88 SCIENCE IN "BONDAGE" 



in religious dissertations, for of course, though it 

 is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same 

 blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of 

 knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology 

 what he thought of the religious articles of a 

 distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with 

 theology, yet, none the less, then splashing 

 freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, 

 in the theological pool. His reply was that in 

 so far as they were at all constructive, they con- 

 sisted mostly of exploded heresies of the first 

 century. Is not this precisely what one would 

 have expected a priori ? A man commencing to 

 write on science orjreligion who neglects the 

 work of earlier writers places himself in the 

 position of the first students of the subject and 

 very naturally will make the same mistakes as they 

 made. He refuses to be hampered and biased 

 by knowledge, and the result follows quite in- 

 evitably. " A scientist," says Monsignor Benson, 

 " is hampered and biased by knowing the earth 

 goes round the sun." The fact of the matter is 

 that the man of science is not a solitary figure, a 

 chimtzra bombinans in vacuo. In whatever direc- 

 tion he looks he is faced by the figures of other 

 workers and he is limited and " hampered " by 

 their work. Nor are these workers all of them in 

 his own area of country, for the biologist, for 

 example, cannot afford to neglect the doings of 

 the chemist ; if he does he is bound to find him- 

 self led into mistakes. No doubt the scientific 

 man is at times needlessly hampered by theories 

 which he and others at the time take to be fairly 



