Febbuaet 24, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



287 



derived from a clear apprehension of the 

 paramount law. We are certainly justi- 

 fied in our impatience with these stand- 

 ards so far as such impatience helps to 

 make them or mankind better. Whoever 

 seriously contemplates the historical de- 

 velopment of our culture standards out of 

 a barbaric past can hardly fail of restive- 

 ness under them, whether of our educa- 

 tional system with its burden of time-worn 

 incongruities and maladaptation to highly 

 differentiated individualities, in which to 

 the common scandal of the race our youth 

 have been treated as papers of pins, ma- 

 chine-made watches, or as communities of 

 ants; of our various religions "with their 

 mossy heritage of half truth and half fic- 

 tion," of commerce with its Midas dreams 

 and cut-throat ethics. But it is not likely 

 that we can effect any perceptible influ- 

 ence upon these only as the pebbles of 

 truth, brought together by the patient and 

 persistent search which we pursue and en- 

 courage, cemented by the pervasive law 

 of life, will some time make more secure 

 the foundation for the superstructure of 

 society. Men of science are freely accused 

 to-day of a snohisme scientifique. The re- 

 proach comes pretty hard and fast from 

 certain highly deductive quarters peopled 

 largely by conventional thinkers. And it 

 is not always in French, either. We may 

 make all allowances for criticisms of our 

 work based on a point of view quite incon- 

 ceivable to consecutive inductive reason- 

 ing, but the fact is quite evident that sci- 

 entific snobs and scientific snobbishness do 

 abound. A clergyman of my acquaintance 

 asked a scientific friend about his work — 

 what vast problems were now occupying 

 his mind, and with utter and quite needless 

 frankness the answer was — Repairing the 

 conclusions I arrived at last year. That 

 quickly served to point a sermon on the 

 errancy and frailty of inductive science. 



But while the clergyman and the type of 

 thought he stands for ought to know that 

 progress in knowledge is never along direct 

 lines, always in bewildering zigzags and 

 pulsations which nevertheless end further 

 forward than where they started, still the 

 man of science does himself and his work 

 an injustice in permitting himself to be 

 exploited by agencies of popularization 

 which are in essence entirely hostile to his 

 mode of thought. So long as the whole 

 pathway of science is bordered by the 

 graves of cast-off theories and the atmos- 

 phere of to-day reeks with the aroma of 

 new theories standing on probation and 

 some in dire need of burial, it is whole- 

 some to stop and reflect that these in their 

 turn are likely to be inhumed with only 

 rotting stones to mark the names of their 

 progenitors. 



We must recognize the fact that there 

 is to-day a palpable reaction against the 

 scientific mode for which we are ourselves 

 to blame. ■ The uplifting impulse given to 

 every department of thought by the revival 

 of the last decades of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury is followed in this decade by a tre- 

 mendous rebound. We may not all be 

 fully conscious of this, as we are in some 

 measure aloof from the pulse of other than 

 scientific thought, biit its proportions are 

 well expressed by the formal and direct 

 organization against the scientific mode 

 embodied in such a masterly structure and 

 so well-generaled an army as the eucharistic 

 congress. Let us not deceive ourselves, 

 this great body of serious-minded deduct- 

 ive thinkers marshaled for no other pur- 

 pose than to counteract the logical and the 

 obvious and to encourage reliance on the 

 mysterious is not standing alone. The 

 ease with which we make and unmake 

 hypotheses, the finality with which we 

 enunciate propositions, the autocratic 

 statement of possibilities as facts unques- 



