SCIENCE AND THE THOUGHT OF THE WORLD 



for belief. Already a remarkable change in the way of 

 looking at things in all departments of thought has been 

 brought about. To an extent before unknown, each man 

 now thinks for himself, and is no longer content to accept 

 sluggishly the current beliefs of his time, but seeks to 

 bring all things to the touchstone of experiment and 

 experience. 



Perhaps I am speaking a little prematurely, and paint- 

 ing the present under the illumination of the golden 

 radiance of the dawn of a still freer future, for even to- 

 day we are reminded in the press, from time to time, that 

 the spirit of persecution is not yet dead. 



Another direction in which, during the last half-century, 

 the public mind has been powerfully influenced by the 

 discoveries and the methods of science, is in a change of 

 attitude, in all matters of opinion, towards truth, by 

 putting truth for her own sake in the first place as its 

 main quest. 



I do not for a moment suggest that consciously the 

 desire for truth does not take the first place in all honest 

 hearts. All the other great departments of human in- 

 terests, however, as politics, economics, theology, and 

 philosophy, are broken up into sharply divided schools 

 of thought, of which the differences of opinion are accen- 

 tuated by the jealousies and the intolerance of party 

 feeling. In the great majority of cases, men find them- 

 selves by the lot of birth and early education among the 



adherents of one or other party, and nearly always come 



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