The Popes and Science Part 18

At first the friends probably intended to come back and take the patients away, but after a time, finding that they got along so well near the shrine, they gradually learned to leave them there entirely.

Thus originated the famous insane colony at Gheel which has in recent years been the subject of more attention on the part of alienists the world over than almost any other therapeutic method of our time. This medieval invention of caring for the non-violent insane, especially those of low grades of intelligence, in the midst of small families, where none of the cares of life burden them and where they have occupation of mind and body and certain human interests, such as might appeal to their weakened intelligence, is probably the ideal method of caring for such patients. Certain it is that it is much better than the large inst.i.tutional system, the invention of succeeding centuries, from which we are now trying to get away as fast and as far as possible.

The Gheel mode of caring for the insane is really the colony system that is now universally recognized as the most favorable mode of treatment for these patients. It seems not unlikely that there was much more of this practice during the Middle Ages in Europe than we have any idea of.

With regard to the serious accusations so often made {378} against the people of the Middle Ages for their cruelty to the insane, not much apology will be needed by those who know anything about the treatment of the insane, even in quite recent times. Measures of rigid restraint were employed for dangerous cases. Patients who had shown manifestations of violence were likely to be chained. Severe and unusual punishments were sometimes inflicted. Of all this there is no doubt. Abuses crept into inst.i.tutions. The insane were sometimes brutally treated or hideously neglected. These, however, are objections that can be urged against our system of taking care of the insane in many places even at the present day. In certain states, in order to lessen the expense of caring for the insane, they are kept in departments in the Poor Houses, and every now and then a legislative committee of investigation tells the story of appalling evils that have been discovered. It was not because they thought that possessed people deserved punishment, nor because they hoped thus to get the devils to go out of them, that the medieval generations allowed such things in their asylums, but because human nature will neglect its duties toward the ailing unless carefully superintended, and because regular attendants become hardened in their feelings sooner or later, when they serve only for pay, and the result always is the abuse of patients.

In proportion to the number of patients cared for, there was much more need for restraint in those old days than at present. As a rule, during the Middle Ages prisons and asylums were few. Only the violently insane, who already had actually committed some serious crime or threatened to, were kept in the asylums. For these restraint is needed even at the present {379} time. We have learned to apply milder measures by employing many more attendants, but even that has come only in the last generation or two. The milder cases of insanity were not kept in asylums, but were allowed to wander about the country, or were cared for in their families with a devotion of which one finds no example at the present time; or if the insane person belonged to a n.o.ble family, very often the patient was kept in the house of a retainer and gently cared for. The fact that the milder cases were allowed to wander about the country might seem to be dangerous, but is not so serious as is ordinarily thought. Only a limited number of insane patients are likely to be violent, and these, as a rule, show manifestations of it early in the history of their affection. It was the frequent meeting with these harmless insane, as they were to be encountered in the many places through which he wandered professionally in England, that enabled Shakespeare to make his pictures of insane characters so true to life, that even at the present day we are able to recognize from his marvelous description exactly the form of insanity that was present.

In a word, these generations of the Middle Ages builded better than they knew in this matter of the care of the mentally afflicted, as in everything else which they took up for serious consideration. They did only the most obvious things, and what they could not very well help, under the circ.u.mstances, and yet very often the solutions of grave problems which they hit upon so naturally, proved to be as efficient as, indeed sometimes practically identical with, those we have reached by much more elaborate methods. This story of the treatment of the insane in the Middle Ages {380} deserves careful study. I have given only a few suggestions for the interpretation of certain methods of action on their part, apparently very different from our ideas, yet in reality antic.i.p.ating our most recent conclusions.

What many people have not been able to forgive the generations of the Middle Ages, and especially the ecclesiastics of the centuries before our own, is that as educated men and leaders of the people they should have accepted the view that mental diseases may, in some of their forms at least, be due to possession by the devil or some other spiritual interference with the working of the human intellect. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became the custom among the educated to scoff at any possible manifestation of this kind. The interference of the spiritual world with any of man's actions came to be looked upon as absurd, except by those who still clung to old-time beliefs and thought that new fashions in opinion might very well prove almost as variable as do corresponding fads in the realm of dress or of interests. The difficulty in the matter was that the generations of the latter nineteenth century lost their faith, to a great extent, in the existence of a spiritual world, and consequently it was easy to laugh at those who had found the interference of such a world as not only possible, but actual, in a great many affairs in human life. As a matter of fact, when we realize how many utterly inexplicable phenomena the earlier centuries tried to explain this way, it is not surprising to find their explanation sometimes wrong.

