INTRODUCTION 15 



two thousand years hence, but that it is next to impossible 

 to find any one credulous enough to believe in their hap- 

 pening to-day. Paraphrasing this epigram, I would say 

 of astronomers that they do not hesitate to postulate 

 miracles as taking place far up in the heavens, or deep in 

 past time, while they indignantly scout the possibility of 

 such things taking place right here and now. Thus, they 

 impudently assume that stars and planets move sponta- 

 neously, but they are sane enough to know that bullets 

 remain useless without powder; they nonchalantly as- 

 sume that nebulae revolve of their own accord, but would 

 classify as defective a child that would expect as much of 

 a mere squirrel- wheel. 



UNUM versus OMNES 



On the theory of probabilities, the odds in every gen- 

 eration are a billion to one against the originator of an 

 idea being right and the world wrong. This formidable 

 preponderance of numbers against him has doubtless 

 awed many a timid, but correct, thinker into silence, and 

 cast many a stone in the path of human progress. Few of 

 us, I dare say, ever stop to reflect that every valuable 

 idea and item of information has incipently been handi- 

 capped by identically these odds, and that all that man- 

 kind has garnered, or can ever acquire, in the way of use- 

 ful knowledge is merely the sum of these minority-of-one 

 discoveries that have won their way through gauntlets of 

 criticism to general acceptance. In every ship 's company, 

 at the close of every voyage, there is invariably one who 

 must be the first to sight port. Natural truth exists in- 

 dependently of both human wishes and opinions, and can- 

 not be settled one way or the other by a plebiscite, or even 

 by a council of the wisest of one 's own generation. It is re- 

 lated of Newton, for instance, that, although he survived 

 for forty years the publication of his great work, The 

 Principia, he did not have upwards of twenty followers in 

 all England at the time of his death, and that it was not 

 until ten years later that his doctrines were allowed to be 



