304 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



of duty, for it decreased the influence of fear as the motive 

 of duty, and substituted for it the " motive of DUTY FOR ITS 

 OWN SAKE." It likewise destroyed the importance of 

 dogmatic teaching, and thereby contributed to bring in the 

 Reformation. It further established the SUPREMACY OF 

 CONSCIENCE, and this now became the prime mover of 

 individual and collective actions. 



In the MORAL SPHERE the improvements have been 

 equally important, and are due principally to the same cause 

 elevation of intellect consequent upon science. Conscience, 

 it was just said, dictates most of our acts nowadays; it 

 also gives us all a notion of right and wrong, and right 

 is no longer considered as based upon statute law, or 

 tradition, or dogma, but upon the notion of ideal justice 

 hence the substitution of the SENSE OF RIGHT for the fear 

 of punishment as the chief incentive of virtue. In other 

 words, we pursue VIRTUE FOR ITS OWN SAKE. Next, the 

 intellectual movement had a consequence of extreme im- 

 portance with regard to legislation and the improvement 

 of the penal code, and that was the ABOLITION OF TORTURE 

 in religious, political, and civil procedure. And when we 

 remember the cruelty of its infliction and the variety of 

 its means fire, water, red-hot pincers, the rack, the wheel, 

 the boots ; when we remember that the innocent, even 

 when found so, generally died or were frightfully crippled 

 for life from its effects ; that witnesses might be, and were, 

 tortured as well as the accused, we can but bless the 

 movement which swept away this appalling barbarity. So 

 that the humane alteration of the law, together with pro- 

 portioning the penalty to the offence, is one of the most 

 precious conquests of the present knowledge upon the past. 



The elevation of moral sense is seen again in another 

 sphere, that is the search, the LOVE OF TRUTH for its own 

 sake an element of good which had been absent in 

 Europe for more than a thousand years, from the time 

 of Augustine to the time of Galileo and even Newton's. 

 The Christian Church " supported its teaching by what it 

 called pious fraud" the name given to imposture and false- 

 hood. This had become a principle of religious government 



