560 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



g>izu\iiit %x\zx%Xuxz. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



In his recently published History of the Warfare of Science,* Dr. An- 

 drew D. White has given the world a work of great practical value a 

 work to which we can confidently refer any one who desires to know 

 not only what is thought to-day in the principal departments of scien- 

 tific inquiry, but by what stages the crude and illogical fancies of an 

 earlier period gave way to conclusions founded on observation and in- 

 duction. The title of Dr. White's book, we have no doubt, will give 

 offense in certain quarters, but it would be difficult to say how the actual 

 content of the book could be otherwise expressed. It is a narrative of con- 

 flict in which we invariably find that conclusions derived from the study 

 of facts have bad to make their way against opinions resting on the sup- 

 posed authoritative utterances of a sacred book. In whatever direction we 

 turn we find that theology has been beforehand with science in telling men 

 what to believe, even in matters that turn on the evidence of the senses, and 

 that science has to climb over mountains of obstruction and wage many a 

 desperate battle before it can secure the right to deliver its message to man- 

 kind. How can this conflict be described otherwise than as Dr. White has 

 described it ? It is not a conflict merely between true science and false 

 science, between sound views and unsound views, but a conflict between the 

 observation of Nature and of facts generally and an utterly unreasoning 

 adherence to things said. It is a struggle of data against dicta, science 

 taking its stand on the former and theology on the latter. It is true that 

 theology has, in these later days, reconsidered its position, and consented 

 to hand over to the jurisdiction of science vast regions of thought which it 

 once assumed to rule with absolute authority ; but none the less was it the- 

 ology which fought science step by step in the past, and that not by argu- 

 ment in any true sense, but by the weapons of physical force, and often in 

 a spirit of intolerable arrogance and cruelty. 



Although the role in which theology is necessarily made to appear in 

 the volumes before us is a decidedly unamiable one, it would be unjust to 

 Dr. White not to recognize the kindly and charitable spirit in which his 

 work is written. He deplores the crimes against intellectual liberty that 

 were perpetrated by ecclesiastical powers, but he rarely excites our enmity 

 against the individuals concerned. He shows that they acted according to 

 their lights, that their judgments were overpowered by the authority which 

 it was common in their day to ascribe to sacred texts, and that, in resisting 

 the most convincing demonstrations of scientific truth, they honestly be- 

 lieved they were following a surer and higher guidance. To them science, 

 or the observation of Nature, represented at best the unaided operations of 

 the human intellect, whereas Holy Writ contained the direct and authentic 

 teaching of the Divine Spirit. How, then, could they hesitate between the 

 two ? How could they fail to consider as guilty of dangerous impiety those 

 who ventured to set up the former against the latter ? As we read Dr. 



* History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. By Andrew D. White, LL. D., 

 L. H. D. 2 vols., 8vo, New York: D. Appleton & Co. Price, $5. 



