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      Published by Good Press, 2019

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Table of Contents

       SCIENCE AND MORALS

       SCIENCE AND MORALS

       § 1. THE GOSPEL OF SCIENCE

       § 2. SCIENCE AS A RULE OF LIFE

       II. THEOPHOBIA AND NEMESIS

       § 1. THEOPHOBIA: ITS CAUSE

       § 2. THEOPHOBIA: ITS NEMESIS

       III. WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE SYSTEM

       IV. SCIENCE IN "BONDAGE"

       V. SCIENCE AND THE WAR

       VI. HEREDITY AND "ARRANGEMENT"

       VII. "SPECIAL CREATION"

       VIII. CATHOLIC WRITERS AND SPONTANEOUS GENERATION

       IX. A THEORY OF LIFE [36]

       INDEX OF NAMES

       GENERAL INDEX

SCIENCE AND MORALS

       Table of Contents

SCIENCE AND MORALS

       Table of Contents

§ 1. THE GOSPEL OF SCIENCE

       Table of Contents

      In the days before the war the Annual Address delivered by the President of the British Association was wont to excite at least a mild interest in the breasts of the reading public. It was a kind of Encyclical from the reigning pontiff of science, and since that potentate changed every year there was some uncertainty as to his subject and its treatment, and there was this further piquant attraction, wanting in other and better-known Encyclicals, that the address of one year might not merely contradict but might even exhibit a lofty contempt for that or for those which had immediately preceded it.

      During the three years immediately preceding the war we had excellent examples of all these things. In the first of them we were treated to a somewhat belated utterance in opposition to Vitalism. Its arguments were mostly based upon what even to the tyro in chemistry seemed to be rather shaky foundations. Such indeed they proved to be, since the deductions drawn from the behaviour of colloids and from Leduc's pretty toys were promptly disclaimed by leading chemists in the course of the few days after the delivery of the address.

      Further, the President for the year 1914 in his address (Melbourne, p. 18)[1] told us that the problem of the origin of life, which, let us remind ourselves, in the 1912 address was on the point of solution, "still stands outside the range of scientific investigation," and that when the spontaneous formation of formaldehyde is talked of as a first step in that direction he is reminded of nothing so much as of Harry Lauder, in the character of a schoolboy, "pulling his treasures from his pocket—'That's a wassher—for makkin motor-cars!'" Nineteen hundred and twelve pinned its faith on matter and nothing else; Nineteen hundred and thirteen assured us that "occurrences now regarded as occult can be examined and reduced to order by the methods of science carefully and persistently applied."[2] Further, the examination of those facts had convinced the deliverer of the address "that memory and affection are not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond bodily death." Nineteen hundred and fourteen proclaimed telepathy a "harmless toy," which, with necromancy, has taken the place of "eschatology and the inculcation of a ferocious moral code." And yet it is on telepathy, if we are to believe the daily papers, that Sir Oliver Lodge largely relies for his proofs. Here, at any rate, is a pleasing diversity of opinion which fully bears out what was said at the beginning of this paper. It is, however, with the third address, or rather pair of addresses, that we are concerned; for the meeting of 1914, not only was the first to be held at the Antipodes, but also the first to be honoured with two addresses—one in Melbourne, the other in Sydney.

      Their deliverer is a very distinguished and a very independent man of Science. It was he who insisted, at a time when the domination of a very rigid form of Darwinism was much stronger than it is to-day, that the picture of Nature as seen by us is a Discontinuous picture, though Discontinuity does not exist in the environment. And it was he who asked whether the Discontinuity might not be in the living thing itself, and prefixed to the monumental work[3] in which he discussed this question the significant text from the Bible: "All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." Nearer to our own times, he was one of a small body of men of science who almost synchronously disinterred the forgotten works of Abbot Mendel, and proclaimed them to the world, as containing discoveries of the first value. He was thus always something of a "Herald of Revolt," and maintains that character in these addresses. "We go to Darwin for his incomparable collection of facts. We would fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of exposition, but to us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. We read his scheme of evolution as we would those of Lucretius or Lamarck, delighting in their simplicity and their courage" (M., p. 9). "Naturally, we turn aside from generalities. It is no time to discuss the origin of the Mollusca or of Dicotyledons, while we are not even sure how it came to pass that Primula obconica has in twenty-five years produced its abundant new forms almost under our eyes" (ib., ib.). And so on. To take one other example: there is nothing which was more insisted upon by Darwinians than the fact that all the various races of domestic fowl known to us came from Gallus bankiva, the jungle-fowl of India; in fact I think I have seen that form enthroned amongst its supposed descendants in more than one museum. "So we are taught; but try to reconstruct the steps in their evolution and you realise your

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