Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ScientistsHubbard, Elbert
Science
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
Hubbard, Elbert
Scientists -- Biography
The success of the volunteer lies in keeping one large ear close to the
turf.
Religious teachers have ever given to their people a cosmogony that was
adapted to their understanding.
Who made it? God made it all. In how long a time? Six days. And then
followed explanations of what God did each day.
Over against the volunteers with a taste for power and a fine corkscrew
discrimination, there have been at rare intervals men with a desire to
know for the sake of knowing. They were not content to accept any man's
explanation. The only thing that was satisfying to them was the
consciousness that they were inwardly right. Loyalty to the God within
was the guiding impulse of their lives.
In the past, such men have been regarded as eccentric, unreliable and
dangerous, and the volunteers have ever warned their congregations
against them.
Indeed, until a very few years ago they were not allowed to express
themselves openly. Laws have been passed to suppress them, and dire
penalties have been devised for their benefit. Laws against sacrilege,
heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these
invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or
exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to
invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock. This hot intent to support
and uphold the volunteers in their explanations of how the world was
made, is a universal manifestation of the barbaric state, and is based
upon the assumption that God is an infinite George the Fourth.
Six hundred years before Christ, Anaximander, the Greek, taught that
animal life was engendered from the earth through the influence of
moisture and heat, and that life thus generated gradually evolved into
higher and different forms: all animals once lived in the water, but
some of them becoming stranded on land put forth organs of locomotion
and defense, through their supreme resolve to live. Anaximander also
taught that man was only a highly developed animal, and his source of
life was the same as that of all other animals; man's present high
degree of development having gradually come about through growth from
very lowly forms.
Anaxagoras, the schoolmaster of Pericles, also made similar statements,
and then we find him boldly putting forth the very startling idea that
between the highest type of Greek and the lowest type of savage there
was a greater difference than between the savage and the ape. He also
taught that the earth was the universal mother of all living things,
animal and vegetable, and that the fecundation of the earth took place
from minute, unseen germs that floated in the air.
According to modern science, Anaxagoras was very close upon the trail of
truth. But there were only a very few who could follow him, and it took
the combined eloquence and tact of Pericles to keep his splendid head in
the place where Nature put it, and Pericles himself was compromised by
his leaning toward "Darwinism."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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