1. That dread is in itself a physical affection.

2. That the gods who were dreaded were, with the vulgar, who alone

dreaded them, merely impersonations of the powers of nature.

3. That it was physical injury which these gods were expected to

inflict.

But he himself agrees with this theory of mine; for he says shortly

after, that not only philosophers, but even the ancient Romans, had

separated superstition from religion; and that the word was first applied

to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites essent--might

survive them. On the etymology no one will depend who knows the

remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the ancients, in

consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive method which has

created modern criticism. But if it be correct, it is a natural and

pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds of men who saw their

children fade and die; probably the greater number of them beneath

diseases which mankind could neither comprehend nor cure.

The best exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition is to

be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil,

Theophrastus.

The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his hands

with lustral water--that is, water in which a torch from the altar had

been quenched, goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth, to keep off

evil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my youth, to go about

with a withe of mountain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye.

If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either throws three pebbles

into the road, or, with the innate selfishness of fear, lets some one

else go before him, and attract to himself the harm which may ensue. He

has a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name of

its mistress, Pallas Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets

up an altar to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he

pours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it. If a rat has nibbled one of

his sacks he takes it for a fearful portent--a superstition which Cicero

also mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assisting

at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house, saying that

Hecate--that is, the moon--has exercised some malign influence on it; and

many other purifications he observes, of which I shall only say that they

are by their nature plainly, like the last, meant as preservatives

against unseen malarias or contagions, possible or impossible. He

assists every month with his children at the mysteries of the Orphic

priests; and finally, whenever he sees an epileptic patient, he spits in

his own bosom to avert the evil omen.

I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by Theophrastus; and you will

agree, I am sure, that the moving and inspiring element of such a

character is mere bodily fear of unknown evil. The only superstition

attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to have its root in

dread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them Muller says that the

Dionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal deity, connected with

Hades, and was the personification, not merely of rapturous pleasure, but

of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life." The Orphic societies

of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food

save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato speaks of a

lower grade of Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, "who used to come before

the doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, to

release them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;" and

such would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who was afraid

of a weasel or an owl.

Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the root

of all superstition whatsoever.

But be it so. Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one. Without

the instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-anemone to

contract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover, species would

be extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide.

Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it is

controlled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational, but

irrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of

the unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not likely, then, to be

afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as

to man? Any one will confess that, who has ever seen a horse inflict on

himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quite

imaginary danger. I have good reasons for believing that not only

animals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often

destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for

instance, as cause a whole herd of buffalos to rush over a bluff, and be

dashed to pieces. And remark that this capacity of panic, fear--of

superstition, as I should call it--is greatest in those animals, the dog

and the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy.

Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when he

attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these very

manifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies before

he can see them himself?

But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes him a

source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states. It

transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught

in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand

that you wish to release her; and, in the madness of terror, bites and

tears at the hand which tries to do her good. Yes; very cruel is blind

fear. When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what.

When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately. When he dreads

beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason. He has no law of

guidance left, save the lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet

his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him

into terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest

animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more

foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the lower

animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his

superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his

blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to the weak!

For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will

reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the

Malleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature of the

fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has

of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most

fairly.

But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world? And is

not that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great deal of that

fear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is simply not fear of the

spiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else.

The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not merely

an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world which

is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong.

And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of all affections, as

bodily fear is one of the basest--is, if properly defined, nothing less

or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.

But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy which

conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves.

What difference is there between a savage's fear of a demon, and a

hunter's fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He does not know what

is on the other side: but he has seen fences like it with a great ditch

on the other side, and suspects one here likewise. He has seen horses

fall at such, and men hurt thereby. He pictures to himself his horse

falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly a

broken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; and

perhaps with very good reason. His picture may have its counterpart in

fact; and he may break his leg. But his picture, like the previous

pictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on

the brain, just as much as those in dreams.

Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, being

unseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a

spiritual broken leg? And does the fact of the demon and his doings,

being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the harm that he

may do, a spiritual harm? What does the savage fear? Lest the demon

should appear; that is, become obvious to his physical senses, and

produce an unpleasant physical effect on them. He fears lest the fiend

should entice him into the bog, break the hand-bridge over the brook,

turn into a horse and ride away with him, or jump out from behind a tree

and wring his neck--tolerably hard physical facts, all of them; the

children of physical fancy, regarded with physical dread. Even if the

superstition proved true; even if the demon did appear; even if he wrung

the traveller's neck in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritual

agency or phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlour

table, when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood;

and human beings, who are really spirits--and would to heaven they would

remember that fact, and what it means--believe that anything has happened

beyond a clumsy juggler's trick.