It is very easy, to my mind, for men of our generation to be too hard in their judgments of the men of {381} the Middle Ages with regard to the curious phenomena, psychic, spiritistic and occult, which, with all our advance in science, are still almost as obscure to the eye of the intellect as they were seven centuries ago. The medieval generations saw a great many things that they could not explain happening round them, and attributed them to spiritual agencies. We have learned since that many of these things are merely natural, and must not be considered as due to anything else than the ordinary laws of nature. We have not eliminated belief in the spiritual world, however, and there is still a large proportion of mankind who think that they see, even in the matter-of-fact world around them of the present day, many signs of interference in human affairs by agencies distinct from those of human beings and quite independent of matter.

It is easy to dismiss this side of the question with a shrug of the shoulders and say that it need not be taken into account. A man who does this easily succeeds in convincing himself that there are no evidences for spiritual manifestations in our life, and that the stories with regard to them are all nonsense.

It is curious, however, that anyone who investigates and does not merely dismiss at once, is very p.r.o.ne to come to a contrary conclusion, even though all his training and the traditions of his education are opposed to such an admission. There are many prominent scientists who have allowed themselves to be drawn into the investigation of spiritualistic manifestations so-called. Very few of them have come away from their investigations entirely convinced that there was nothing in them. Frauds they have found; sleight-of-hand impositions they have exposed; but apart from all these, there {382} is a residue of phenomena which they cannot explain and which convinces many of them of the existence and the mundane action of forces independent of matter. The men who come to these conclusions are not only the ignorant, nor the over-credulous, but frequently representative leaders in scientific thought--men who are known to be thoroughly capable of weighing evidence, prominent lawyers and judges, above all, men who are accustomed to investigation as most painstaking scientists and faithful students of nature.

A few examples will ill.u.s.trate this. Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, has a name in the scientific world that places him among the leaders of scientific thought. For many years he has been convinced that spiritualism contains in itself truths that deserve careful investigation, and he for one is persuaded that the neglect of investigation of this subject, on the part of recent generations, is one of the most serious mistakes, from a purely scientific standpoint, that they have made. Sir William Crookes, whose brilliant theories with regard to the fourth stage of matter, radiant matter, would seem to have quite appropriately prepared him for the proper investigation of existences even beyond the domain of the attenuated substances with which he had been so much concerned, is another of the prominent scientists of the day who confesses to a belief in the truth of spiritualistic phenomena. He made his first publication on the subject more than a quarter of a century ago. When a score of years after this he was elected as the President of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, the most prominent scientific body in Great Britain, and, it may be said, in the {383} English-speaking world, he recurred in his Presidential address to the subject of spiritualism, and said that in the meantime he not only had not changed his mind with regard to the truth of certain spiritualistic phenomena, but had even become more convinced than he was originally.

These are prominent English scientists, and Englishmen are supposed to be more conservative, less likely to be influenced by personal motives, and less p.r.o.ne to be led astray by imaginative influences, than their colleagues on the Continent. Besides these two whom we have mentioned, there is a third one, of quite as great prominence, Sir Oliver Lodge, who is also a convert to belief in the reality of certain spiritual manifestations, and other names might readily be mentioned. Over in France, the most prominent of living physiologists, Professor Charles Richet, who is well known for investigating work of a high order and successful original research that has made his name familiar throughout the medical world at least, is another modern scientist who cannot but think that there is something in spiritualistic manifestations. The latest convert to these notions is an even more surprising addition to such a group of witnesses to the possibility of the interference of spirits with human affairs. This is no less a person than Lombroso, the well-known writer on criminology, who has recently confessed that certain tests made by him showed beyond all doubt that there were influences at work quite independent of human powers, and showing the existence of a world apart from matter. This immaterial world evidently interpenetrates, and may interfere with things in the material world as we know it.

