Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/24

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Science is unquestionably the most powerful material factor in the world today. It enables man to escape catastrophe on land and sea, to stay the famine and prevent the pestilence, for which the earlier desperate expedients of magic and supplication were wholly unavailing. But all these material results which have thus brought increased security and satisfaction to the masses of people, are not so important as the intellectual and spiritual changes which have come along with them. Its great influence has been in emancipating the mind and making it possible for intellectual life to prosper under a new standard of morality and a new outlook upon the world.

The method from which these world-moving results derive is that disciplined type of thinking in which the object of thought is subjected to controlled observation and experiment, as free as possible from emotion, for the most destructive influence within science is emotional bias. In other words, it means submitting our ideas or hypotheses to the authority of Nature, acknowledging with Emerson that her laws are inexorable, that she tells no falsehoods, that "everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what a man sows he reaps." The basic position is that all our ideas and thoughts derive from some phase of the common sense which assumes the reality of the objective world. In that assumption is bound up the sanity of man and the integrity of science. And "thus far every attempt to transcend the world of experience which common sense describes has met with failure, for all the thought which such attempts involve is couched in the imagery of these experiences." Scientific thinking is thinking in the service of the principle of truth or reality rather than in that of pleasure. Practiced by only a small fragment of the race, it has proved fruitful beyond our wildest expectations. It has given us the truth by which we can live and live more abundantly, and its livableness is its best test.

On the contrary, emotional or wishful thinking—"thinking hobbled by fear, desire, aspiration or self-exaltation"—has been sterile or destructive because involving a greater or less departure from reality. Much of such thinking may be comparatively harmless; but such excessive departures from reality as witchcraft, which during its long and ghastly course is said to have destroyed no less than 10 million lives, and the religious persecutions and nationalisms which have destroyed many more millions, belong to the domain of insanity and crime.

Persistent departures from reality are made in aid of established power. The interests of those in positions of authority call for the support of thought which, unfortunately, in being so applied does not have to correspond with the facts but rather with the ideas upon which the authority rests. The question is no longer one as to the intrinsic validity of the thought, but one as to its bearing upon the sanctions of the power or authority. That becomes