some of his colleagues in the ministry eminently deserved the
opprobrious substantive epithet he employed. It would be too much to
expect that there should not be as many foolish ones among the clergy
of the olden times as in any other of the professions. Occasionally
one of these foolish clergymen rose up in opposition to science.
Whenever he did, especially if he belonged to the class mentioned by
Dean Swift, then he surely made his religion the principal reason for
his opposition. That gave an added prestige in his mind and in the
minds of those who accepted his teachings, to whatever he had to say
on the subject. This no more involved the Church itself, nor
ecclesiastics generally, in the condemnation of the particular
scientific doctrine, than does the frequent opposition of peculiar
members of medical societies to real progress in medicine, involve the
organization to which they belong in the old-fogyism which would
prevent advance.
It must not be forgotten that small minds are always prone to find
very respectable reasons for their opposition to something that has
been hitherto unknown to them. While novelty is supposed to attract,
and does when it comes in a form not too unfamiliar, and when men are
not asked to give up old convictions for its sake, real newness always
evokes opposition. Washington Allston once said very well with regard
to this, that "An original mind is rarely understood until it has been
reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so {392} averse are
men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty,
however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed." This
principle will be of great service in making clear the real
significance of many incidents in the history of science, in which not
only intelligent men without special scientific training have been
found in opposition to real scientific progress, but in which men
having had the advantage of long experience in scientific
investigation, having themselves sometimes as younger men done
original work of value, have yet placed themselves squarely in
opposition to scientific advance that eventually proved of the highest
possible significance.
Scientific men have, as a rule, been quite ready at all times to argue
that an announced new discovery could not be true, that indeed it was
absurd to think of it. The word nonsense is perhaps oftener on
scientists' tongues than on any others'. It is not because he is
deliberately opposed to scientific progress that this is the case with
the scientist, but that he is so convinced of the ultimate
significance of many things that he knows already, that he cannot
readily bring himself to admit the idea of progress along lines with
which he is familiar. To do so, indeed, supposes that he himself has
been lacking in perspicacity and in powers of observation. The fact
that it is usually a young man who makes the new observation, not
infrequently a young man who does not know the great body of science
that the older acknowledged scientist does, only adds to the readiness
with which the senior is apt to consider the new proposition as
absurd. Ecclesiastics have done this same thing, but not nearly so
frequently as scientists. There was a time when the majority of
educated men belonged to the clerical order, and then it seemed as
though it must be religion that prompted some of the conservatism
which led them to oppose what proved eventually to be new truths. It
was not, however, but only human nature asserting itself in spite of
education.
Prof. David Starr Jordan in reviewing briefly the history of the
Struggle for Realities in one of the essays in his Foot-notes to
Evolution, [Footnote 45] has summed up the genuine {393} significance
of this supposed opposition of science and theology in some striking
paragraphs. To my mind, he places the whole subject on its proper
foundation, and properly disposes of the supposed conflict between
religion or theology and science. He says:--
[Footnote 45: N. Y., Appleton, 1902.]
"But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies
not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of
man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human
history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and
suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just
such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship
never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need
for all these is part of the actual development of man.
Intolerance and prejudice is, moreover, not confined to religious
organizations. The same spirit that burned Michael Servetus and
Giordano Bruno for the heresies of science, led the atheist
"liberal" mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist
Lavoisier, with the sneer that "the republic has no need of
savants." The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to
reject natural selection because it "relieves God of the labor of
creation," causes the heterodox Haecekel to condemn Weismann's
theories of heredity, not because they are at variance with facts,
but because such questions are settled once for all by the great
philosophic dictum (his own) "of monism."
This very natural ultra-conservative mood of scientists is well
illustrated by a passage from Galileo's life, in which he himself
describes in a letter to Kepler, the great mathematician and
astronomer of his time, the reception that his new invention, the
telescope, met with from distinguished men of science, their
colleagues of the moment. The Italian astronomer encountered the
well-known tendency of men to reason from what they already know, that
certain advances in knowledge are impossible or absurd. The favorite
expression is that the thoughts suggested by some new discovery are
illogical. Men have always reasoned thus, and apparently they always
will. Knowledge that they learn before they are forty constitutes,
consciously or unconsciously, for them the possible sum of human
knowledge, and {394} they can only think that apparent progress that
contradicts their previous convictions must be founded on false
premises or faulty observation. We cannot help sympathizing with
Galileo, though it must be a consolation for others who are struggling
to have ideas of theirs adopted, to read the words addressed to his
great contemporary and sympathetic fellow worker by the Italian
astronomer.
