Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/74

64 hypothesis of a primitive tongue and the correlation of all the facts gathered from all the kindred forms of speech. It is the same with social science. And although I am aware of the notion of many doctors, both of divinity and medicine, that theology is a fixed deposit, as distinct from inductive knowledge, and indeed that there is an eternal conflict of religion and science, yet I am bold to say that it is a vulgar error. There is a more palpable movement in the science of Nature, because it has to do with material forces, while the theologian explores the more subtile laws of thought and moral history. We do not deal with scalpel or microscope, yet we recognize the method of analysis. It might be a curious pursuit if you should study medical history from the day of Galen, through the middle age, and note how the same speculative notions of soul and body entered into the current dogmas of the Church and the healing art. The central truths of Christianity are always the same; but Biblical criticism, the comparative study of Hebrew or Christian epochs, the domain of doctrinal thought, are growths of the human mind, and every advance has been the fruit of experimental searching. And if we have some clergymen as guiltless of modern ideas as the Englishman who moved the risibles of a scientific circle by claiming that the fossils of the caves were the bones of the rebel angels, possibly you may have a few doctors of medicine almost unable to appreciate the scientific criticism of the four Gospels.

But, as we have thus recognized this law of method as the fruit of our culture, we shall be able to see the interdependence of all these branches of knowledge. All our gains are helpful to each other. I might sum the vast history of science in a word—that it has taught us the harmony of law, not only in the correlation of natural forces, but of the moral and social forces of human life. But I look more especially at the studies which employ your profession, as they have shed such light on the marvelous secrets of the inner man. The cunning laws of cerebration; the wondrous rhythm that runs between the several powers of memory, feeling, will, and the sensitive nerve-centres; the dependence of thought on the supply of the chemical brain-food; the explanation of the riddles of our dream-life; the relation of our mental functions to the loss or decay of our organs; the phases of disease as affecting voluntary action—all these are as needful a study for the intellectual or the Christian thinker as for the naturalist. These researches have not only cured many mistakes of our psychology, but have given us sounder views of life and education. It is not too much to say that our theories of social and religious culture have been far too often affected by a partial view of our spiritual nature, which lost sight of its dependence on the body and the healthy laws of action. But while I gratefully acknowledge this debt, I hold that our scientific culture will, if faithful to its aim, lead us to a nobler knowledge of those truths that pass beyond a bald materialism. I