Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



Now, looking back, at this interval of time, 

 though I admit that my attack was somewhat 

 hasty and crude in detail, I feel that in its main 

 contention it was thoroughly justified, and I do 

 not feel the least inclined to withdraw it. 



What was that main contention ? It was as 

 follows. Modern Science is an attempt (and no 

 doubt it would accept this definition of itself) 

 to survey and classify the phenomena of the world 

 in the pure dry light of the intellect, uncoloured 

 by feeling ; and so far is an effort to separate the 

 intellectual in man from the merely perceptive, 

 the emotional, the moral, and so forth. It was 

 in this very fact that my criticism lay ; for I con- 

 tended that such a separation was in the long run 

 quite impossible. 



But before proceeding to defend this position, 

 let me admit at once that this attempt of Modern 

 Science to get rid of human feeling and to look 

 at everything in the dry light of the intellect was 

 in some respects a very grand one. When you 

 consider what the Old-time Science was, with its 

 fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon 

 the sun and moon in eclipses, its immolations of 

 hundreds of human beings to appease some god 

 of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its super- 

 stitions, and its incapability of regarding anything 

 except from the point of view of that thing's in- 

 fluence on man's own comfort and his little hopes 

 and fears, it was indeed a grand advance to try 

 and see fac/s, uncoloured and for themselves alone. 

 It was an effort of Man as it_were to rise above 



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