The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and DiscussionsCobbe, Frances Power
Religion
The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions
Cobbe, Frances Power
Knowledge, Sociology of; Philosophy and religion; Science -- Moral and ethical aspects
candor, we may credit it beyond his four “great truths,” fall, I venture
to think, deplorably short of such a standard of culture as this.
The deficiencies of Scientific education do not exhaust the objections
against it. There seem to be positive evils almost inseparable from such
training when carried far with the young. One of the worst is the danger
of the adoption by the student of materialistic views on all subjects.
He need not become a theoretic or speculative Materialist: that is
another risk, which may or may not be successfully eliminated. But he
will almost inevitably fall into practical materialism. Of the two sides
of human life, his scientific training will compel him to think always
in the first place of the lower. The material (or, as our fathers would
have called it, the _carnal_) fact will be uppermost in his mind, and
the spiritual meaning thereof more or less out of sight. He will view
his mother’s tears not as expressions of her sorrow, but as solutions of
muriates and carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime; and he will
reflect that they were caused not by his heartlessness, but by cerebral
pressure on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he will “peep and
botanize” on her grave,—not with the poet’s sense of the
sacrilegiousness of such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene
conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate observation among the
scientifically interesting “Flora” of a cemetery.
To this class of mind, thoroughly imbued with the Scientific Spirit,
Disease is the most important of facts and the greatest of evils. Sin,
on the other hand, is a thing on which neither microscope nor telescope
nor spectroscope, nor even stethoscope, can afford instruction. Possibly
the student will think it only a spectral illusion; or he will foresee
that it may be explained by and by scientifically, as a form of disease.
There may be discovered _bacilli_ of Hatred, Covetousness, and Lust,
respectively responsible for Murder, Theft, and Adultery. Already
hypocrisy is a recognized form of Hysteria. The state of opinion in
“Erewhon” may be hopefully looked for in England, when the Scientific
Spirit altogether prevails.
Besides its materializing tendency, a Scientific Education involves
other evils, among which may be counted the fostering of a callous and
irreverent spirit. To this I shall return presently. Of course every
tendency of a pursuit, good or bad, affects the young who are engaged in
it much more than the old, whose characters may have been moulded under
quite opposite influences. We must wait for a generation to see the
Scientific Spirit in its full development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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