Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/345

Rh same time that his suggestions have been misleading or impracticable, Reason obliges us to accept the first authority rather than the second. And if we have to select one of two conflicting masses of authority of the kind Mr. Balfour so well describes as largely influencing our beliefs apart from Reason, we must determine their respective claims to our confidence in a similar way. What are the authorities between which we have to choose? Briefly characterized, Mr. Balfour's book is a plea for Supernaturalism versus Naturalism, and unless his section insisting on the "beneficent part" which Authority plays in the production of beliefs is without any raison d'être, it is clear that the aggregate of influences composing the authority which supports Religion is set against the aggregate of influences by which Rationalism, considered by him as a form of authority, is supported. The authorities which uphold Theology and Science respectively are the two in question. Let us, then, observe what happens when we test their relative values as we test the relative values of individual authorities.

From the days when Chaldean priests began to record eclipses, and after a time partially discovered the cycle they follow, and were so enabled to foresee their recurrence with approximate truth, down to our own day, astronomical knowledge has been growing ever more exact and more extensive, until now the celestial motions are so perfectly known, that a transit of Venus or an occultation of Jupiter by the moon, fulfills expectation to the minute. So is it throughout: the previsions of the chemist having reached such a stage that, foreseeing the possibility of an unknown compound which must have certain properties, he proceeds to form it, and creates a substance which has never before existed, answering to his anticipations. If from this ever-increasing verification of scientific statements and inferences we turn to the guidance Science has afforded, allied evidence everywhere surrounds us. Led by Science mankind have progressed from boomerangs to 100-ton guns, from dug-out canoes to Atlantic liners, from picture-writing on skins to morning journals printed twenty thousand per hour; and that over all the developed arts of life Science now presides scarcely needs saying.

With the Authority of Science, thus daily becoming greater, contrast now the opposed Authority. Have the propositions constituting current Theology been rendered more certain with the passage of time and the advance of knowledge, or has the contrary happened? Assyrian and Egyptian records, discovered of late years, have, indeed, served to confirm certain statements contained in the Bible; and so have tended to verify the natural part of the Hebrew story. But this yields no more reason for accepting its supernatural part than does proof that there occurred the