Section 1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of the state of Tennessee, that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals and all other public schools of the state, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals. That same spring John T. Scopes, a young instructor in biology in the high school at Dayton, made an agreement with some local citizens to teach such a theory and to cause himself to be indicted therefor with the object of testing the validity of the law. The indictment was duly returned, and the two sides prepared for the contest. The issue excited the nation as a whole; and the trial drew as opposing counsel Clarence Darrow, the celebrated Chicago lawyer, and William Jennings Bryan, the former political leader and evangelical lecturer. The remarkable aspect of this trial was that almost from the first the defense, pleading the cause of science, was forced into the role of rhetorician; whereas the prosecution, pleading the cause of the state, clung stubbornly to a dialectical position. This development occurred because the argument of the defense, once the legal technicalities were got over, was that evolution is “true.” The argument of the prosecution was that its teaching was unlawful. These two arguments depend upon rhetoric and dialectic respectively. Because of this circumstance, the famous trial turned into an argument about the orders of knowledge, although this fact was never clearly expressed, if it was ever discerned, by either side, and that is the main subject of our analysis. But before going into the matter of the trial, a slight prologue may be in order. It is only the first step beyond philosophic naïvete to realize that there are different orders of knowledge, or that not all knowledge is of the same kind of thing. Adler, whose analysis I am satisfied to accept to some extent, distinguishes the orders as follows. First there is the order of facts about existing physical entities. These constitute the simple data of science. Next come the statements which are statements about these facts; these are the propositions or theories of science. Next there come the statements about these statements: “The propositions which these last statements express form a partial universe of discourse which is the body of philosophical opinion.”[24]