SCIENCE AND THE PRESS 65 



It is because I see in science the surest and most permanent 

 springs of reverence that I care to fight for it, that I grow 

 vehement in its defence, urgent with its claims. I am outraged 

 when I hear it subject to the flippant jests of some self-styled 

 humanists half- educated men I should rather call them, who 

 stand deaf amid the deepest harmonies of nature. 



I deplore, like other men, and more than most, the mud of 

 materialism that fringes the path of science. I do not know 

 that a bigoted man of science is more harmful than any other 

 kind of bigot, but he is sufficiently unedifying, and I will gladly 

 join in suppressing him. But that the essential tendency of 

 science is materialistic I would deny with my last breath, and if 

 there is anything unprovable about which I feel confident/ it 

 is that science is destined to provide humanity with the abiding 

 reverence, the love of truth, the freedom and sanity of mind 

 and spirit, without which religion and morals are but names 

 and life is not worth living. 



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