History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in ChristendomWhite, Andrew Dickson
Religion
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
White, Andrew Dickson
Religion and science -- History
(185) For the general history of early views regarding stone implements,
see the first chapters in Cartailhac, La France Prehistorique; also
Jolie, L'Homme avant les Metaux; also Lyell, Lubbock, and Evans. For
lightning-stones in China and elsewhere, see citation from a Chinese
encyclopedia of 1662, in Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 209. On the
universality of this belief, on the surviving use of stone implements
even into civilized times, and on their manufacture to-day, see ibid.,
chapter viii. For the treatment of Boue's discovery, see especially
Morillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, p. 11. For the suppression of
the passage in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, see Letter 113, cited in
Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century (English translation),
vol. i, p. 135.
In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by the Rev. Mr.
McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who seems to have been completely
overawed by orthodox opinion in England and elsewhere; for, though
he found human bones and implements mingled with remains of extinct
animals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and they were only brought to
light more than thirty years later by Mr. Vivian.
The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bourbons, to the throne,
made the orthodox pressure even greater. It was the culmination of
the reactionary period--the time in France when a clerical committee,
sitting at the Tuileries, took such measures as were necessary to hold
in check all science that was not perfectly "safe"; the time in Austria
when Kaiser Franz made his famous declaration to sundry professors, that
what he wanted of them was simply to train obedient subjects, and that
those who did not make this their purpose would be dismissed; the time
in Germany when Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers
under his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth all
their might in behalf of "scriptural science"; the time in Italy when
a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclusion distrusted by
the Church, was sure of losing his place and in danger of losing his
liberty; the time in England when what little science was taught was
held in due submission to Archdeacon Paley; the time in the United
States when the first thing essential in science was, that it be
adjusted to the ideas of revival exhorters.
Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on; and in 1828 Tournal, of
Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens of human industry,
with a fragment of a human skeleton, among bones of extinct animals. In
the following year Christol published accounts of his excavations in the
caverns of Gard; he had found in position, and under conditions which
forbade the idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of
the extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period. Little general notice
was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere involved such
discoveries in darkness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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