"What wilt thou say," he writes, "of the first teachers at the
University at Padua, who when I offered to them the opportunity,
would look neither at the planets nor the moon through the
telescope? This sort of men look on philosophy as a book like the
AEneid or Odyssey, and believe the truth is to be sought not in the
world of nature, but only in comparison of texts. How wouldst thou
have laughed, when at Pisa the leading Professor of the University
there endeavored, in the presence of the Grand Duke, to tear away
the new planets from Heaven with logical arguments, like magical
exorcisms!"
This gives the key to the real explanation of the Galileo incident
better than would a whole volume of explanation of it. It is now
realized that very few of those who have been most ready to quote the
example of Galileo's condemnation as an argument for Church
intolerance in the matter of science, know anything at all about the
details of his case. The bitter intolerance of many men of science of
his time, including even that supposed apostle of the experimental
method--Bacon--to the Copernican system, is an important but ignored
phase of the case of Galileo, as it came before the Roman inquisition.
The peculiar position occupied by Galileo caused Prof. Huxley, writing
to Prof. St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, to say that, after
looking into the case of Galileo when he was in Italy, he had arrived
at the conclusion "that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had
rather the best of it." In our own time, M. Bertrand, the Perpetual
Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that "the great
lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was
clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his
condemnation was learned _without any profound sorrow to Galileo
himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon
as the most serene and enviable in the history of science."_
{395}
Certain historical incidents in which Church authorities and
ecclesiastics assumed an attitude distinctly opposed to true
scientific advance can be found. They are, however, ever so much rarer
than is thought. Let those who accept unquestioningly the supposed
opposition of Church to science, count over for themselves the
definite cases of this in history which they know for certain, and
they will be surprised, as a rule, on what slight grounds their
persuasion in this matter is founded. We have detailed the policy of
the Church with regard to education and science. Such incidents of
opposition as can be gathered were breaks away from that policy. They
were not due so much to faith or theology, though these were often
made excuses for them, as to the natural opposition to novelty, so
common in man.
With regard to this matter, as with regard to opposition in general to
science, President Jordan has once more set forth the realities of the
situation so as to make it clear that, even when it was the dogmatic
spirit that was behind the refusal to accept certain scientific
truths, not only was there the best of intentions in this in all
cases, but in nearly all, the results were such as to benefit mankind,
and even to help rather than hinder science. He says:
"The desire of dogmatism to control action is in its essence the
desire to save men from their own folly. The great historic churches
have existed 'for the benefit of the weak and the poor.' By their
observances they have stimulated the spirit of devotion. By their
commands they have protected men from unwise action. By their
condemnations they have saved men from the grasp of vice and crime."
The ultra-conservatism which is the real factor at fault in these
cases exists in all men beyond middle life. It is a wise provision of
nature very probably to prevent the young and headstrong from running
away with the race. We would be plunged into all sorts of curious
experimental conditions only for the fact that those beyond middle
life act as a brake on the initiative of their juniors. While it does
some harm, there is no doubt of its supremely beneficial effects in
the long run. {396} For one announced great discovery that proves its
actual right to the title, there are at least a hundred that are
proclaimed with loud blare of trumpet, yet prove nonentities. This
sometimes becomes a very troublesome brake on progress, however. Some
three hundred years ago, Harvey said with regard to his epoch-making
discovery of the circulation of the blood, that he did not expect any
of his contemporaries who was over forty years of age to accept it.
His premonition in this matter was fully confirmed by the event.
Darwin, I believe, once remarked that he did not think that men of his
own age in his own generation would accept his theory, and most of
them did not.
The opposition which, as a consequence of this natural conservatism,
is so constantly ready to manifest itself, is as human as the envy
which, much as we may bewail the fact, accompanies all individual
success. A history of this phase of scientific progress is of itself
very interesting and of great psychological importance. A short sketch
of it will serve the purpose of placing the opposition of churchmen to
science in the category where it belongs, and will make this subject
appear in its true light of a very natural and universal psychic
manifestation, not a religious or supposed theological phenomenon.
