Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/70

58 we can educate it; nor abolish curiosity, but we can restrain and direct it; nor check invention, but it need not be applied to evil purposes. Neither can we make races equal, but we can establish justice and mercy in the relations of the stronger to the weaker.

This study of the natural laws, which necessarily limit rational human action, applies with especial force to biological research, and explains the reason for limiting scientific method.

Thus, the study of living creatures under unnatural or destructive conditions, although it may be a well-meaning attempt to acquire knowledge, is nevertheless a dangerous one. It is intellectually a false method, which may lead to practical error, and produce a labyrinth of confusion and contradictory experience which hinders the attainment of exact knowledge. It is morally a false method, because it injures those elementary instincts of justice and mercy by whose evolution civilization advances. Thus the progress of the race is retarded.

The present astounding multiplication of drugs, of inoculations, of mutilations in the practice of medicine, with the eager attempt to prove each