376 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



chology before it is wrought out in human history. It 

 is the struggle of realities against tradition and sugges- 

 tion. The progress of civilization would 



still have been just such a struggle had 

 conservatism. . °° 



religion or theology or churches or wor- 

 ship never existed. But such a conception is impossi- 

 ble, because the need for all these is part of the actual 

 development of man. 



Intolerance and prejudice are, moreover, not con- 

 fined to religious organizations. The same spirit that 



burned Michael Servetus and Giordano 



The effort to -„ e ^u u • c • i j 



,. . , , Bruno for the heresies of science, led 



limit thought. , , . ,., , ,, , , 



the atheist " liberal mob of Pans to 



send to the scaffold the great chemist Lavoisier, " with 

 the sneer that the republic has no need of savants." 

 The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to 

 reject natural selection because it "relieves God of the 

 labour of creation," causes the heterodox Haeckel to 

 condemn Weismann's theories of heredity, not because 

 they are at variance with facts, but because such ques- 

 tions are settled once for all by the great philosophic 

 dictum of monism. 



There is no better antidote to bigotry than the study 

 of the growth of knowledge. There is no chapter in 

 man's history more encouraging than that which treats 

 of the gradual growth of open-mindedness. The study 

 of this history will bring religious men to avoid the mis- 

 takes of intolerance through a knowledge of the evils 

 to which intolerance has led in the past. Scientific men 

 will be spurred to better work by the record that through 

 the ages objective truth has been the final test of all 

 ideas. All men will be more sane and more effective in 

 proportion as they realize that no good can come from 

 " wishing to please God with a lie." 



The conflict of science is usually considered as the 