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In a word, it may be said that if a man wants to keep the spiritual side of things out of his purview of life, he may do so by refusing to investigate any evidence that would demonstrate the existence of spiritual forces in the world around him. The heavy price, however, that he pays for absolute certainty and peace of mind in this matter--is peremptory refusal to investigate. If he gives himself up to investigations, he comes inevitably to the conclusion that there is something in the belief in the existence of spirits all round us, and of the possibility of their interference in the ordinary affairs of life. It is true that after he has come to this conclusion he may not be able to demonstrate it to others. His conviction of it, however, will be none the less absolute because of this. His adhesion to the new belief may seem to many people absurd. He will accept this view of his state of mind quite calmly, and apparently enjoy the compensation of finding the absurdity to be in the other point of view. It matters not how distinguished a scientist he may be, he comes out of investigation of spiritual phenomena persuaded of the existence of a spiritual world.

This persuasion seems to come by some form of intuition not quite dependent on the ordinary processes of intelligence. It is as if spirit called to spirit across the abyss, from the immaterial to the material, as if somehow we obtained a conviction of the existence of spirits around us by the very sympathy of our natures and their relationship to the immaterial world, rather than by the ordinary avenues of intelligence. It is, in a word, a telepathy, the other agent in which is not material, but quite independent of matter, yet somehow is able to set up those vibrations in the ether which {385} affect brain cells, and thus bring about communications, as Sir William Crookes explains the curious phenomena in this line that occur between human beings. Such an explanation may easily be dismissed as highly imaginative and altogether theoretic. As a student of psychology now for many years, it has appealed to me, however, as the only possible hypothesis that gives any plausible explanation of the curious conversions which so inevitably result from sympathetic attempts at investigation of the possibility of spirit interference in mundane affairs.

How far this persuasion of spiritual interference in ordinary human affairs has gone, will not be realized except by those who are familiar with some of the literature which has been made in the last twenty years on the subject of psychical research. Not long since, a distinguished European professor of physical science went so far as to warn people of the dangers there might be in dismissing the opinion that other intelligences than those of men could interfere for the abrogation of certain natural laws. This may be scoffed at as the height of credulity, and may be received in sceptical mood by those who refuse to look into such matters, because they know _a priori_ that they _cannot be true!_ It is hard, however, to differentiate the att.i.tude of mind of such persons from that which Galileo deprecated so much, in that letter of complaint to Kepler, in which he said so bitterly that they refused to look through his telescope and demolished, as they thought, his observations by logical conclusions from what they knew already. It is to be remarked that it was not ecclesiastics of whom he was talking at this time, but professors of science at the University of {386} Pisa, who were quite as unsympathetic towards certain of his astronomical discoveries as were any of the ecclesiastics of his time.

Alfred Russell Wallace has summed up this matter in a well-known chapter on psychic research, which he places among what he calls the failures of A Wonderful Century--the nineteenth. While personally viewing this matter from a very different standpoint to that from which it is viewed by Mr. Wallace, I cannot help but think that the position he occupies is much nearer the truth than the absolute refusal to credit stories of supra-natural or ultra-natural, if not supernatural interferences in human affairs. When Mr. Wallace has an opinion he is likely to express it very forcibly, and he has done so in this case. He does not hesitate to attribute a great many marvelous happenings to practically the same forces as the medieval people formulated for them, though they would disagree utterly in the purposes attributed to these events. Mr. Wallace says:

"The still more extraordinary phenomena--veridical hallucinations, warnings, detailed predictions of future events, phantoms, voices or knockings, visible or audible to numerous individuals, bell-ringing, the playing on musical instruments, stone-throwing and various movements of solid bodies, all without human contact or any discoverable physical cause, still occur among us as they have occurred in all ages. These are now being investigated, and slowly but surely are proved to be realities, although the majority of scientific men and of writers for the press still ignore the c.u.mulative evidence and ridicule the inquirers. These phenomena being comparatively rare, are as yet known to but a limited number of persons; but the evidence for their reality is {387} also very extensive, and it is absolutely certain that during the coming century they too will be accepted as realities by all impartial students and by the majority of educated men and women."

