Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/452

436 This sets aside very much that has been called science, and, as it seems, perhaps nearly all that which has been the material used by those who have raised the most smoke over this "conflict" question.

"Guesses at truth" are valuable only as the pecking at a plastered wall, to find where a wooden beam runs, is useful; but a guess is not knowledge. A working hypothesis were not to be despised, although the student of science might feel quite sure in advance that when he had learned the truth in this department he would throw the hypothesis away. A working hypothesis, like a scaffold, is useful; but a scaffold is not a wall. Art is not science. Art deals with the appearances, science with the realities, of things. Art deals with the external, science with the internal, of a thing; art with the phenomenon, science with the noumenon. It must be the "real truth" which we know, and know truly.

Weak men on both sides have done much harm—the weak religionists by assuming, and the weak scientists by claiming, for guesses and hypotheses, the high character and full value of real truth. The guesses of both have collided in the air, and a real battle seemed impending; but it was only "guesses" which exploded—bubbles, not bombs; and it is never to be forgotten that a professor of religion has just as much right to guess as a professor of science, and the latter no more right than the former, although he may have more skill.

No man can abandon a real truth without degradation to his intellectual and moral nature; but Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, in their studies from time to time, employed and discarded theory after theory, until they reached that which was capable of demonstration. It was only that which took its place as science. In the case of Kepler, it is known what great labor he spent in attempting to represent the orbit of Mars by combinations of uniform circular motion. His working hypothesis was the old doctrine of epicyclic curves. But his great labor was not fruitless, as has been carelessly asserted. The theory was false, and therefore not a part of real science; but, working on it, he discovered that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse, and this led him to the first of his three great laws of planetary motion, and enabled him almost immediately to discover the second. Here was a great intellect employing as a working hypothesis a theory which has always been false, and now is demonstrably false. It was not science.

Now if, while scientific men are employing working hypotheses merely as such, men representing religion fly at them as if they were holding those hypotheses as science, or if men representing science do set forth these hypotheses as if they were real knowledge of truth, and proceed to defend them as such, then much harm is done in all directions.

In the first instance, the religious man shows an impatience which is irreligious. "He that believeth doth not make haste." It is unfair