Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/367

Rh certain canons of his art, as certainly as the true and lasting work of the scientist must accurately accord with natural laws.

The scientist is as little able to prove the fundamental truth or existence of the groundwork upon which modern physical, chemical and physiological theories are built, as the artist is to prove the ethics, or perfect truth, or perfect beauty, of those conventions upon which poetry, painting or that great group of studies termed the "humanities" find their basis. But the artist or philosopher knows that, using these conventions as the best at present discovered, he can produce works of which the beauty and consistency appeal to all educated human minds capable of appreciation. Similarly, the conventions of natural science, properly understood, appeal to the imagination of the scientist, call forth new ideas to his mind, and suggest fresh experiments to test those ideas; or, a chance empirical observation of an experimental nature, which without theory and scientific imagination would remain isolated and sterile, placed in relationship to the rest of the scheme of science, awakens thought, and may lead to a fresh departure and a long train of important discoveries.

It was this correlation of the imagination with experimentation and the tracing out of relationship from point to point so as to develop the evolution of phenomena that characterized the science of medicine when new-born about seventy years ago and differentiated it from the older nosological medicine in which imagination and experimentation, while both existing, seemed to possess independent existences and pay little regard the one to the other.

It seems well-nigh forgotten nowadays by the majority of people that science and religion originally began together from a common thirst for knowledge, and usually in the same type of mind endowed with a divine curiosity to know more of the origin and nature of things.

Every great religion worthy of the name contains some account of the natural history and creation of the world, in addition to its metaphysical aspects, and reflects the degree of knowledge of natural science possessed by the nation in which it arose at the time of its birth.

The fundamental error throughout the ages of human conceptions, both in science and religion, was that of a non-progressive world to which a stereotyped religion, or science, could be adapted for all time. Perfection was imagined where perfection, we are now happy to realize, was impossible, and, believing in this imaginary perfection and that all things new deviating from it were damnable men were prepared to burn one another at the stake rather than allow error to creep into the world in either science or religion. Thus there have been martyrs for the scientific conscience just as for religious belief, and at this distance in time we can perhaps better understand both inquisitor and martyr and realize that both were fighting for great ideals.

Evolution has taught us that as knowledge broadens we must be