SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM. 789 

 SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM. 



Br Professor T. II. HUXLEY. 



~~VTEXT to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending 

 -LN investigations, tbe intellectual sin which is commonest and most 

 hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge 

 is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors re- 

 corded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at 

 the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for 

 such neglect. No small labor is needed to raise ones' self to the level of 

 the acquisitions already made ; and able men who have achieved thus 

 much know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the 

 increase of their store, and avoid looking back with as much care as 

 if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them, 

 such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the discov- 

 erer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less elevated 

 character. 



So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse inter mortuos 

 qucerere vivum (to seek what is living among the dead); we leave the 

 past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual ancestry. Nor are we 

 content with that. We follow the evil example set us, not only by 

 Bacon, but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in pouring scorn 

 upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the school-men 

 of the middle ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisputable 

 that, for seven or eight centuries, a long succession of able men — some 

 of them of transcendent acuteness and encyclopedic knowledge — de- 

 voted laborious lives to the grave discussion of mere frivolities and the 

 arduous pursuit of intellectual Will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a 

 little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal experience 

 might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy meth- 

 od of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind. 

 Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so 

 far as to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick which con- 

 tains his weighty aphorism that " there is a great deal of human nature 

 in all mankind," might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that 

 epoch, who, take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly 

 in much the same proportion as ourselves, were likely to display noth- 

 ing better than the qualities of energetic idiots, when they devoted 

 their faculties to the elucidation of problems which were to them, and 

 indeed are to us, the most serious which life has to offer. Speaking for 

 myself, the longer I live the more I am disposed to think that there is 

 much less either of pure folly or of pure wickedness in the world than 

 is commonly supposed. It may be doubted if any sane man ever said 

 to himself, '"Evil, be thou my good," and I have never yet had the good 



