Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/82

72 This second change leads to self-distrust, as the first led to distrust of other men. As we learn not to take our truth at second-hand from other thinkers, so we learn that we must not take it, if the expression may be used, from ourselves. Truth is not what ice think, any more than it is what famous men have thought. That which irresistibly strikes us as true, that which seems self-evident, that which commends itself to us, may nevertheless, we learn, not be true at all. It is not enough to judge for ourselves, to examine the facts independently. We must examine the facts according to a rigorous method, which has been elaborated by a long series of investigators, and without which neither candor nor impartiality would save us either from seeing wrong, or from receiving unsound evidence, or from generalizing too fast, or from allowing some delusive name to come between us and the reality. Distrust of others, distrust of ourselves—if the first of these two factors of the scientific spirit were separated from the second, the result would be mere self-conceit, mere irreverence. As it is, the scientific spirit is simply a jealous watchfulness against that tendency of human nature to road itself into the universe, which will show itself both in each individual and in the very greatest investigators, and which can only be controlled by rigorously adhering to a fixed process, and rigidly verifying the work of others by the same.

Knowledge, not scientifically obtained and verified, might very fitly be called by the name which Christianity uses. It might be called "human knowledge," or "the wisdom of the world." For the difference between it and genuine knowledge is just this, that it is adulterated by a human element. It is not the result of a contact between the universe and the naked human intelligence. The perceiving mind has mixed itself up with the thing perceived, and not merely in the way in which it always must, in the way which constitutes cognition, but in quite other and arbitrary ways, by wishes, by prejudices, by crotchets, by vanities. Such humanized views of the universe have a peculiar though cheap attractiveness. They naturally please the human mind, because, in fact, they were expressly contrived to do so. They adapt themselves readily to rhetoric and poetry, because, in fact, they are rhetoric and poetry in disguise. To reject them is to mortify human nature; it is an act of vigorous asceticism. It is to renounce the world as truly as the Christian does when he protests against fashionable vices. It is to reject a pleasant thing on the ground that it is insincere—that it is not, in fact, what it professes to be. The moral attitude of the man who does it is just such as Hebrew prophets assumed toward the flattering and lying court-prophets of their day; just such as Christianity itself assumed toward Pharisaism; just such as Luther and Knox assumed toward mediævalism; just such as the Puritans assumed toward prelacy. It is an attitude of indignant sincerity, an attitude marking an inward determination to face the truth of the universe, however disagreeable, and not to allow it to be