It must not be forgotten that small minds are always prone to find very respectable reasons for their opposition to something that has been hitherto unknown to them. While novelty is supposed to attract, and does when it comes in a form not too unfamiliar, and when men are not asked to give up old convictions for its sake, real newness always evokes opposition. Washington Allston once said very well with regard to this, that "An original mind is rarely understood until it has been reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so {392} averse are men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty, however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed." This principle will be of great service in making clear the real significance of many incidents in the history of science, in which not only intelligent men without special scientific training have been found in opposition to real scientific progress, but in which men having had the advantage of long experience in scientific investigation, having themselves sometimes as younger men done original work of value, have yet placed themselves squarely in opposition to scientific advance that eventually proved of the highest possible significance. Scientific men have, as a rule, been quite ready at all times to argue that an announced new discovery could not be true, that indeed it was absurd to think of it. The word nonsense is perhaps oftener on scientists' tongues than on any others'. It is not because he is deliberately opposed to scientific progress that this is the case with the scientist, but that he is so convinced of the ultimate significance of many things that he knows already, that he cannot readily bring himself to admit the idea of progress along lines with which he is familiar. To do so, indeed, supposes that he himself has been lacking in perspicacity and in powers of observation. The fact that it is usually a young man who makes the new observation, not infrequently a young man who does not know the great body of science that the older acknowledged scientist does, only adds to the readiness with which the senior is apt to consider the new proposition as absurd. Ecclesiastics have done this same thing, but not nearly so frequently as scientists. There was a time when the majority of educated men belonged to the clerical order, and then it seemed as though it must be religion that prompted some of the conservatism which led them to oppose what proved eventually to be new truths. It was not, however, but only human nature asserting itself in spite of education.