Mr. Wallace has insisted further on the utterly unscientific position of many of those who refuse to look into the evidence for these phenomena, so plainly beyond the power of the ordinary forces of nature as we know them, or of the human intelligences in the body, that are immediately around us. He deprecates, as does Galileo, the method by which this subject has been kept from receiving its due meed of attention. He points out that it is because of intellectual intolerance that this subject has been relegated to the background of scientific attention. He even contends that a great lesson is to be learned from this neglect, and one which will help men to free themselves from that burden of overconservatism which, much more than religion or theology, has impeded the progress of knowledge and the advance of science. He says:

"The great lesson to be learnt from our review of this subject is, distrust of all _a priori_ judgments as to facts; for the whole history of the progress of human knowledge, and especially of that department of knowledge now known as psychical research, renders it certain that whenever the scientific men or popular teachers of any age have denied, on _a priori_ grounds of impossibility or opposition to the 'laws of nature,' the facts observed and recorded by numerous investigators of average honesty and intelligence, these deniers have always been wrong."

"Future ages will, I believe, be astonished at the vast amount of energy and ignorance displayed by so many {388} of the great men of this century in opposing unpalatable truths, and in supposing that _a priori_ arguments, accusations of imposture or insanity, or personal abuse, were the proper means of determining matters of fact and of observation in any department of human knowledge."

If these hard-headed scientists, whose training has been obtained in what physical scientists themselves, at least, are fain to call the rigid school of the logic of facts, and under the severe mental discipline of the inductive method, accept on the evidence afforded them, the manifestations of the spiritual world and its influences in this as true, surely we will not condemn these men of the Middle Ages, who approached the subject in such a different temper, if they came to the same conclusion. We recognize that the modern scientist, with his trained powers of observation and his elaborate facilities for eliminating the advent.i.tious in his experiments, is in a position to judge impartially with regard to such subjects. More than this, his life has usually been spent in making such syntheses of evidence for and against the significance of facts, as should enable him to be a proper judge. If, then, whenever he seriously devotes himself to such an investigation, he comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that spirits do intervene in our affairs, yet we refuse to believe with him, it is hard to know on what principle we shall accept his scientific conclusions. If we cannot bring ourselves to think his conclusions are of equal value in both cases, we place ourselves in a strange dilemma. The medieval scholars were p.r.o.ne, because of the faith to which they had given their whole-hearted adhesion, to see spiritual powers at work in many things. In this they were {389} sometimes sadly mistaken, but not so much mistaken as certain generations of the nineteenth century, who absolutely refused to accept any possibility of spiritual interference in things mundane.

Both the extremes are mistakes. It is manifestly more of a mistake, however, to deny spiritual influence entirely (I talk now from the standpoint of the scientist and not the believer), than to accept so much of spiritual interference as the medieval generations permitted themselves to be convinced of.

This whole subject is one that cannot be dismissed as the conclusion of a bit of vapid superficial argumentation. It is one of the great mysteries of life and of the significance of man in the world. The medieval peoples did much harm by accepting the position, that many persons suffering from ordinary nervous and mental diseases as we now know them were really possessed by the devil. The treatment accorded these supposedly possessed (for the moment we lay aside the question as to the possibility of the reality of diabolic possession) was not any worse than has frequently been accorded to sufferers from mental and nervous disease in presumably much more intelligent times, either because of fear of them, or neglect on account of the absence of a sufficient number of keepers, or because of curious theories of medical science. Mankind, it is hoped, is progressing, but the amount of progress from generation to generation is not enough, that any succeeding age should criticise severely the well-intentioned though mistaken efforts of their predecessors to meet, according to the best of their ability, problems that are as deep as those involved in nervous and mental diseases.

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APPENDIX.

"The truth seeker has had to struggle for his physical life. Each acquisition of truth has been resisted by the full force of the inertia of satisfaction with preconceived ideas. Just as a new thought comes to us with a shock which rouses the resistance of our personal conservatism, so a new idea is met and repelled by the conservatism of society." (_Jordan, The Struggle for Realities, in Footsteps of Evolution._)

I.

OPPOSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.

The main purpose of this book has not been accomplished unless it has been shown that the Church, the Popes, and ecclesiastics generally during the Middle Ages, and especially during the three centuries before the reformation so-called, far from opposing scientific advance or investigation, were constantly in the position of encouraging and fostering science, even if the meaning of that term be limited, as it has come to be in modern times, to the physical or natural sciences.

