SCIENCE AND PROGRESS 



burned for teaching the doctrines of Copernicus, 

 since Galileo was imprisoned because he had proof 

 that the Copernican theory was true. Six gener- 

 ations carry us back to the day when Newton re- 

 vealed the simple mechanical principle on which 

 our solar system, and no doubt every other, is run. 

 There are men yet living who might have known 

 Laplace and heard from his own lips the theory of 

 how the system of planets, earth, and moon came 

 into existence. It is only forty years since Darwin 

 offered a mechanical explanation of how all things 

 living fern and fish, horse, ape, and man came to 

 be what they are. The doctrine of evolution, haz- 

 arded as a guess by Heraclitus two thousand years 

 ago, has been developed and proved only in our 

 own time. Even yet it cannot be said to have pen- 

 etrated more than a slender number of minds, save 

 in the vaguest way. 



The last two or three centuries have acquired a 

 wider knowledge of this world, and of the larger 

 universe, than all the sixty or a hundred centuries 

 preceding. I have elsewhere 1 sketched what might 

 be Newton's sensations were he now to return 

 among men. For Newton, as for Empedocles 2300 

 years before, the primal elements were Earth, Air, 

 Fire, and Water. He was something of a chemist, 



1 "The Spirit- Rappers, the Telepaths, and the Galvanom- 

 eter." p. 291. 



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