The Complete Essays of John GalsworthyGalsworthy, John
General
The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
Galsworthy, John
Essays
both artists—let them both be measured by the same last!
But let us now consider the case of Science. It will not, indeed
cannot, be contended that the investigations of scientific men, whether
committed to writing or to speech, are always suited to the taste and
capacities of our general public. There was, for example, the well-known
doctrine of Evolution, the teachings of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russet
Wallace, who gathered up certain facts, hitherto but vaguely known, into
presentments, irreverent and startling, which, at the time, profoundly
disturbed every normal mind. Not only did religion, as then accepted,
suffer in this cataclysm, but our taste and feeling were inexpressibly
shocked by the discovery, so emphasised by Thomas Henry Huxley, of Man's
descent from Apes. It was felt, and is felt by many to this day, that
the advancement of that theory grossly and dangerously violated every
canon of decency. What pain, then, might have been averted, what
far-reaching consequences and incalculable subversion of primitive
faiths checked, if some judicious Censor of scientific thought had
existed in those days to demand, in accordance with his private estimate
of the will and temper of the majority, the suppression of the doctrine
of Evolution.
Innumerable investigations of scientists on subjects such as the date
of the world's creation, have from time to time been summarised
and inconsiderately sprung on a Public shocked and startled by the
revelation that facts which they were accustomed to revere were
conspicuously at fault. So, too, in the range of medicine, it would be
difficult to cite any radical discovery (such as the preventive power
of vaccination), whose unchecked publication has not violated the
prejudices and disturbed the immediate comfort of the common mind. Had
these discoveries been judiciously suppressed, or pared away to suit
what a Censorship conceived to be the popular palate of the time, all
this disturbance and discomfort might have been avoided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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