The Popes and the great ecclesiastics were patrons of learning of every kind, and that they not only encouraged, but aided very materially the inst.i.tutions of learning in which the problems of science with which we are now engaged, were discussed in very much the same way as we discuss them at the present time, is evident from the story of the foundation of the universities. It will be a source of wonder to many people how, with all this as a matter of simple educational history, the traditions with regard to the supposed opposition of the Church and the Popes to science have grown up. This is not so difficult to understand, however, as might be thought, {391} and a few words of explanation will serve to show that there was opposition to science, but that this was not due to religious intolerance in any proper sense of the term.

Those who give the religious element a prominent place in this, forget how much natural opposition to the introduction of new ideas there is in men's minds, quite apart from their religious convictions. Nearly two centuries ago Dean Swift said, in his own bitter frame of mind of course, but still with an approach to truth that has made the expression one of the oft-quoted pa.s.sages from his works: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign--that all the a.s.ses are in confederacy against him."

I suppose the Dean himself would have been the first to insist that some of his colleagues in the ministry eminently deserved the opprobrious substantive epithet he employed. It would be too much to expect that there should not be as many foolish ones among the clergy of the olden times as in any other of the professions. Occasionally one of these foolish clergymen rose up in opposition to science.

Whenever he did, especially if he belonged to the cla.s.s mentioned by Dean Swift, then he surely made his religion the princ.i.p.al reason for his opposition. That gave an added prestige in his mind and in the minds of those who accepted his teachings, to whatever he had to say on the subject. This no more involved the Church itself, nor ecclesiastics generally, in the condemnation of the particular scientific doctrine, than does the frequent opposition of peculiar members of medical societies to real progress in medicine, involve the organization to which they belong in the old-fogyism which would prevent advance.

It must not be forgotten that small minds are always p.r.o.ne to find very respectable reasons for their opposition to something that has been hitherto unknown to them. While novelty is supposed to attract, and does when it comes in a form not too unfamiliar, and when men are not asked to give up old convictions for its sake, real newness always evokes opposition. Washington Allston once said very well with regard to this, that "An original mind is rarely understood until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so {392} averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed." This principle will be of great service in making clear the real significance of many incidents in the history of science, in which not only intelligent men without special scientific training have been found in opposition to real scientific progress, but in which men having had the advantage of long experience in scientific investigation, having themselves sometimes as younger men done original work of value, have yet placed themselves squarely in opposition to scientific advance that eventually proved of the highest possible significance.

Scientific men have, as a rule, been quite ready at all times to argue that an announced new discovery could not be true, that indeed it was absurd to think of it. The word nonsense is perhaps oftener on scientists' tongues than on any others'. It is not because he is deliberately opposed to scientific progress that this is the case with the scientist, but that he is so convinced of the ultimate significance of many things that he knows already, that he cannot readily bring himself to admit the idea of progress along lines with which he is familiar. To do so, indeed, supposes that he himself has been lacking in perspicacity and in powers of observation. The fact that it is usually a young man who makes the new observation, not infrequently a young man who does not know the great body of science that the older acknowledged scientist does, only adds to the readiness with which the senior is apt to consider the new proposition as absurd. Ecclesiastics have done this same thing, but not nearly so frequently as scientists. There was a time when the majority of educated men belonged to the clerical order, and then it seemed as though it must be religion that prompted some of the conservatism which led them to oppose what proved eventually to be new truths. It was not, however, but only human nature a.s.serting itself in spite of education.

Prof. David Starr Jordan in reviewing briefly the history of the Struggle for Realities in one of the essays in his Foot-notes to Evolution, [Footnote 45] has summed up the genuine {393} significance of this supposed opposition of science and theology in some striking paragraphs. To my mind, he places the whole subject on its proper foundation, and properly disposes of the supposed conflict between religion or theology and science. He says:--

[Footnote 45: N. Y., Appleton, 1902.]

"But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need for all these is part of the actual development of man.

Intolerance and prejudice is, moreover, not confined to religious organizations. The same spirit that burned Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno for the heresies of science, led the atheist "liberal" mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist Lavoisier, with the sneer that "the republic has no need of savants." The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to reject natural selection because it "relieves G.o.d of the labor of creation," causes the heterodox Haecekel to condemn Weismann's theories of heredity, not because they are at variance with facts, but because such questions are settled once for all by the great philosophic dictum (his own) "of monism."

