Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/529

Rh seem like a rehearsal of truisms. But it is one of the paradoxes of human development that errors which have been completely dislodged from the minds of the few may still linger persistently in the minds of the many, and that the misleading hypotheses and the dead theories of one age may be resuscitated again and again in succeeding ages. Thus, to cite one of the simplest examples, it doubtless appeared clear to the Alexandrian school of scientists that the flat, four-cornered earth of contemporary myths would speedily give way to the revelations of geometry and astronomy. How inadequate such revelations proved to be at that time is one of the most startling disclosures in all history. The 'Divine School of Alexandria' passed into oblivion. The myth of a flat and four-cornered earth was crystallized into a dogma strong enough to bear the burden of men's souls by Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century; it was supported with still more invincible arguments by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century; and it was revived and maintained with not less truly admirable logic, as such, by John Hampden and John Jasper in the last decades of the nineteenth century. To cite examples from contemporary history showing how difficult it is for the human mind to get above its primitive conceptions, one needs only to refer to the daily press. During the past two months, in fact, the newspapers have related how multitudes of men, women and children, many of them suffering from loathsome if not contagious diseases, have visited a veritable middle age shrine in the city of New York, strong in the hoary superstition that kissing an alleged relic of St. Anne would remove their afflictions. During the same interval a railway circular has been distributed explaining how tourists may witness the Moki snake-dance, that weird ceremony by which the Pueblo Indian seeks to secure rain in his desert; and a similar public, and officially approved, ceremony has been observed in the heat-stricken State of Missouri.

Such epochs and episodes of regression as these must be taken into account in making up an estimate of scientific progress. They show us that the slow movement upward in the evolution of man which gives an algebraic sum of a few steps forward per century is not inconsistent with many steps backward. Or, to state the case in another way, the rate of scientific advance is to be measured not so much by the positions gained and held by individuals, as by the positions attained and realized by the masses, of our race. The average position of civilized man now is probably below the mean of the positions attained by the naturalist Huxley and the statesman Gladstone, or below the mean of the positions attained by the physicist von Helmholtz and His Holiness the Pope. When measured in this manner, the rate of progress in the past twenty centuries is not altogether flattering or encouraging to us,