THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION ,^ 



them in tender spots with his swift rapier thrusts, it is 

 hardly to be expected that he would discover the chief 

 causes of the domination of science. 



In the first place, science flatters us by making a 

 direct appeal to the reason. It offers an apparently 

 simple and logical explanation not only of the world 

 about us, but also of ourselves, our acts, and our 

 thoughts. For the doctrine of free-will which assumed 

 man to be personally responsible for his choice be- 

 tween good and evil, the substitution of impersonal 

 natural law could not fail to lull the conscience with 

 the comforting thought that what is, is right, or 

 rather is unavoidable because natural law knows 

 neither right nor wrong. Science, also, places man in 

 a middle world of law and order and relegates all 

 perturbing complexities to the incomprehensible 

 background of the immeasurably small or the inde- 

 finitely great. Life and matter on the earth are the 

 dance of atoms, and atoms are so small that we can 

 forget their variations: and the earth itself is in so 

 vast a universe that its perturbations are negligible. 



Again, the marvellous inventions of science and 

 its conquest of external conditions affect the imagina- 

 tion. Criticism is abashed and overawed by the array 

 of facts which men of science have predicted and 

 which have been verified. And so we become con- 

 vinced that the facts of science are adequate as a basis 

 for the most elaborate and far-reaching hypotheses 

 on all questions, however contrary to experience and 



i: 123 