You demur? Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of having

produced physical consequences, would have become himself a physical

agent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he and

his doings, by physical laws? If you do not see that conclusion at first

sight, think over it till you do.

It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow basis;

that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that, considering the

numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has assumed,

bodily fear is too simple to explain them all.

But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that my

base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every man is

capable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition

must be something like fear, which is common to all men: for all, at

least as children, are capable of superstition; and that it must be

something which, like fear, is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric

kind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still

superstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition seems, indeed,

to be, next to the making of stone-weapons, the earliest method of

asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that

utterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man.

Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of that

same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself; whether

or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed must

have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which he carried about

with him, every time he prowled for food through the primeval forest.

A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into things

which he can eat, and things which can eat him; including, of course, his

most formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his fellow-man. In finding

out what he can eat, we must remember, he will have gone through much

experience which will have inspired him with a serious respect for the

hidden wrath of nature; like those Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says,

that as they know every poisonous plant, they must have tried them

all--not always with impunity.

So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat, and

which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him,

out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents. There are

natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones,

floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends of

their own. If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more natural

than to suppose that there is some giant up there who threw it at him? If

he had been up there, and strong enough, and had seen a man walking

underneath, he would certainly have thrown the stone at him and killed

him. For first, he might have eaten the man after; and even if he were

not hungry, the man might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to

prevent that, by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might have

a wife; and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient

law common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such is

the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek text] of St.

Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very

acute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with the

working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.

So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the cliff,

who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes in like wise

concerning most other natural phenomena. There is something in them

which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt him: and if he cannot

destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear of them grows quite

boundless. There are hundreds of natural objects on which he learns to

look with the same eyes as the little boys of Teneriffe look on the

useless and poisonous _Euphorbia canariensis_. It is to them--according

to Mr. Piazzi Smyth--a demon who would kill them, if it could only run

after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt

it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse

names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised

stalks."

And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the permanent

terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are sudden and

seemingly capricious?--towards storms, earthquakes, floods, blights,

pestilences? We know too well what it has been--one of blind, and

therefore often cruel, fear. How could it be otherwise? Was

Theophrastus's superstitious man so very foolish for pouring oil on every

round stone? I think there was a great deal to be said for him. This

worship of Baetyli was rational enough. They were aerolites, fallen from

heaven. Was it not as well to be civil to such messengers from above?--to

testify by homage to them due awe of the being who had thrown them at

men, and who though he had missed his shot that time, might not miss it

the next? I think if we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy,

or Christianity, saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London,

we should be inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So the

aerolites, or glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct

race, which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the

heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange

transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image of

Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was the

Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the days of

Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and several more

became notable for ages.

Why not? The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike with

metaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in every

strange and sharply-defined object. A cloud like an angel may be an

angel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned into

wood--perhaps to be turned back again at its own will. An erratic block

has arrived where it is by strange unknown means. Is not that an

evidence of its personality? Either it has flown hither itself, or some

one has thrown it. In the former case, it has life, and is

proportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown it is

formidable.

I know two erratic blocks of porphyry--I believe there are three--in

Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which--so I

was always informed as a boy--were the stones which St. Kevern threw

after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, and

ran away with them to the Land's End. Why not? Before we knew anything

about the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is, until the last eighty

years, that was as good a story as any other; while how lifelike these

boulders are, let a great poet testify; for the fact has not escaped the

delicate eye of Wordsworth:

"As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie

Couched on the bald top of an eminence;

Wonder to all who do the same espy,

By what means it could thither come, and whence,

So that it seems a thing endued with sense;

Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf

Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself."

To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a savage

poet, it would have become a material and a very formidable fact. He

stands in the valley, and looks up at the boulder on the far-off fells.

He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes up his mind. It is

alive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it move. May it not sleep

there all day, and prowl for prey all night? He had been always afraid

of going up those fells; now he will never go. There is a monster there.

Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a

child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed as

ourselves--children from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do not

talk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaid

by the result of other men's manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisation

and Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as the

conclusions of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner of

reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save the

passion of imitation. Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man as

he is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural

slave of his own fears.

But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five

passions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I said

it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him

than that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the

noblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be

counted as one of the roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in

whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still

merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact. It has not

come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be

treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and

senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a vera

causa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to have found a sufficient

explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least till

we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.

Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have

already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher

vertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external

objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if, indeed, all

memory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of dreaming. Upon this

last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all

ages, I beg you to think a moment. Recollect your own dreams during

childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child.

Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it

must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or

realities. To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he

grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions. But,

moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children's dreams are wont

to be, of a painful and terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always

painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the

influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And

so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he

will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific

kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a

shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out

upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and

unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten--but let us draw a

veil before the larder of a savage--his chin is pinned down on his chest,

a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself

again at that cavern's mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him:

and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe.

It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at

home all the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the

contrary. He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods. When

we remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better

explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wandered

free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory. Now, I submit that in

these simple facts we have a group of "true causes" which are the roots

of all the superstitions of the world.

And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shall

answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to eliminate

and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order that

that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in its

divine and eternal beauty.

To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis,

let me give you an example--fictitious, it is true, but probable fact

nevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of actual fact:

and let us see how, in following it out, we shall pass through almost

every possible form of superstition.

Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the tropics

have built for ages. The average savage hurries past the spot in mere

bodily fear; for if they come out against him, they will sting him to

death; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than the rest, with

more observation, reflection, imagination, independence of will--the

genius of his tribe.

The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps,

weighs on him, and excites his brain. Perhaps, too, he has had a wife or

a child stung to death by these same wasps. These wasps, so small, yet

so wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting. Ah, if he could

fly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live right merrily. They

build great towns; they rob far and wide; they never quarrel with each

other: they must have some one to teach them, to lead them--they must

have a king. And so he gets the fancy of a Wasp-King; as the western

Irish still believe in the Master Otter; as the Red Men believe in the

King of the Buffalos, and find the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth

remains of Big-bone Lick; as the Philistines of Ekron--to quote a

notorious instance--actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.

If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course. If he, the

savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at home and

make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.

And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of the

wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He will go

to the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will get

accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the new

fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: and

at last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying--"Oh

great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and I

will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatter

you, and worship you, and you shall be my king."

And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysterious

bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, and

fear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surely

would, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell his

children not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will

send his children, and sting you all to death." Vanity and ambition will

have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie. The man

will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them

when he has repeated them a dozen times.

And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of

the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children

after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the

fetish of their tribe.

And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The wasp

will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy. The new

chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting like

wasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build like

wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they

will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.

Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast that their

king's father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole

tribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym

hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to

build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this

epoch, the new thought--Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled.

The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before. He never

pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and

as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still. What makers or

builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?

Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely

new guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed. That would

be their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savage

genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he

would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it

to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. It

would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in

his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the

astronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd enough; but--as every man who

is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know--no more absurd

than twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradual

genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo

theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise,

the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one

expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they

not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, which

had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.

But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes,

through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed or

is doomed to pass.

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribe

than themselves. What would be the result? They would fight valiantly

at first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail? Was not the wasp-

king angry with them? Had not he deserted them? He must be appeased; he

must have his revenge. They would take a captive, and offer him to the

wasps. So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty years

ago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captive

girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn. I would not tell

the story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force

on my argument. What were those Red Men thinking of? What chain of

misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a device

for making the crops grow? Who can tell? Who can make the crooked

straight, or number that which is wanting? As said Solomon of old, so

must we--"The foolishness of fools is folly." One thing only we can say

of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means of

ridding themselves of their fear.

But what if the wasp-tribe had no captives? They would offer slaves.

What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps? They

would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters,

to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day

200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought

out of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom

they only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must be

appeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And so the

veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand

forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.

But more; the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carry

their wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor and weakly,

their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, would

degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant. Away from

the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large or

formidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and they

would make one--a wasp of wood, or what not. After a while, according to

that strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see at

work in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would become

identified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp

with all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of

the tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree,

the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp--aye,

even of their defeat and flight--had vanished from their songs and

legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a

little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and

meant they knew not what, save that it was a very "old fetish," a "great

medicine," or some such other formula for expressing their own ignorance

and dread. Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the

Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence--unless the ancient Irish

were Buddhists, like the Himalayans--tie just the same scraps of rag on

arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her

lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No, it need not end there; it

may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition,

which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros; {256}

which, we may hope, will soon be exterminated.

This might happen. For it, or something like it, has happened too many

times already.

That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the

wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not

merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and

revenge. Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute

force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she

has too often gone for comfort and help--and those of the very darkest

kind--to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting--there are

not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles--wicked old women

who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.

Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes;

then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison,

with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with

truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were

misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of those

witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which

were too common of old among the men of our race.

I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it

as--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--man's

dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.

She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the civilised

man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and

mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his

physical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored

and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which

often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker

instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat

prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and

rule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than

his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those

habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage

and degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal

skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.

He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no

man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many--if

not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American,

Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her

who brings him into the world. If she turn against him--she, with all

her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who

prepares his very food day by day--what harm can she not, may she not do?

And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What

deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?

Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day. Woman must be

crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over

the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous

of all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints enough to show

that it, like all other superstitions, is the child--the last born and

the ugliest child--of blind dread of the unknown.

SCIENCE: A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution.

I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of

Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that Science

was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.

But these genealogies--like most metaphors--do not fit exactly, as you

may see for yourselves.

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear;

the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, the

less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It is

dangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple

of old--"I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted." And why

should they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace,

they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she does not destroy

them. So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing

ignorance.

And courage? We may say, and truly, that courage is the child of

knowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of

courage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have told

you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, of

reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose of

keeping the masses ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Reverence?

I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will all but agree

with the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues. But

which child reverences his father most? He who comes joyfully and

trustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father's mind, and do his

will: or he who at his father's coming runs away and hides, lest he

should be beaten for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence,

a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms of

reverence. That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not

overlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because

it is a fact, it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must be

a fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has it,

revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn

awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, or

the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles,

believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying

them, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence; a

reverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which will

produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yet

unborn shall bless.

But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious

awe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the

sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but

that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when

unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be

ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature as to a

parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head--Will it

bite me?--will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it may

bite him, and had therefore best be left alone? It is only the man of

courage--few and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite,

in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off a

gun. And it is only the man of courage--few and far between--who will

stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill him for

aught he knows--for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong--in order

that he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same method

by which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, used to break

in his horses; first, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying to

find out what they were thinking of. But after all, as with animals, so

with Nature; cowardice is dangerous. The surest method of getting bitten

by an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of being

injured by Nature is to be afraid of it. Only as far as we understand

Nature are we safe from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind not

to pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for

their own life and well-being, or for their children after them. But how

few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of Nature. How

few have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she

is thinking of. The mass are glad to have the results of science, as

they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they are tamed: but for want of

courage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to some one

else. And therefore we may say that what knowledge of Nature we have--and

we have very little--we owe to the courage of those men--and they have

been very few--who have been inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or,

what is better, act as if they were saying--"I find something in me which

I do not find in you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to

understand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become your

master, and not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know: or die in the

search."

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and very

few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, and

looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe what we call

Physical Science.

There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each four

races--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively from

an historical, and not a religious point of view.

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly

civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship. They invaded

and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more debased,

silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped. Their

own masses were for centuries given up to nature-worship. Now among

those Jews arose men--a very few--sages--prophets--call them what you

will, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers--who assumed towards

nature an attitude utterly different from the rest of their countrymen

and the rest of the then world; who denounced superstition and the dread

of nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for

themselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a

unity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They

found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a law

which could not be broken; that all things continued to that day

according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally new

in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet

reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in

our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of

their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in

the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superstitious man,

pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and

declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth was

moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea;

though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the

tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my belief

that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of

inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have

achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable,

but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in

perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose

minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they

have--as an historic fact--slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings

of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were not

the Jews: but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupils

the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what success had

they? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the

motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still

prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For a great and a patient

genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the

fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. But

they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries.

They stopped short. They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature.

They sank into planet-worship. They invented, it would seem, that

fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an

incubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians

and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing

but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face

Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superstitious mob as

irreverent, impious, atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, was

actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. School

after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a

hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something

like experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed to

prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which

they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed

over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the

last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was

Neoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise for, and

organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the

Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all

her school--they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for

they were noble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those who

had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they

despised: just as--it sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days are

like to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe

in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:

as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being.

And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood,

just where it began.

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks

and Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our race, under

the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.

Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a personally

courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than the

forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or

Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong

appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Their

laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations

by land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured,

moreover, by circumstances, or--as I should rather put it--by that divine

Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their

habitation. They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of

Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special

fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with

the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with

boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the

world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the

hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath

the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve

their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and

not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has

crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to

respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it

out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland

fen-dyke, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: a

battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out

of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which

linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and

what not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder

and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the

forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and

horse, the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the early

legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all

the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own superstitions,

they added those of the Rome which they conquered. They dreaded the

Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's Canidia, still

performed horrid rites in grave-yards and dark places of the earth. They

dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. They

dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed. They were the work of

enchanters. Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all

full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden. The

Caesars became to them magical man-gods. The poet Virgil became the

prince of necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they

were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the

old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and

Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and

often came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and

interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo,

even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in

prison. All the medieval sages--even Albertus Magnus--were stigmatised

as magicians. One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor

Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense,

took--vain and sensual--to drinking the laudanum which he himself had

discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool

dieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the "Romani nominis umbra," the

shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our

forefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens was

really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when the

authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries,

those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of

Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its

laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become

regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and

are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said

is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent

wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of the

middle ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think

of Nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of

her. Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice,

opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there

were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe--as there certainly

were in the days of the immortal 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum'--who were

ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to

accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature

itself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of

letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so

strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds of

men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but

toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not

without a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear

witness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century.

After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by--it has been

notably assisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its causes

I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with

theological questions, that they cannot be discussed here. I will only

point out to you these facts: that, from the latter part of the

seventeenth century, the noblest heads and the noblest hearts of Europe

concentrated themselves more and more on the brave and patient

investigation of physical facts, as the source of priceless future

blessings to mankind; that the eighteenth century, which it has been the

fashion of late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind, in

every conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen centuries before it;

that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that

this boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe became

indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as

Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever

else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature

was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are

not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual

emancipation of the human intellect. The connection may not, of course,

be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere coincidence. I believe it

to be a cause; one of course of very many causes: but still an integral

cause. At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to be

worthy of investigation.

I said, just now--The emancipation of the human intellect. I did not

say--Of science, or of the scientific intellect; and for this reason:

That the emancipation of science is the emancipation of the common mind

of all men. All men can partake of the gains of free scientific thought,

not merely by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming more

scientific men themselves.

Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by defining

superstition, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist,

science. For the word science defines itself. It means simply

knowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approximation

as can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object, its classification,

its causes, its effects; or in plain English, what it is, how it came

where it is, and what can be done with it.

And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition; for it is simply

the exercise of common sense. It is not a peculiar, unique,

professional, or mysterious process of the understanding: but the same

which all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming correct

conclusions.

Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart Mill,

will be familiar with this opinion. But to those who have no leisure to

study him, I should recommend the reading of Professor Huxley's third

lecture on the origin of species.

In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some humour,

how the man who, on rising in the morning, finds the parlour window open,

the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on the window-sill,

and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to the conclusion that

some one has broken open the window and stolen the plate, arrives at that

hypothesis--for it is nothing more--by a long and complex train of

inductions and deductions, of just the same kind as those which,

according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be used for investigating

the deepest secrets of Nature.

This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematical

calculations. In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is the

most important element in the calculation; and that is so thoroughly a

labour of common sense that an utterly uneducated man may, and often

does, state an abstruse problem clearly and correctly; seeing what ought

to be proved, and perhaps how to prove it, though he may be unable to

work the problem out, for want of mathematical knowledge.

But that mathematical knowledge is not--as all Cambridge men are surely

aware--the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of

those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses;

and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician

if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough

about the subject.

There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical calculation;

for instance, botany, zoology, geology, which are just now passing from

their old stage of classificatory sciences into the rank of organic ones.

These are, without doubt, altogether within the scope of the merest

common sense. Any man or woman of average intellect, if they will but

observe and think for themselves, freely, boldly, patiently, accurately,

may judge for themselves of the conclusions of these sciences, may add to

these conclusions fresh and important discoveries; and if I am asked for

a proof of what I assert, I point to 'Rain and Rivers,' written by no

professed scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known to fame

only as one of the most perfect horsemen in the world.

Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A man--I do not say a

geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman--sees a small valley,

say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys in the

Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain its age.

He has, at first sight, a very simple measure--that of denudation. He

sees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the product

of innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and which are fed

entirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds, on observation, that

this stream brings down some ten cubic yards of sand and gravel, on an

average, every year. The actual quantity of earth which has been removed

to make the glen may be several million cubic yards. Here is an easy sum

in arithmetic. At the rate of ten cubic yards a year, the stream has

taken several hundred thousand years to make the glen.

