Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/23

 Without a system of morals no civil society could exist; yet if mankind must have waited for civil polity until some such system were built up from below, of scientifi- cally tested materials, social constructions would have been virtually impossible. In morals, as in the arts, the art precedes the science; the intuitions of genius imagine social schemes of provisional validity, and new and lofty standards of fitness. But a social fabric thus born of a vision can bear no rough handling; and even the solid builders who would make a more permanent foundation upon positive conceptions, while seeking more or less deliberately to underpin the fabric, may, and often do, shake it to ruin.

Hence in all guardians of morals the dread of meddling with the reigning vision of truth; hence. its sanctity, that no man shall try the stuff of which it is made. And the dangers of heresies from within are more fearful than those of alien attacks; social cohesion, the end of it all, is thereby more exposed to disintegration. Yet nevertheless, as the generations of men change, and as knowledge increases, men see from new points of view; and thus while for some the reigning vision retains its apparent solidity, for others its rays are broken or dissolved. Even John Henry Newman was compelled to teach the relativity of truth, and that a doctrine of development must be accepted. For every provisional synthesis then the time must come when the appari- tion of truth can no longer command united allegi- ance, and criterions begin to encroach upon sanctions. Broader and more stable foundations have, it is true, 2 A.