As a matter of fact, it is comparatively easy to show that there are
many more incidents of opposition to the progress of science on the
part of scientists because of their conservatism, than on the part of
ecclesiastics because of religion or theology. There has scarcely ever
been a really important advance made in science, a really new
discovery announced, which has not met with such bitter opposition on
the part of the men who were most prominent in the science concerned
at the time, as to make things very uncomfortable for the discoverer,
and on many occasions this opposition has taken on the character of
real persecution. It will be at once said that this is very different
from the formal condemnation by organized bodies of truths in science,
with all that this implies of ostracization and of discouragement on
the part of scientific workers. The history of science is full of
stories showing that formal scientific bodies refused to consider
seriously what were {397} really great discoveries, or that scientific
editors not only rejected papers representing valuable original
research, but even did not hesitate to discredit their authors in such
a way as to make it extremely difficult for them to pursue their
studies in science successfully, and still more to prevent them from
securing such positions as would enable them to carry on their
scientific investigations under favorable circumstances. In a word,
persecution was carried out just as far as possible, and the result
was quite as much discouragement as if the opposition were more
formal. It is not hard to show, on the other hand, that while formal
opposition by Church authorities was very rare, rejection by medical
and scientific societies and by the scientific authorities for the
moment of new discoveries was so common, as to be almost the rule in
the history of progress in science.
This is so different from what is ordinarily supposed to be the calm
course of scientific evolution, that it will need a series of
illustrative cases to support it. In recent years, however, the
cultivation of the history of science has been more ardent than in the
past, and the result has been that many more know of this curious
anomaly and paradox in scientific history than was the case a few
years ago, and it is comparatively easy to obtain the material to
demonstrate it. One of the most striking instances is that of Harvey.
Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, at a time and under
circumstances that would surely lead us to expect its immediate
acceptance and the hailing of him as a great original thinker in
science. He first expounded it to his class, very probably in 1616,
which will be remembered as the year of Shakespeare's death. The glory
of the great Elizabethan era in England was not yet passed. Men's
minds had been opened to great advances in every department of thought
during the preceding century, by the Renaissance movement and the New
Learning in England. Probably no greater group of original thinkers
has ever existed than were alive in England during the preceding
twenty-five years. Four years after Harvey had sufficiently elaborated
his ideas on the circulation to present them to his class, and the
very year after he wrote his treatise on the {398} subject, though he
dared not publish it as yet, Lord Bacon published his Novum Organum,
in which he advocated the use in science of the very principles of
induction on which Harvey's great discovery was founded.
What happened is interesting for our purpose. Harvey was so well
acquainted with the intolerant temper of men as regards new
discoveries, that he hesitated to publish his book on the subject
until men had been prepared for it, by his ideas gradually filtering
out among the medical profession through the members of his class. He
waited nearly fifteen years after his first formal lesson on the
subject, before he dared to commit it to print. Shakespeare had made
Brutus say to Portia:
"You are my true and honorable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart;"
but men were not yet ready to accept the great principle of the blood
movement. There seems to be good authority for saying that Harvey had
more than suspected his great truth for twenty-five years before he
dared print it. He realized that it would surely meet with opposition
and would make serious unpleasantness between him and his friends. He
was not deceived in anticipation. Many of his friends fell away from
him, and according to tradition, he lost more than half of his
consulting practice, because physicians could not and would not
believe that a man who evolved such a strange idea as the constant
movement of the blood all over the body, from heart to surface and
back, could possibly be in his right mind, and, above all, be a
suitable person to consult with in difficult cases.
Harvey's case is a lively picture of what happened to Vesalius the
century before in Italy, which we have already discussed at length in
the chapter on the Golden Age of Anatomy. President White insists that
this persecution was due to ecclesiastical opposition to dissection,
but of this there is not a trace to be found. Dissection was carried
on with perfect freedom at all of the Italian universities, though
they were all under ecclesiastical influence, and in none was there
more freedom than in the Papal University of Rome, at the {399} very
time when Vesalius was doing his work in Northern Italy. At this time,
too, Bologna was famous for its work in anatomy. Berengar of Carpi did
a very large number of dissections, though Bologna was at the moment a
Papal city and the University was directly under the Popes.
It is clear, then, that the opposition to Vesalius arose entirely from
the conservatism of fellow scientists in medicine, who thought that
what had been taught for many hundreds of years in the universities,
and had been accepted by men quite as good as Vesalius or any of their
generation for over a thousand years, must surely be nearer absolute
truth than what this young investigator wished them to accept. It is
scarcely to be wondered that they resented, as men always do, what
must have seemed the intrusive rashness of this young medical student,
who was not yet thirty when he began to claim the right to teach his
teachers, and who wanted to tell them that the medical world had all
been wrong not only for many years, but for many centuries, and that
he had been born to set them right. This is, after all, the attitude
of mind which naturally develops in these cases, and it is no wonder
that the old men use whatever means they have in their power to
prevent rash young men from leading, as they think, the world astray.