You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense. He

has a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen, because

he finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right as he has to

assume, if he finds a hole in his pocket, and his last coin in the act of

falling through it, that the rest of his money has fallen through the

same hole. It is a sufficient cause, and the simplest. A number of

observations as to the present rate of denudation, and a sum which any

railroad contractor can do in his head, to determine the solid contents

of the valley, are all that are needed. The method is that of science:

but it is also that of simple common sense. You will remember,

therefore, that this is no mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair

and simple conclusion from palpable facts; that the probability lies with

the belief that the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that

it is not the observer's business to prove it further, but other persons'

to disprove it, if they can.

But does the matter end here? No. And, for certain reasons, it is good

that it should not end here.

The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can disprove

his own conclusion; moreover, being human, he is probably somewhat awed,

if not appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of thousands of years

spent in making that little glen! Common sense would say that the longer

it took to make, the less wonder there was in its being made at last: but

the instinctive human feeling is the opposite. There is in men, and

there remains in them, even after they are civilised, and all other forms

of the dread of Nature have died out in them, a dread of size, of vast

space, of vast time; that latter, mind, being always imagined as space,

as we confess when we speak instinctively of a space of time. They will

not understand that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that

if we were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a

thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand

times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than it

is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our being, to

whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. I

believe this dread of size to be merely, like all other superstitions, a

result of bodily fear; a development of the instinct which makes a little

dog run away from a big dog. Be that as it may, every observer has it;

and so the man's conclusion seems to him strange, doubtful: he will

reconsider it.

Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first

guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he be a

modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of thoughtful

men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say, that the glen can

only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred, years old. And he

will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far as it is, like his own,

drawn from facts, but no further.

So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have been

produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a shorter

time.

1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides are

identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.

2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at the

upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run in at the

upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel beds of the

horizontal moor, without channel or depression.

3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of the

sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end spreads out

like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds do.

But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat

behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens, parted

from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained on the same

hypothesis; but they cannot. For there could not have been

surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There are no

other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the original

theory--the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it all, even as

they are doing it this day.

But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding power

have been far greater in old times than now?

Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he must

put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a great

deal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman tells him

that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than land under

vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands rose from the

sea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has some measure of the

time required, because he can tell roughly how long it takes for sands

and shingles left by the sea to become covered with vegetation. But he

must allow that the friability of the land must have been originally much

greater than now, for hundreds of years.

But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time from his

hundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first rose from the

sea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend in the shore

determined its site. That stream was not there. It was split up into a

million little springs, oozing side by side from the shore, and having

each a very minute denuding power, which kept continually increasing by

combination as the glen ate its way inwards, and the rainfall drained by

all these little springs was collected into the one central stream. So

that when the ground being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water

was least able to do it; and as the denuding power of the water

increased, the land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more

able to resist it. All this he has seen, going on at the present day, in

the similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire coast;

especially round Bournemouth.

So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set off

against each other, as making a difference of only a few thousands or

tens of thousands of years either way; and the age of the glen may fairly

be, if not a million years, yet such a length of years as mankind still

speak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it would do them some harm.

I trust that every scientific man in this room will agree with me, that

the imaginary squire or ploughman would have been conducting his

investigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian philosophy.

You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a single scientific

term, or referred to a single scientific investigation; and has observed

nothing and thought nothing which might not have been observed and

thought by any one who chose to use his common sense, and not to be

afraid.

But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, to

something very like his first conclusion, was all that further

investigation useless? No--a thousand times, no. It is this very

verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys

the unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions which

makes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning ground

slowly, but never receding from it. It is this buffeting of adversity

which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of first

guesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep,

wide, and interlaced into the solid ground of actual facts.

It is very necessary to insist on this point. For there have been men in

all past ages--I do not say whether there are any such now, but I am

inclined to think that there will be hereafter--men who have tried to

represent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar,

unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for the

purpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her. For as long

as the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific

method is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on

necromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of

mighty secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them great

harm.

Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons to

instal themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific men

themselves: and--as Shakespeare has it--to talk of Robin Hood, though

they never shot in his bow. Thus they become mediators to the masses

between the scientific and the unscientific worlds. They tell them--You

are not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand. You

are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods. It is we who

will, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out for you such of their

conclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe.

To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything is

discovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and e

cathedra--Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science.

For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of their

assertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers

are by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what

they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional

conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang were

the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts

require one.

This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition that

it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tell

the masses--Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a

peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, combined with uncommon

courage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and if

you will be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need no

mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not to

believe; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts and

theories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions. You

are men and women: and more than that you need not be.

And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify most

thoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr. Thomas

Carlyle.

