Kabanata Kabanata 56 · The Fundamental Laws Which Govern The Universe

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Greeks and the

Romans, had all contributed something to the first vague notions of

science and scientific investigation. But the great migrations of the

fourth century had destroyed the classical world of the Mediterranean,

and the Christian Church, which was more interested in the life

of the soul than in the life of the body, had regarded science as

a manifestation of that human arrogance which wanted to pry into

divine affairs which belonged to the realm of Almighty God, and which

therefore was closely related to the seven deadly sins.

[Illustration: THE PHILOSOPHER]

The Renaissance to a certain but limited extent had broken through

this wall of Mediæval prejudices. The Reformation however, which had

overtaken the Renaissance in the early 16th century, had been hostile

to the ideals of the “new civilisation,” and once more the men of

science were threatened with severe punishment, should they try to pass

beyond the narrow limits of knowledge which had been laid down in Holy

Writ.

Our world is filled with the statues of great generals, atop of

prancing horses, leading their cheering soldiers to glorious victory.

Here and there, a modest slab of marble announces that a man of science

has found his final resting place. A thousand years from now we

shall probably do these things differently, and the children of that

happy generation shall know of the splendid courage and the almost

inconceivable devotion to duty of the men who were the pioneers of that

abstract knowledge, which alone has made our modern world a practical

possibility.

Many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and contempt and

humiliation. They lived in garrets and died in dungeons. They dared

not print their names on the title-pages of their books and they dared

not print their conclusions in the land of their birth, but smuggled

the manuscripts to some secret printing shop in Amsterdam or Haarlem.

They were exposed to the bitter enmity of the Church, both Protestant

and Catholic, and were the subjects of endless sermons, inciting the

parishioners to violence against the “heretics.”

Here and there they found an asylum. In Holland, where the spirit

of tolerance was strongest, the authorities, while regarding these

scientific investigations with little favour, yet refused to interfere

with people’s freedom of thought. It became a little asylum for

intellectual liberty where French and English and German philosophers

and mathematicians and physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of

rest and get a breath of free air.

In another chapter I have told you how Roger Bacon, the great genius

of the thirteenth century, was prevented for years from writing a

single word, lest he get into new troubles with the authorities of the

church. And five hundred years later, the contributors to the great

philosophic “Encyclopædia” were under the constant supervision of the

French gendarmerie. Half a century afterwards, Darwin, who dared to

question the story of the creation of man, as revealed in the Bible,

was denounced from every pulpit as an enemy of the human race. Even

to-day, the persecution of those who venture into the unknown realm of

science has not entirely come to an end. And while I am writing this

Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast multitude on the “Menace of Darwinism,”

warning his hearers against the errors of the great English naturalist.

[Illustration: GALILEO]

All this, however, is a mere detail. The work that has to be done

invariably gets done, and the ultimate profit of the discoveries and

the inventions goes to the mass of those same people who have always

decried the man of vision as an unpractical idealist.

The seventeenth century had still preferred to investigate the far off

heavens and to study the position of our planet in relation to the

solar system. Even so, the Church had disapproved of this unseemly

curiosity, and Copernicus who first of all had proved that the sun

was the centre of the universe, did not publish his work until the

day of his death. Galileo spent the greater part of his life under

the supervision of the clerical authorities, but he continued to use

his telescope and provided Isaac Newton with a mass of practical

observations, which greatly helped the English mathematician when he

discovered the existence of that interesting habit of falling objects

which came to be known as the Law of Gravitation.

That, for the moment at least, exhausted the interest in the Heavens,

and man began to study the earth. The invention of a workable

microscope, (a strange and clumsy little thing,) by Anthony van

Leeuwenhoek during the last half of the 17th century, gave man a chance

to study the “microscopic” creatures who are responsible for so many of

his ailments. It laid the foundations of the science of “bacteriology”

which in the last forty years has delivered the world from a great

number of diseases by discovering the tiny organisms which cause the

complaint. It also allowed the geologists to make a more careful study

of different rocks and of the fossils (the petrified prehistoric

plants) which they found deep below the surface of the earth. These

investigations convinced them that the earth must be a great deal

older than was stated in the book of Genesis and in the year 1830, Sir

Charles Lyell published his “Principles of Geology” which denied the

story of creation as related in the Bible and gave a far more wonderful

description of slow growth and gradual development.

At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on a new theory of

creation, which made the earth a little blotch in the nebulous sea out

of which the planetary system had been formed and Bunsen and Kirchhoff,

by the use of the spectroscope, were investigating the chemical

composition of the stars and of our good neighbour, the sun, whose

curious spots had first been noticed by Galileo.

Meanwhile after a most bitter and relentless warfare with the clerical

authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and

physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to

substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the

guesswork of the mediæval quack.

[Illustration: THE DIRIGIBLE]

Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more progress was

made in every branch of science than in all the hundreds of thousands

of years that had passed since man first looked at the stars and

wondered why they were there. It must have been a very sad age for

the people who had been educated under the old system. And we can

understand their feeling of hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin,

who did not exactly tell them that they were “descended from monkeys,”

(an accusation which our grandfathers seemed to regard as a personal

insult,) but who suggested that the proud human race had evolved from

a long series of ancestors who could trace the family-tree back to the

little jelly-fishes who were the first inhabitants of our planet.

The dignified world of the well-to-do middle class, which dominated the

nineteenth century, was willing to make use of the gas or the electric

light, of all the many practical applications of the great scientific

discoveries, but the mere investigator, the man of the “scientific

theory” without whom no progress would be possible, continued to be

distrusted until very recently. Then, at last, his services were

recognised. To-day the rich people who in past ages donated their

wealth for the building of a cathedral, construct vast laboratories

where silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and

often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy greater

happiness and health.

Indeed it has come to pass that many of the ills of this world, which

our ancestors regarded as inevitable “acts of God,” have been exposed

as manifestations of our own ignorance and neglect. Every child

nowadays knows that he can keep from getting typhoid fever by a little

care in the choice of his drinking water. But it took years and years

of hard work before the doctors could convince the people of this fact.

Few of us now fear the dentist chair. A study of the microbes that live

in our mouth has made it possible to keep our teeth from decay. Must

perchance a tooth be pulled, then we take a sniff of gas, and go our

way rejoicing. When the newspapers of the year 1846 brought the story

of the “painless operation” which had been performed in America with

the help of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To

them it seemed against the will of God that man should escape the pain

which was the share of all mortals, and it took a long time before the

practice of taking ether and chloroform for operations became general.

But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the old walls

of prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as time went by, the

ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling down. The eager crusaders

of a new and happier social order rushed forward. Suddenly they found

themselves facing a new obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past,

another citadel of reaction had been erected, and millions of men had

to give their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed.

ART