CHAPTER IX 



SPECIAL-CREATION OT DERIVATION ? 



Whatever may be said in condemnation or approval of the 

 method of estimating the worth of men and women by an 

 inquiry into their pedigrees, it cannot be denied that there is 

 often much value in such a method of estimating the worth 

 of current ideas. Obviously a theory which was framed in a 

 barbarous age, when men were alike unfamiliar with the con- 

 ceptions of physical . causation and uniformity of law and 

 ignorant of the requirements of a valid scientific hypothesis, 

 and which has survived until the present day, not because it 

 has been uniformly verified by observation or deduction, but 

 because it has been artificially protected from critical scrutiny 

 by incorporation with a system of theological dogmas assumed 

 to be infallible, — obviously such a theory is at the outset 

 discredited by its pedigree. A presumption is at once raised 

 against it, which a critical examination may indeed do away 

 with, but which for the moment cannot fail to have some 

 weight with a jury of inquirers familiar with the history of 

 human thinking. On the other hand a theory is a priori 

 Accredited by its pedigree when it is framed in a cultivated 

 age by thinkers familiar alike with the special phenomena 

 which form its subject-matter and with the requirements of 

 scientific hypothesis in general; and when, in spite of 



