22 
IOWA ACADEMY OP 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-reacbing, 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 ditferent 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 vive. 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 studyiag 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, 
com})arable 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. 
