyond 

 their own domain. It is this which causes the distaste of artists, men 

 of letters, and moralists ; and their opposition to the spread of scientific 

 teaching. They do not oppose knowledge in the abstract, nor any 

 particular knowledge ; what they resist is the idea that the conclusions 

 reached in one department of inquiry are to dictate conclusions in an- 

 other. The artist is quite willing to accept the chemist's methodized 

 experience of chemical facts, but refuses to listen to the chemist theoriz- 

 ing about art. The moralist will accept from the physicist equations of 

 light, and from the anatomist relations of structure ; but reserves to 

 himself the right of deciding on a moral question. 



One must admit that in the inarticulate resistance of sentiment and 

 common-sense against certain applications of scientific doctrines there 

 is often a justification. For example, there are mechanical laws and 

 equations which admirably explain the facts of motion, yet sentiment 

 is shocked at the attempt to explain Nature on mechanical principles 

 only, and is sustained by common-sense, which sees other facts besides 

 facts of motion, and sees that Nature is not mechanical only. Again, 

 when the stored-up wealth of sentiments laboriously evolved in civilized 

 life is set aside in favor of some analogy drawn from observed processes 

 in the inorganic world, when the moral impulse to cherish the weak and 

 sickly is condemned because Nature (which is not moral) cherishes the 

 strong and pitilessly destroys the weak, common-sense protests, and 

 the protest helps to intensify the popular distrust of science. Yet, in 

 truth, the wiser heads among men of science are equally alive to the 

 mistake of such applications. 



What is to be understood by Science ? It means, first, a general 

 Method, or Logic of Search, applicable to all departments of knowledge ; 

 and, secondly, a doctrine, or body of truths and hypotheses, embracing 

 the results of search. In this second acceptation there are the particu- 

 lar sciences such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychol- 

 ogy, etc. which are the special applications of the general method to 

 special departments of knowledge ; and although there is an inter- 

 dependence of these sciences, each is restricted to its own class of facts, 

 none can legislate for the others. But because the various branches of 

 knowledge have been very unequally reduced to the exactness and 

 orderliness of science, those which have been most successfully reduced 

 have acquired the almost exclusive title ; so that science is generally 

 regarded as something apart the peculiar study of a particular class. 



