Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/329

Rh often discovered in circumstantial evidence, "We only have to get hold of the right end to be able to unwind the mystery as you would a skein of thread." Nor is the narrow fear of conservative religionists to be too harshly blamed for this misapplied and unnecessary warfare. The windmills are certainly there, although they are not giants.

Filled with natural vanity at the discovery of some new fact of this wondrous life, or arrived at some new aspect of it, some new view of Nature, such pride as stirred the soul of Nuñez de Balboa when, first of civilized men, from the Cordillera of Panama, he caught sight of the great South Sea, is not unbecoming the pioneers of thought and knowledge. The danger to be guarded against is the common one of all vanity, that of mistaking partial attainment for complete victory, the achievement of a stand-point in advance assumed as the only possible one. The error is that of forgetting, like that same first beholder of the Pacific, that the apparent trend of coast depends upon the simple fact of position, the stand-point. And like him, also, it is natural, easy, and common, to conclude that the opening of some petty gulf before us is the grand expanse of the boundless ocean.

Coming in plain terms to the point before us: When a naturalist, confining himself properly to reason and the laws of Nature, speculates on the origin of species, and attempts to show the correlation of form to form, the evolution of one from another, or the development of many distinct species from a common stock, the reverence of certain minds, which have long run in a certain groove that connects these obscure mysteries of Nature with some imagined interference of Omnipotence, is seriously shocked. These, looking only to primary and final causes, feel contempt for the laborer who is working, for his penny a day, for the sight of the next step in that endless chain of secondary, efficient causes, which is the revelation of Nature to the rational faculty.

On the other hand, the proper conservatism of religious minds is often insulted by the exclusive cultivator of mere natural science, as the reserve and resistance of ignorance and fanaticism. Vainglorious in the light of some new discovery, he sees all the rest of the world in apparent darkness. If each—the worshiper according to the old faith, and the cultivator of the new science—understood the domain of the other better, the conclusions of both would be different.

Nor is it a few tyros in science who thus forget their true vocation, and invade a province they do not understand. When we find a Spencer and a Huxley leveling their wrath, like ordinary zealots, against what they style anthropomorphism, and issuing bulls of excommunication from their self-constituted Church of Common-Sense, against all who differ with them, against all who dare to believe in what they call the "dogma of special creations"—and even Charles Darwin, most moderate and dignified as he is of all scientists, acknowledges that "the object of his earliest work was, to combat this same