Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/79

Rh penetrated with liberal ideas; and, since 1730, the date of the first election of a Genevese to an important foreign scientific society—our own Royal Society—Geneva has never ceased to produce 'mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists, in a number wholly out of proportion to her small population.

The author argues from these and similar cases that it is not so much the character of the dogma taught that is blighting to science as the dogmatic habit in education. It is the evil custom of continually telling young people that it is improper to occupy their minds about such and such things, and to be curious, that makes them timid and indifferent. Curiosity about realities, not about fictions of the imagination, is the motive power of scientific discovery, and it must be backed up by a frank and fearless spirit. M. de Candolle, in spite of his anti-heredity declarations, enunciates an advanced pro-heredity opinion well worthy of note. He says it is known that birds originally tame, when found on a desolate island, soon acquire a fear of man, and transmit that fear as an instinctive habit to their descendants. Hence, we might expect a population, reared for many generations under a dogmatic creed, to become congenitally indisposed to look truth in the face, and to be timid in intellectual inquiry.

Can, then, religion and science march in harmony? It is true that their methods are very different; the religious man is attached by his heart to his religion, and cannot endure to hear its truth discussed, and he fears scientific discoveries which might, in some slight way, discredit what he holds more important than all the rest. The scientific man seeks truth regardless of consequences; he balances probabilities, and inclines temporarily to that opinion which has most probabilities in its favor, ready to abandon it the moment the balance shifts, and the evidence in favor of a new hypothesis may prevail. These, indeed, are radical differences, but the two characters have one powerful element in common. Neither the religious nor the scientific man will consent to sacrifice his opinions to material gain, to political ends, nor to pleasure. Both agree in the love of intellectual pursuits, and in the practice of a simple, regular, and laborious life, and both work in a disinterested way for the public good. A strong evidence of this fundamental agreement is found in the number of sons of clergymen who have distinguished themselves as scientific investigators; it is so large that we must deplore the void in the ranks of science caused by the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. If Protestant ministers, like them, had never married, Berzelius, Euler, Linnæus, and Wollaston, would never have been born. But to revert to what we were speaking about. There are some six different objects in the