As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject. For

aught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or chemistry, of

comparative anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware of, he may know a

great deal about them all, and, like a wise man, hold his tongue, and

give the world merely the results in the form of general thought. But

this I know; that his writings are instinct with the very spirit of

science; that he has taught men, more than any living man, the meaning

and end of science; that he has taught men moral and intellectual

courage; to face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness of

facts; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship nature; to believe

that man can know truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can he

live worthily on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other man

in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity of

spirit. That he would have made a distinguished scientific man, we may

be as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fine

old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a first-class

hunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in harness.

Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be true, devout,

and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say--Read what you will: but

at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to me--and I doubt not to

him--whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but his

premises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the

"voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam"--on fact and common sense.

And Mr. Carlyle's writings, if I am correct in my estimate of them, will

afford a very sufficient answer to those who think that the scientific

habit of mind tends to irreverence.

Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by those

who confound reverence with fear. For from blind fear of the unknown,

science does certainly deliver man. She does by man as he does by an

unbroken colt. The colt sees by the road side some quite new object--a

cast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not. What a fearful monster! What

unknown terrific powers may it not possess! And the colt shies across

the road, runs up the bank, rears on end; putting itself thereby, as many

a man does, in real danger. What cure is there? But one; experience. So

science takes us, as we should take the colt, gently by the halter; and

makes us simply smell at the new monster; till after a few trembling

sniffs, we discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a

kettle. Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find the

colt's character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus disabused.

He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for the man who is

breaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle; and

becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful member of society, as does

the man when disabused of his superstitions.

From which follows one result. That if science proposes--as she does--to

make men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs excite unpleasant

feelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and slavish.

And that too many such persons have existed in all ages is but too

notorious. There have been from all time, goetai, quacks, powwow men,

rain-makers, and necromancers of various sorts, who having for their own

purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightful

interpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after a

true, exact, brave, and hopeful one. And therefore it is to be feared,

or hoped, science and superstition will to the world's end remain

irreconcilable and internecine foes.

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the last

fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fair

breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so

often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe them

herself,--conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch the

Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the 'Times.'

Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's African friend, Katchiba, the

rain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder and

lightning--though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as they

do in England--if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving

to Katchiba's Negros a course of lectures on electricity, with

appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning among

the foremost.

It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been open to

the rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real

secret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends.

The former method--that of killing the man of science--was found more

easy in ancient times; the latter in these modern ones. And there have

been always those who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have

patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the use which may be

made of it; who would like to keep a tame man of science, as they would a

tame poet, or a tame parrot; who say--Let us have science by all means,

but not too much of it. It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to the

world, like medicine, in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific

man, will of course freely discover what you choose. Only do not talk

too loudly about it: leave that to us. We understand the world, and are

meant to guide and govern it. So discover freely: and meanwhile hand

over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and edify the populace

with so much of them as we think safe, while we keep our position

thereby, and in many cases make much money by your science. Do that, and

we will patronise you, applaud you, ask you to our houses; and you shall

be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously with us every

day. I know not whether these latter are not the worst enemies which

science has. They are often such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-

meaning persons. They desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise:

only not too wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they are

doing. They would recoil with horror if they were told they were so many

Iscariots, betraying Truth with a kiss.

But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and blandishments. In

old times, she endured being imprisoned and slain. She came to life

again. Perhaps it was the will of Him in whom all things live, that she

should live. Perhaps it was His spirit which gave her life.

She can endure, too, being starved. Her votaries have not as yet cared

much for purple and fine linen, and sumptuous fare. There are a very few

among them who, joining brilliant talents to solid learning, have risen

to deserved popularity, to titles, and to wealth. But even their

labours, it seems to me, are never rewarded in any proportion to the time

and the intellect spent on them, nor to the benefits which they bring to

mankind; while the great majority, unpaid and unknown, toil on, and have

to find in science her own reward. Better, perhaps, that it should be

so. Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go

where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out

at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who

guide the many. And so, I verily believe, the majority of scientific men

think. There are those among them who have obeyed very faithfully St.

Paul's precept, "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs

of this life." For they have discovered that they are engaged in a war--a

veritable war--against the rulers of darkness, against ignorance and its

twin children, fear and cruelty. Of that war they see neither the end

nor even the plan. But they are ready to go on; ready, with Socrates,

"to follow reason withersoever it leads;" and content, meanwhile, like

good soldiers in a campaign, if they can keep tolerably in line, and use

their weapons, and see a few yards ahead of them through the smoke and

the woods. They will come out somewhere at last; they know not where nor

when: but they will come out at last, into the daylight and the open

field; and be told then--perhaps to their own astonishment--as many a

gallant soldier has been told, that by simply walking straight on, and

doing the duty which lay nearest them, they have helped to win a great

battle, and slay great giants, earning the thanks of their country and of

mankind.

