Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/246

226 define science simply as knowledge or "complement of cognitions," it is contrasted with feeling or emotion. Its correlatives are productions designed to please, such as poetry, painting, or the fine arts generally.

If religion be regarded as proceeding wholly from the emotional nature, it may be contrasted with science and classed among aesthetic conceptions. But narrowing the definition further by qualifying knowledge by the terms "logically classified," we then have science as contrasted with or opposed to particular knowledge, or knowledge imperfectly classified. Qualifying further by placing the word real before knowledge, we have it contrasted with error or not genuine knowledge. By reading Hamilton, it will be seen that error is his antithesis to his real truth in the definition. But hypotheses are not error, since they are not held as truth. The distinguishing character of error is that, while false in fact, is is supposed to be true completely. Hypotheses are neither genuine truth nor errors, so long as they are held merely as such. They lie upon the border-lands of truth and error, and Hamilton's definition cannot banish them completely from the domain of science. They are properly allowed to hover around its borders. But we totally disagree with Dr. Deems as to the value of these "guesses" at truth. Says he, "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, though he may have more skill." Now, as to the right, there can be no dispute, but, as to the value of the guesses, this better skill makes all the difference in the world. Prof. Huxley is right in his estimate of guesses. Says he, "Do not allow yourself to be misled by the common notion that an hypothesis is untrustworthy because it is an hypothesis. What more have we to guide us in nine-tenths of the most important affairs of daily life than hypotheses, and often very ill-based ones? So then in science, where the evidence of an hypothesis is subjected to the most rigid examination, we may rightly pursue the same course. You may have hypotheses and hypotheses. A man may say, if he like, that the moon is made of preen cheese; that is an hypothesis. But another man, who has devoted a great deal of time and attention to the subject, and availed himself of the most powerful telescopes, and the results of the observations of others, declares that it is probably composed of materials very similar to those of which the earth is made up; and this also is an hypothesis." You perceive that it makes a good deal of difference both as to who guesses and as to what is guessed. Indeed, so many scientific hypotheses have been verified in the face of the opposing theological hypotheses, that there begins to be a strong presumption in their favor before verification. Nor is it strange that we should be led to regard them as highly probable. The investigator of Nature, familiar with her processes and her laws, founds these guesses upon broad and deep analogies.