The cases of Harvey and Vesalius are by no means exceptional, nor was
the opposition limited to England and Italy, but examples of it may be
found in every country in Europe. Nor was it only with regard to
anatomy and anatomical discoveries and problems that such opposition
manifested itself. In this matter the story of Servetus is very
interesting. He made some new discoveries in anatomy, but these had
nothing to do with the bitter opposition which some of his ideas
encountered in Paris, quite apart from any question of theology or
religion. We do not know just when he discovered the circulation in
the lungs, which he described so clearly in the volume on the renewal
of Christianity, for which he was burned at Geneva by Calvin. While at
the University of Paris, he had been mainly occupied with the
department of therapeutics rather than of anatomy or physiology. He
had suggested especially certain changes in the mode of {400} giving
drugs. He had much to do with the general introduction of syrups to
replace more nauseating preparations of medicine. He was probably the
first one to realize that elegant prescribing, that is, the choice of
drugs and their combination in such a way as to make them less
unpleasant to the patient, was a consummation eminently to be desired
in medical practice. His ideas on this subject met, as novelties
always do, no matter how good in themselves, with the most rancorous
opposition. Factions were formed in the University. There were riots
in the streets. Students were wounded in the fights which took place.
Some even were killed apparently. All this over the question whether
medicine as given to patients should be pleasant or unpleasant.
As we have had examples from England, France and Italy, we may quote
one from the Netherlands. We do so only to emphasize the fact that
everywhere, no matter what the character of the people, nor the
religion which they happened to profess, their conservatism set them
in opposition at once to novelties in science. England was Protestant
in Harvey's time, and the Netherlands mainly so at the period of which
we are about to speak.
When Stensen, or as he is more familiarly known by his Latin name,
Steno, discovered and announced the fact that the heart is a muscle,
he was looked upon with very much the same suspicion as to his sanity
as Harvey, a half-century before, when the great English physiologist
proclaimed the circulation of the blood, and such suspicions were
rather openly expressed by those who were too conservative to accept
this new teaching. The heart had been considered, not figuratively as
we now speak, but seriously and very literally, as the seat of the
emotions. Over and over again, all men had had the experience that in
times of emotional stress the heart was disturbed. They could feel
their emotions welling up from their hearts, therefore there was no
doubt in their minds of the truth of the old teaching. Into the midst
of this perfectly harmonious concord of scientific opinion, without a
dissenting voice anywhere in the world, comes a young man not yet
twenty-five, who almost sacrilegiously declares that the heart is
merely a muscle and not a secreter of emotions. Fortunately for him,
he was of gentler disposition than most of the other {401} men who
have had the independence of mind to make discoveries, and so no very
bitter opposition was aroused against him. He was considered too
harmless to be taken very seriously, but at least when the
announcement first came, most of those who knew anything about
medicine, or thought they did, and this is much more serious in these
cases, recognized that young Stensen had somehow allowed himself to be
led astray into a very foolish notion, and one that could only emanate
from a mind not quite capable of realizing truth as it was; and they
did not hesitate to say so.
After this Stensen found the Netherlands quite an unsympathetic place
for his studies, and so moved down into Italy, where he could find
more freedom of thought for research and more appreciation, and
continue his original investigations with less scorn for his new
discoveries. Here he continued to hit upon original ideas that were
likely to make things quite uncomfortable for him, not because of
religious intolerance, but because of the more or less hide-bound
conservatism that always characterizes mediocre minds. Far from coming
into disrespect here, however, he acquired many and very close
friends. He laid the foundation of modern geology and wrote a little
book that is a very wonderful anticipation of supposedly nineteenth
century ideas in that science. He had come down into Italy a
Protestant, having been raised in that religion in his native Denmark.
He found so much of sympathy with every phase of intellectual activity
among the ecclesiastics in Italy, that he not only became a convert to
Catholicity, but after a time a Catholic priest. His reputation spread
to Rome, and the Pope not only sent for and received this innovator in
anatomy and the founder of geology very courteously, but treated him
with every mark of appreciation, and this within a half a century
after Galileo's condemnation. Stensen eventually went back to Northern
Europe as a bishop, in the hope of being able to convert to
Catholicity those among the Teutonic nations who had been led away
during the religious revolt.