Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/133

Rh classic prayer, "Save us from our friends!"

There is one feature in the case, however, which is not to be overlooked, and that is that the representatives of science have been in the past, and still are to some extent, required to put up with a kind of opposition that is very annoying to men who have worked their way by patient labor, in appropriate fields of observation, to certain well-demonstrated conclusions. We refer to the opposition of those who have not labored at all in those fields, but who, on the strength of the most extraneous considerations, insist that certain scientific conclusions must be all wrong. Such was the opposition made by the Catholic Church to the modern system of astronomy, and such the opposition made by all Christian churches, more or less, to modern geological science. What is the use of inquiring into the origin of language and the affinities of different families of speech if the stories of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are to dominate all speculation on these subjects? The indignation used to be all on the side of the theologians, when their opinions were traversed by considerations drawn from the study of Nature. Nowadays scientific men allow themselves occasionally a little indignation, or at least impatience, when theories, which they have carefully founded on facts, are traversed on the strength of other men's interpretations of a book. Time brings about these changes, and it would be harsh to find much fault with the champions of science for not being wholly above the infirmities of human nature.

It should, of course, be clearly understood that dogmatism, in so far as it exists, does no good to science. True theories will vindicate themselves in the end; and, even when the grounds for certainty seem ample, it is well not to be too confident or too absolute. Then if people who simply adopt other people's opinions would only learn not to be more dead-sure than the authors and sponsors of those opinions, a great point would be gained and much trouble avoided. Science wants all the friends it can get, seeing that is a friend to all; but its path would be smoothed if ardent converts would temper their zeal with discretion.

we wrote, in March, concerning the series of articles by Mr. Spencer with which this magazine began its career we had no thought that we should be so fortunate as to have the first of another series by the same master hand for the opening number of our twenty-fourth year. Nor had Mr. Spencer; for that editorial itself suggested to him the advisability of issuing serially the chapters on Professional Institutions which he had nearly completed. There will be eleven or twelve papers in the present series. These papers will show how the several professions have been differentiated from the functions of the priest or medicine-man, who is the only professional man of primitive society. They will demonstrate that in these affairs—although subject to human will and caprice—the grand principle of evolution operates just as surely and completely as in the derivation of an animal species from its ancestral form.

A peculiar element of value in the evolutionary philosophy, of which Mr. Spencer is the original and most eminent expositor, is the power of understanding the present and predicting the future which is afforded by its explanation of the