DISCOVERY 



237 



quailed before the rack and the stake? No. Galileo 

 had steadfastly maintained that the spheres of Science 

 and Faith were separate, that they never intersected, 

 and that there was no need to measure one against 

 the other. Galileo, says Professor Gentile, who 

 certainly cannot be accused of any tenderness to the 

 Roman Inquisition, was the first to recognise that, 

 if ever and whenever the conflict came, science ought 

 to bend as he bent in the cloister of the Minerva. He 

 renounced because his truth was declared incom- 

 patible with the doctrines of the Church. The dutv 

 of the Church, said Galileo, was to teach men how to 

 go to heaven ; not how the heavens go. His position 

 was, that there existed a twofold revelation of divine 

 truth. One positive, absolute, supernatural : the 

 other in continual, progressive formation. One the 

 infallible source of truth and doctrine regarding belief 

 and conduct ; the other wholly independent, the 

 domain of scientific research. One deposited in the 

 sacred scriptures and directly inspired by God ; the 

 other the fruit of the human mind faithfully reading 

 the book of nature. The importance of his defence of 

 science against the attacks of religious tradition con- 

 sists in the demonstration of the rights of free 

 scientific research — science by his very definition 

 whollv sundered from those cognitions which theology 

 made dependent on revelation. It differed from 

 theology {which in those davs included ethics) in that 

 it had no bearing on the essential aim of the spirit of 

 man, or, as he put it, on the salvation of souls. It 

 was the knowledge of nature conceived mechanically 

 and determined according to quantitative relations, a 

 naturalistic science. But, asks Gentile, does a purely 

 naturalistic science exist? — a science which deals with 

 a reality whose mode of being and operating is 

 indifferent to the soul of man? It was impossible 

 that the theologian of Galileo's time could grasp this 

 absolute separation between the world envisaged by 

 the man of science and that contemplated by the 

 Church — the Church, Catholic and Protestant — con- 

 cerned with the salvation of men's souls. In the 

 vital question of the day, the Council of Trent, the 

 Tubingen Faculty, the common consent of all the 

 Fathers; all the commentators, Greek and Latin, the 

 millennial traditions of all Christian saints and martyrs, 

 were against Galileo — how could the whole of the 

 Christian Church be indifferent to a revolutionary 

 definition of the world, not merely regarded as the 

 hypothesis of a mathematician, but as existing in Jc 

 facto reality ? .\ world no longer evolved in a 

 scientist's brain, but that very actual state of being 

 which man was a part of, and in which the theologian 

 by divine imposition had laid upon him the awful, the 

 solemn responsibilitv of guiding man to right moral 

 conduct in this world and to eternal salvation in the 

 world to come. Galileo's imperishable fame rests less 

 on his eminence as a thinker than on his apostolate of 



the experimental method in natural science. He was 

 a herald of free research, a deliverer of the human 

 mind from the thraldom of .Aristotle and the bonds of 

 scholasticism. He saw for the first time that a science 

 of nature might be constituted if it were rigorouslv 

 separated from metaphysics and based on a direct 

 cognition of facts — facts, not deduced by a process of 

 abstract reasoning, but already before the senses and 

 indecipherable in their intrinsic, essential existence 

 and in their qualitative differences ; knowable and 

 measurable only in their quantitative proportions. 

 This science was the result of the experience of the 

 senses, the esperiensa sensata, and not the product of 

 philosophic ratiocination ; a material reality to which 

 tho.se criteria are not referable wherewith man inter- 

 prets the actions of man and his final destiny. 



The value of such a pure science of nature, which 

 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries applied them- 

 selves to, will surely be challenged in our own and 

 in later centuries when the human spirit shall again 

 face, but under a far different aspect, that funda- 

 mental problem which Galileo was brought up against 

 — the problem of harmonising naturalistic science, 

 which regards neither the ends nor the needs of 

 spiritual man, nor the laws proper to his spiritual life, 

 with the science that derives from the intuition of 

 man's spiritual need. For the science which men 

 turned to in those centuries with such hope and trust, 

 and which might suffice them when they were engaged 

 in reforming minds, prone to a reactionary 

 dogmatism, by a new noviciate — this science no 

 longer satisfies men's minds in which there rises a 

 vague home-sickness for one knows what not beliefs 

 and promises of mysterious satisfactions ; for those 

 spiritual and moral needs, which science does not and 

 cannot satisfy, because science is directed to other 

 ends. The new age will therefore demonstrate its 

 limitations. 



Sex and 

 its Determination— II 



By J. S. Huxley, M.A. 



Fellow oj Sew College, Oxford 



(ContmueJ from the August \ umber, page 199.) 



\\"e have seen in a previous article that the higher 

 animals possess special or sex-chromosomes, tv\o in 

 one sex, one in the other, by whose agency sex is 

 determined. 



What must the precise action -of this machinery be 

 supposed to be? What, for instance, is its relation 

 to the so-called secondary sexual characters, all those 

 which, like the beard of man, the voice of the 

 nightingale, the plumage of the pheasant, the sexual 

 instincts of many animals, are different in the two 



