Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/219

Rh be fact, no matter whether it may fit into our preconceived theories or make havoc of them, we ask: How best are these high qualities to be cultivated? What is the method and training by which such results are to be secured?—we shall find that in the very terms of our statement the answer is clearly given by implication. It is in the scientific spirit, and in the spread of scientific ideals, methods, and habits of mind, that we have to seek the ultimate cause of philosophical veracity. Of this austere virtue, science itself offers the one great training school. We are there taught, as we are taught nowhere else, to estimate evidence and weigh hypotheses; to discount ready-made conclusions, and set aside authority and tradition; to look steadily at facts and theories, and hold lightly to creeds and systems as, in the nature of things, nothing more than provisional. Such drill, such training in mental conduct, is bound to affect the whole life, nurturing patience, reserve, precision of observation, thought, and statement, care in forming opinions, the judicial temper of mind, on which stress has been laid. Nor is this all. Science furthermore teaches us, and beyond all things else, to seek fact as fact, allowing the judgment to be in no way swayed or disturbed by any consideration of its real or supposed consequences. Elsewhere, truth may be made subordinate to social convenience, established philosophies, pet theories of man, nature, and God. In science, it is sought for its own sake, and from first to last is held supreme.

The difference between the scientific and the non-scientific spirit in these important matters is made clear when we remind ourselves that almost every great conclusion established by scientists has at the outset been angrily denounced on account of its imagined bearings upon questions of conduct or the creeds of the organized churches and schools. When, to take only a single conspicuous illustration, Darwin published the results of his investigations into the origin of species and the descent of man, pulpits and newspapers all over the civilized world vehemently attacked the new doctrines because "they made a personal God unnecessary" or "debased man to the level of brutes" or "tended to materialism" or "contradicted the first chapter of Genesis" or did something else equally impertinent, equally subversive of preconceived ideas. And even where no rancor was shown, the position too often assumed was no less fatal to genuine veracity. "Here is the established creed of my party and church; as this is truth, whatever does not harmonize with it must be false; the Darwinian hypothesis does not harmonize with it—it is therefore false; it only remains in one way or another to disprove it; let me cast about to see how this can be done" This, I think, is no unfair description of the popular plan of campaign; and