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or theology, the expression Gnothi seauton has been fully worked out, 

 or that we know but little beyond the merest rudiments of the bound- 

 less stores of knowledge which lie therein concealed. To many of us it 

 will, therefore, seem much more fitting that the two great sister civili- 

 zeis, science and religion, should go forward, hand in hand, intent on 

 the ascertaining of truth itself and the amelioration of the condition of 

 the human race, rather than through the errors of man's judgment or 

 the imperfection of his knowledge, the least semblance of conflict 

 should be apparent. 



Theories there are without end in every department of life's work: 

 but theories are not always the essential things to which we should pin 

 our faith. It does not follow that the school-boy, when he has reached 

 man's estate, should continue to abide by the dictum of his early 

 preceptor. Had Galileo been content to accept the doctrine of his 

 so-called superiors that the world did not move, but that the heavenly 

 bodies, by their revolutions around the earth, gave rise to the pheno- 

 mena of clay and night, and had the successors of Galileo been content 

 to have followed the same blind path, it is very possible that the science 

 of astronomy, and, in fact, human knowledge in general, would have 

 made much slower progress than it has done since that date. The mere 

 dictum of any man, or of any body of men, will not at the present day, 

 and should not, carry more than its proper weight in the face of an 

 array of indisputable facts to the contrary. The great thing to guard 

 carefully against is the rash putting forth of unsubstantiated theories 

 as theories only ; and what is even worse, when such a theory has been 

 advanced, is the deliberate distortion of facts to its support when its 

 weakness becomes apparent or its falsity is clear. This unfortunate 

 condition of things is occasionally found in all the sciences. Thus in 

 the science of geology we have had the fierce warfare of the school of 

 the Neptunists, who hold that all the phenomena of the earth's surface 

 were produced by the agency of water, against that of the Plutonists, 

 who invoked the asencv of fire alone as the solver of all the difficulties 

 in the creative problem. Later, we have had the men who contended 

 for the great continental ice sheet extending over the entire northern 

 half of our land, against the advocates of iceberg action and local glacia- 

 tion only, and so on throughout the chapter. People looking on from 