And, meanwhile, if they get their shilling a day of fighting-pay, they

are content. I had almost said, they ought to be content. For science

is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great reward. I can

conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom,

panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic

forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once

and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of

a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more,

connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order

and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give, nor poverty take

away? What it may lead to, he knows not. Of what use it may become, he

knows not. But this he knows, that somewhere it must lead; of some use

it will be. For it is a truth; and having found a truth, he has

exorcised one more of the ghosts which haunt humanity. He has left one

object less for man to fear; one object more for man to use. Yes, the

scientific man may have this comfort, that whatever he has done, he has

done good; that he is following a mistress who has never yet conferred

aught but benefits on the human race.

What physical science may do hereafter I know not; but as yet she has

done this:

She has enormously increased the wealth of the human race; and has

therefore given employment, food, existence, to millions who, without

science, would either have starved or have never been born. She has

shown that the dictum of the early political economists, that population

has a tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence, is no

law of humanity, but merely a tendency of the barbaric and ignorant man,

which can be counteracted by increasing manifold by scientific means his

powers of producing food. She has taught men, during the last few years,

to foresee and elude the most destructive storms; and there is no reason

for doubting, and many reasons for hoping, that she will gradually teach

men to elude other terrific forces of nature, too powerful and too

seemingly capricious for them to conquer. She has discovered innumerable

remedies and alleviations for pains and disease. She has thrown such

light on the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that the

presence of cholera--and probably of all zymotic diseases--in any place,

is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and authorities of

that place ought to be punishable by law, as destroyers of their fellow-

men; while for the weak, for those who, in the barbarous and

semi-barbarous state--and out of that last we are only just emerging--how

much has she done; an earnest of much more which she will do? She has

delivered the insane--I may say by the scientific insight of one man,

more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn

them--I mean the great and good Pinel--from hopeless misery and torture

into comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure.

For children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents read

and perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers on

physical education. We should not then see the children, even of the

rich, done to death piecemeal by improper food, improper clothes, neglect

of ventilation and the commonest measures for preserving health. We

should not see their intellects stunted by Procrustean attempts to teach

them all the same accomplishments, to the neglect, most often, of any

sound practical training of their faculties. We should not see slight

indigestion, or temporary rushes of blood to the head, condemned and

punished as sins against Him who took up little children in His arms and

blessed them.

But we may have hope. When we compare education now with what it was

even forty years ago, much more with the stupid brutality of the monastic

system, we may hail for children, as well as for grown people, the advent

of the reign of common sense.

And for woman--What might I not say on that point? But most of it would

be fitly discussed only among physicians and biologists: here I will say

only this--Science has exterminated, at least among civilised nations,

witch-manias. Women--at least white women--are no longer tortured or

burnt alive from man's blind fear of the unknown. If science had done no

more than that, she would deserve the perpetual thanks and the perpetual

trust, not only of the women whom she has preserved from agony, but the

men whom she has preserved from crime.

These benefits have already accrued to civilised men, because they have

lately allowed a very few of their number peaceably to imitate Mr. Rarey,

and find out what nature--or rather, to speak at once reverently and

accurately, He who made nature--is thinking of; and obey the "voluntatem

Dei in rebus revelatam." This science has done, while yet in her

infancy. What she will do in her maturity, who dare predict? At least,

in the face of such facts as these, those who bid us fear, or restrain,

or mutilate science, bid us commit an act of folly, as well as of

ingratitude, which can only harm ourselves. For science has as yet done

nothing but good. Will any one tell me what harm it has ever done? When

any one will show me a single result of science, of the knowledge of and

use of physical facts, which has not tended directly to the benefit of

mankind, moral and spiritual, as well as physical and economic--then I

shall be tempted to believe that Solomon was wrong when he said that the

one thing to be sought after on earth, more precious than all treasure,

she who has length of days in her right hand, and in her left hand riches

and honour, whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are

peace, who is a tree of life to all who lay hold on her, and makes happy

every one who retains her, is--as you will see if you will yourselves

consult the passage--that very Wisdom--by which God has founded the

earth; and that very Understanding--by which He has established the

heavens.