THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



-wholly erroneous in the long run."" A few pages later 

 he adds: "The progress of physical science, since the 

 revival of learning, is largely due to the fact that men 

 have gradually learned to lay aside the consideration 

 of unverifiable hypotheses; to guide observation and 

 experiment by verifiable hypotheses. "^^ This sounds 

 like good advice, but he neglects to say how, when an 

 hypothesis is advanced, one can tell whether it will 

 turn out later to be of the verifiable or of the unveri- 

 fiable sort. The history of the hypothesis of the nature 

 of light is one of the best examples in the history of 

 physics. Newton proposed the hypothesis of corpus- 

 cles; it was a century later shown to be unverifiable 

 by Young who proposed the hypothesis of waves in an 

 elastic aether; three-quarters of a century later this 

 proved to be unverifiable and was replaced by Max- 

 well's hypothesis of waves in an electro-magnetic 

 aether; today many physicists say there is no aether. 

 One cannot but suspect that Huxley thus condemned 

 a too strict adhesion to Bacon's inductive method be- 

 cause he, himself, was passionately determined to "put 

 over" Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection as 

 a sufficient cause for evolution, although he knew, and 

 had stated, that it did not rest on an adequate basis 

 of observation and experiment. And, today, we find 

 it discarded as an unverifiable hypothesis. Some day, 

 men of science will learn that hypotheses cannot 



1* Huxley, op. cit., p. 62. 

 '^^ Ibid., p. 65. 



Clio] 



