BIOLOGY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS 



prejudice, and the course of action to which it leads is 

 faced without evasion. I believe that it would be a more 

 comforting as well as a more comfortable world. 



Such creedal statements immediately stimulate emotional 

 reactions in people whose minds have fixations on the 

 mystical. Before they burst forth in criticism or denuncia- 

 tion, I have always wished that they would answer one 

 question: Is it or is it not a worthy objective to prefer 

 truth to falsehood? But they are too cunning to be caught 

 in such a simple trap. Instead, they suggest that the above 

 doctrine is "the substance of things hoped for," and there- 

 fore a faith rather than a belief; they say that they also are 

 seekers after truth, but that their brand of verity includes 

 subjective truth, intuitive truth; and they maintain that 

 numerous able scientists hold similar opinions. 



H. L. Mencken, with his usual forcefulness, has shown 

 the absurdity of the mystics who thunder against the 

 beliefs of men of science as being indistinguishable from 

 articles of faith. "Belief is faith in something that is 

 known," says he, "faith is belief in something that is not 

 known." The distinction is good; and by it the faith of 

 the scientific man in objective truth, established by 

 impartial evidence and demonstrable to all who have been 

 taught the use of reason, becomes a belief. The basis for 

 it is the fact that the whole course of human progress has 

 been due wholly and solely to the use of scientific method- 

 ology. There is no more justification for faith in intuition 

 than for faith in witches. Intuition is merely a delusive 

 word for something that wishful thinkers hope for, a 

 phantom to enable them to vindicate their own irrational- 

 ity. There are instincts, it is true, but experimental physiol- 

 ogy has shown that instincts are drives which are tropistic 

 in nature and which have little connection with the higher 

 cerebral centers. They should not be confounded with 

 intuitions. For example, certain larvae, which hatch in 



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