Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/17

 the defence of, dubious assumptions arouse a sense of intellectual property which the owners cannot bear to see depreciated, and for the maintenance of which they will fight with every weapon at their disposal. But the best weapon is a refusal to discuss, or to refute, because the issue is already settled and beyond dispute. This dogmatic atmosphere is not, of course, confined to the social sciences. It has always impeded progress in the physical sciences, especially in those organic sciences which, like biology, claim to throw light upon the nature and behaviour of man. But in the more exact sciences, where false or outworn laws or hypotheses can definitely be refuted and replaced by others, there is little of that emotional strain that comes when an economic law or a political principle is challenged. Only so far as beliefs concerning the physical world have been incorporated in religious creeds has an aura of sanctity attached to them which has made their denial an act of wickedness. In modern times this attitude has been so modified in most countries that the revolutionary physics of an Einstein are received with little intellectual or emotional difficulty (outside Hitler’s Germany), and Darwinism, though fiercely denounced in its early days, has, except in Fundamentalist circles, won place in an orthodoxy remodelled for its acceptance.

The case is, however, very different for new controversial issues in the fields of politics and economics.