GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE GALLIO OR The Tyranny of Science BY J. W. N. SULLIVAN [Illustration] E. P. DUTTON & CO. :: NEW YORK GALLIO, OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE COPYRIGHT 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A. GALLIO GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE 1 There can be no doubt that the prestige of science has greatly increased of recent times. In the days when Dickens wrote _The Mudfog Papers_ the man of science, to the general reading public, was a purely comic figure. After the man of science had knocked the bottom out of the Victorian universe with his theory of Natural Selection he inspired the respect we accord to whatever is both powerful and sinister. He was observed, warily and acutely, as an enemy. This reaction was perfectly justified, for science, as expounded to the populace by such men as Huxley and Tyndall, deprived life of all that had hitherto made it worth living. The gravamen of their offence was not that they made man an integral part of the animal kingdom, but that they presented him with a universe that was entirely purposeless. Such a doctrine would probably come as a shock even to a disillusioned and emaciated Eastern Sage, but to the men of the Victorian age, almost every one of them brought up in an orthodox Christian household and filled with that belief in a wise Providence that comes of great material prosperity, it was nothing short of an outrage. Even the men of science themselves found their great discovery more than a little disconcerting. Nobody who reads them can fail to detect something strained, something occasionally almost frenzied, in their insistence on the duty of intellectual honesty. These men are, half the time, shouting aloud in order to hearten themselves. They were quite consciously martyrs to the truth. This is true, at any rate, of such men as Huxley and Clifford. There were many men of science, of course, who were not sufficiently alive to live in a universe of any description. Outside, their laboratories they had no perceptible existence. Many of them died simple Christians. But to all interested in such matters it became evident that the goal of science was the detailed explanation of man as the accidental outcome of “matter and motion”. Since the arguments