Intellectual Revolutions in the Past 233 



illusion that they may without moral wrong employ 

 violence to obtain justice, just so long will there be 

 individuals who with good conscience will seek justice 

 through violence. 



The change in ideas and the establishment of a 

 true theory of human relationship which must 

 precede social reconstruction may be compared 

 with three other intellectual revolutions which 

 have profoundly affected the minds of men and led 

 to marvellous advances in the realms of physical 

 science, philosophy, and astronomy. 



In the physical sciences we had an intellectual 

 revolution at the time of the Reformation and 

 Renaissance, when men turned away from the 

 principle of intellectual force — authority — as a 

 method of discovering truth and found instead the 

 method of experiment and direct observation. In 

 that marvellous change in the minds of men when 

 they abandoned the barren path of the deductive 

 method and struck out upon the new highroad of 

 the inductive method we find the cause of that 

 marvellous advance in our knowledge of the physi- 

 cal universe and of our conquest of the forces of 

 nature which has been the glory of the nineteenth 

 century. 



In the same way in the intellectual revolution 

 which is now taking place, in which men are turn- 

 ing away from the old barren path of destructive 

 violence and finding instead the highroad of social, 

 political, and international justice, we are entering 

 upon an era of advance which may enable us at 



