the causes which have brought them into existence."[40] This is the main
root of the trouble. If science be the knowledge of the facts perceived
by the senses, and scientific evidence, evidence addressed to the
senses, then the senses are the only sources of knowledge. Any
conviction resting on any other ground than the testimony of the senses,
must be faith. Darwin admits that the contrivances in nature may be
accounted for by assuming that they are due to design on the part of
God. But, he says, that would not be science. Haeckel says that to
science matter is eternal. If any man chooses to say, it was created,
well and good; but that is a matter of faith, and faith is imagination.
Ulrici quotes a distinguished German physiologist who believes in
vital, as distinguished from physical forces; but he holds to
spontaneous generation, not, as he admits, because it has been proved,
but because the admission of any higher power than nature is
unscientific.[41]
It is inevitable that minds addicted to scientific investigation should
receive a strong bias to undervalue any other kind of evidence except
that of the senses, _i. e._, scientific evidence. We have seen that
those who give themselves up to this tendency come to deny God, to deny
mind, to deny even self. It is true that the great majority of men,
scientific as well as others, are so much under the control of the laws
of their nature, that they cannot go to this extreme. The tendency,
however, of a mind addicted to the consideration of one kind of
evidence, to become more or less insensible to other kinds of proof, is
undeniable. Thus even Agassiz, as a zooelogist and simply on zooelogical
grounds, assumed that there were several zones between the Ganges and
the Atlantic Ocean, each having its own flora and fauna, and inhabited
by races of men, the same in kind, but of different origins. When told
by the comparative philologists that this was impossible, because the
languages spoken through that wide region, demonstrated that its
inhabitants must have had a common descent, he could only answer that as
ducks quack everywhere, he could not see why men should not everywhere
speak the same language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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