Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



crasies, to envisage certain aspects of the problems 

 of the day and to ignore others. 



The whole history of Science illustrates this. 

 We are all familiar with the way in which the 

 predilections of religious feeling in the time of 

 Copernicus and Galileo retarded the progress 

 of astronomical Science. As long as people 

 believed that a divine drama of redemption had 

 been enacted on this earth alone, they naturally 

 concluded that this earth was the centre of the 

 universe, and refused to look at facts which con- 

 tradicted their conclusion. When Galileo turned 

 his newly-made telescope on Jupiter and saw it 

 circled by its satellites, he saw in this an image 

 of the Copernican system and of the planets circling 

 round the central Sun ; but when he asked others 

 to share his observation and his inference, they 

 would not. " O, my dear Kepler," he writes in 

 a letter to his fellow astronomer, " how I wish we 

 could have one hearty laugh together. Here at 

 Padua is the principal Professor of Philosophy, 

 whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested 

 to look at the moon and planets through my glass ; 

 but he pertinaciously refuses to do so. What 

 shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious 

 folly ! " 



And though we laugh at the folly of those before 

 us, we do the same things ourselves to-day. Take 

 the science of Political Economy. A revolution 

 has taken place in that, almost comparable to the 

 change from the geocentric to the heliocentric 

 view in Astronomy. During the distinctively 



