22 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



the end of the century, in the intellectual world everywhere, 

 plainly a reaction against the distinctly scientific method of 

 acting and doing. Thirty years ago, twenty- five years ago, 

 science seemed about to sweep everything before it. Every 

 phase of human thought was roused in a second renaissance, 

 more far-reaching, and, as I think the future historian will 

 declare, immensely more pregnant of result than was that 

 earlier revival of the sixteenth century. But thirty years have 

 passed and now the trend is different The freshness of the 

 impulse is to most of us a memory; the world of thought has 

 begun again to crystallize and although the force of that first 

 upheaval is by no means spent, shores and continental outlines 

 are all different from what they were before, nevertheless old 

 tendencies, old ideas, old superstitions even, as just noted, are 

 beginning again to lift their heads. The scientific movement 

 as represented by this Academy is at an ebb and we must 

 recognize the fact. 



Now the reason for this condition is perfectly plain. In the 

 first place, it is in fact a reaction. The generations of men 

 have had time to shift once on the face of the earth. Men are 

 lovers of ease. Science is aggressive. Under the reign of 

 science the world is forever on the qui rive. Men are almost 

 afraid to open their morning papers lest during the night 

 science may have abrogated the necessity for food, written an 

 analysis of love, or have so far confined to wires and rods the 

 electricity of the planet that none shall be left for thunder- 

 storms or auroral displays. The human mind cannot be 

 always tense. The best lecture at last puts the auditors to 

 sleep. This will account for any popular declension. Then 

 again, there are hundreds of educated men whose conservative 

 sympathies are all with the older views, to whom the real sig- 

 nificance and purport of the scientific movement are but dimly 

 seen. Not studying science itself, but only a presentation of 

 it — I do not say misrepresentation of it — or turning from true 

 scientific employ to the more fascinating fields of speculation, 

 they make of science no more than a system of philosophy, 

 comparable to any other one of the varied schemes of human 

 dreamings that drift hither from the hoar antiquity of the race. 

 It is thus that Mr. A. T. Balfour in his "Foundations of 

 Belief" and Professor Haeckel in his "Confessions" meet in 

 their assault on the methods of science, though separated by 

 the whole diameter of the earth in the paths of their argumen- 

 tation. 