This very natural ultra-conservative mood of scientists is well ill.u.s.trated by a pa.s.sage from Galileo's life, in which he himself describes in a letter to Kepler, the great mathematician and astronomer of his time, the reception that his new invention, the telescope, met with from distinguished men of science, their colleagues of the moment. The Italian astronomer encountered the well-known tendency of men to reason from what they already know, that certain advances in knowledge are impossible or absurd. The favorite expression is that the thoughts suggested by some new discovery are illogical. Men have always reasoned thus, and apparently they always will. Knowledge that they learn before they are forty const.i.tutes, consciously or unconsciously, for them the possible sum of human knowledge, and {394} they can only think that apparent progress that contradicts their previous convictions must be founded on false premises or faulty observation. We cannot help sympathizing with Galileo, though it must be a consolation for others who are struggling to have ideas of theirs adopted, to read the words addressed to his great contemporary and sympathetic fellow worker by the Italian astronomer.

"What wilt thou say," he writes, "of the first teachers at the University at Padua, who when I offered to them the opportunity, would look neither at the planets nor the moon through the telescope? This sort of men look on philosophy as a book like the AEneid or Odyssey, and believe the truth is to be sought not in the world of nature, but only in comparison of texts. How wouldst thou have laughed, when at Pisa the leading Professor of the University there endeavored, in the presence of the Grand Duke, to tear away the new planets from Heaven with logical arguments, like magical exorcisms!"

This gives the key to the real explanation of the Galileo incident better than would a whole volume of explanation of it. It is now realized that very few of those who have been most ready to quote the example of Galileo's condemnation as an argument for Church intolerance in the matter of science, know anything at all about the details of his case. The bitter intolerance of many men of science of his time, including even that supposed apostle of the experimental method--Bacon--to the Copernican system, is an important but ignored phase of the case of Galileo, as it came before the Roman inquisition.

The peculiar position occupied by Galileo caused Prof. Huxley, writing to Prof. St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, to say that, after looking into the case of Galileo when he was in Italy, he had arrived at the conclusion "that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it." In our own time, M. Bertrand, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that "the great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was learned _without any profound sorrow to Galileo himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon as the most serene and enviable in the history of science."_

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Certain historical incidents in which Church authorities and ecclesiastics a.s.sumed an att.i.tude distinctly opposed to true scientific advance can be found. They are, however, ever so much rarer than is thought. Let those who accept unquestioningly the supposed opposition of Church to science, count over for themselves the definite cases of this in history which they know for certain, and they will be surprised, as a rule, on what slight grounds their persuasion in this matter is founded. We have detailed the policy of the Church with regard to education and science. Such incidents of opposition as can be gathered were breaks away from that policy. They were not due so much to faith or theology, though these were often made excuses for them, as to the natural opposition to novelty, so common in man.

With regard to this matter, as with regard to opposition in general to science, President Jordan has once more set forth the realities of the situation so as to make it clear that, even when it was the dogmatic spirit that was behind the refusal to accept certain scientific truths, not only was there the best of intentions in this in all cases, but in nearly all, the results were such as to benefit mankind, and even to help rather than hinder science. He says:

"The desire of dogmatism to control action is in its essence the desire to save men from their own folly. The great historic churches have existed 'for the benefit of the weak and the poor.' By their observances they have stimulated the spirit of devotion. By their commands they have protected men from unwise action. By their condemnations they have saved men from the grasp of vice and crime."

The ultra-conservatism which is the real factor at fault in these cases exists in all men beyond middle life. It is a wise provision of nature very probably to prevent the young and headstrong from running away with the race. We would be plunged into all sorts of curious experimental conditions only for the fact that those beyond middle life act as a brake on the initiative of their juniors. While it does some harm, there is no doubt of its supremely beneficial effects in the long run. {396} For one announced great discovery that proves its actual right to the t.i.tle, there are at least a hundred that are proclaimed with loud blare of trumpet, yet prove nonent.i.ties. This sometimes becomes a very troublesome brake on progress, however. Some three hundred years ago, Harvey said with regard to his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood, that he did not expect any of his contemporaries who was over forty years of age to accept it.

His premonition in this matter was fully confirmed by the event.

Darwin, I believe, once remarked that he did not think that men of his own age in his own generation would accept his theory, and most of them did not.