662 HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



such men as Francis Bacon and Galileo, but only after the supremacy I 

 of theology itself had been impaired by other causes. The divergence j 

 of science from theology or rather from a theology which pronounces 

 a priori upon the very questions which it is the function of science to 

 investigate has often been dated from the sixteenth century. In its 

 operation and results this divergence has perhaps been illustrated 

 sufficiently for the purposes of the present work in Chapter V. We 

 unfortunately hear much in our own day about oppositions and con- 

 flicts between theology and science, and more particularly in connec- 

 tion with the development theory of organic species, many persons 

 have declaimed against the pretensions of science. But not the ac- 

 ceptance of the doctrine of Evolution in its widest application could 

 affect any vital proposition of theology, so profoundly as did the. 

 heliocentric theory of Copernicus when it dethroned the earth from! 

 its supposed central position in the universe. That ecclesiastics, 

 Catholic and Protestant alike, denounced a theory which appeared to 

 them impious and absurd, and refused to admit the discoveries by 

 which it was confirmed, is a well-known fact; and that their opposition 

 was not always confined to words and arguments, the case of Galileo 

 sufficiently exemplifies. Now that the reality of those discoveries, 

 and the truth of that theory, are admitted by all, who regrets the old 

 notions of the universe, or feels that his theology would be better for 

 a rehabilitation of the Patristic cosmography? Yet in the present 

 century certain geological and biological speculations have been loudly 

 denounced on theological grounds. Opposition of this kind is, how- 

 ever, rapidly dying out, for it is seen that truth can never be opposed 

 to itself, that theology has nothing to fear from any results of physical 

 science, and that its province does not lie among things that can be 

 measured and weighed and dissected. Indeed, there were divines 

 who prepared at once cheerfully to accept the development hypothesis, 

 feeling that it was as reasonable to recognize the law of Natural Selec- 

 tion, acting in the production of varieties or species of organized 

 beings, as to admit that the law of gravitation ruled the motions of 

 suns and planets. The number of those is increasing who welcome 

 such scientific generalizations as tending to exalt their views of the 

 government of the universe, and, by clearing the ground of thorny 

 questions and disputes concerning lower matters, to leave a wider 

 space for enlarged spiritual views. 



If we ask for some of the special causes which, beyond the wider 

 influences that have operated in the general intellectual development, 

 have within the last three or four centuries most powerfully contributed 

 to the rapid progress of science, one of the most obvious is the growth 

 \ of the arts of observation and experiment. These, like other arts, 

 were acquired only in process of time. Nature presents us with complex 

 aggregates of phenomena, from which the causes and effects that are 

 to be studied must be disentangled from a plurality of causes and an 



