PiiiLosopiiv OF Botany. 203 



tullian. This disposition of a purely emotional character 

 might have in time of social quietude assumed a proneness 

 to the inquiry into the intellectual causation of natural phe- 

 nomena and reestablished the Aristotelian methods. 



To the great detriment of Christianity, ultimately to the 

 fate of humanity, the Christian teachings were interwoven 

 witli accounts of miracles, quite unessential as to the validity 

 of the precepts, even incompatible with the dignity of the Mas- 

 ter in the consideration of the enlightened and philosophically 

 inclined. More than any other weakness of human nature 

 did the forcible burdening of the consciences with unprovable 

 tenets extinguish in the hearts of men the divine love and for- 

 bearance kindled by the Master. When the light of reason 

 is put out, error becomes incorrigible and faith turns into fa- 

 naticism. 



The fateful disposition of the human mind to anticipate 

 events before the law of causation is comprehended or appre- 

 ciated, invites premature speculation, credulity, superstition. 

 Preferment of the decisions of authority in the presence of 

 contradictory, established physical laws and dictates of plain 

 reasoning is a vicious or perverted constitution of the will, the 

 eternal enemy of truth and science, the Pandora box of his- 

 tory, the object of active and unrelenting warfare, and will 

 find its overthrow through the improved arms and methods of 

 the natural sciences. 



Should a continuous progress of the sciences only be de- 

 picted, one should stop with the era of the Ptolemeans and 

 the names of Dioscorides, Archimedes, Manetho, and Hip- 

 parchus, or Euclid, and resume again the thread of history with 

 the close of the thirty-years' war, the last religious war, with 

 the treaty of peace at Schmalkalden in the year A.D. 1648. 

 This was the first international pledge for parity of religious 

 confessions. 



Such a psychological condition hovered over the mystery- 

 brooding minds of mankind at all times, with ever less control 

 by reason and experience, the farther back we reach in the 

 annals of history; fate and destinies of mortals a play ball 

 thrown about in the heavenly courts for the amusement of 

 the gods. Deeper minds only recognized the " irrevocable fa- 



