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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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