The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social ReformRobinson, James Harvey
Philosophy
The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform
Robinson, James Harvey
Civilization -- History; Social problems; Social psychology
Those who have dealt with natural phenomena, as distinguished from
purely human concerns, did not, however, quickly or easily gain
popular approbation and respect. The process of emancipating natural
science from current prejudices, both of the learned and of the
unlearned, has been long and painful, and is not wholly completed yet.
If we go back to the opening of the seventeenth century we find three
men whose business it was, above all, to present and defend common
sense in the natural sciences. The most eloquent and variedly
persuasive of these was Lord Bacon. Then there was the young Descartes
trying to shake himself loose from his training in a Jesuit seminary
by going into the Thirty Years' War, and starting his intellectual
life all over by giving up for the moment all he had been taught.
Galileo had committed an offense of a grave character by discussing in
the mother tongue the problems of physics. In his old age he was
imprisoned and sentenced to repeat the seven penitential psalms for
differing from Aristotle and Moses and the teachings of the theologians.
On hearing Galileo's fate. Descartes burned a book he had written, _On
The World_, lest he, too, get into trouble.
From that time down to the days of Huxley and John Fiske the struggle
has continued, and still continues--the Three Hundred Years' War for
intellectual freedom in dealing with natural phenomena. It has been a
conflict against ignorance, tradition, and vested interests in church
and university, with all that preposterous invective and cruel
misrepresentation which characterize the fight against new and
critical ideas. Those who cried out against scientific discoveries did
so in the name of God, of man's dignity, and of holy religion and
morality. Finally, however, it has come about that our instruction in
the natural sciences is tolerably free; although there are still large
bodies of organized religious believers who are hotly opposed to some
of the more fundamental findings of biology. Hundreds of thousands of
readers can be found for Pastor Russell's exegesis of Ezekiel and the
Apocalypse to hundreds who read Conklin's _Heredity and Environment_
or Slosson's _Creative Chemistry_. No publisher would accept a
historical textbook based on an explicit statement of the knowledge we
now have of man's animal ancestry. In general, however, our scientific
men carry on their work and report their results with little or no
effective hostility on the part of the clergy or the schools. The
social body has become tolerant of their virus.
This is not the case, however, with the social sciences. One cannot
but feel a little queasy when he uses the expression "social science",
because it seems as if we had not as yet got anywhere near a real
science of man. I mean by social science our feeble efforts to study
man, his natural equipment and impulses, and his relations to his
fellows in the light of his origin and the history of the race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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