The Popes and Science

Alfred Russell Wallace has summed up this matter in a well-known chapter on psychic research, which he places among what he calls the failures of A Wonderful Century–the nineteenth. While personally viewing this matter from a very different standpoint to that from which it is viewed by Mr. Wallace, I cannot help but think that the position he occupies is much nearer the truth than the absolute refusal to credit stories of supra-natural or ultra-natural, if not supernatural interferences in human affairs. When Mr. Wallace has an opinion he is likely to express it very forcibly, and he has done so in this case. He does not hesitate to attribute a great many marvelous happenings to practically the same forces as the medieval people formulated for them, though they would disagree utterly in the purposes attributed to these events. Mr. Wallace says:

"The still more extraordinary phenomena–veridical hallucinations, warnings, detailed predictions of future events, phantoms, voices or knockings, visible or audible to numerous individuals, bell-ringing, the playing on musical instruments, stone-throwing and various movements of solid bodies, all without human contact or any discoverable physical cause, still occur among us as they have occurred in all ages. These are now being investigated, and slowly but surely are proved to be realities, although the majority of scientific men and of writers for the press still ignore the cumulative evidence and ridicule the inquirers. These phenomena being comparatively rare, are as yet known to but a limited number of persons; but the evidence for their reality is also very extensive, and it is absolutely certain that during the coming century they too will be accepted as realities by all impartial students and by the majority of educated men and women."

Mr. Wallace has insisted further on the utterly unscientific position of many of those who refuse to look into the evidence for these phenomena, so plainly beyond the power of the ordinary forces of nature as we know them, or of the human intelligences in the body, that are immediately around us. He deprecates, as does Galileo, the method by which this subject has been kept from receiving its due meed of attention. He points out that it is because of intellectual intolerance that this subject has been relegated to the background of scientific attention. He even contends that a great lesson is to be learned from this neglect, and one which will help men to free themselves from that burden of overconservatism which, much more than religion or theology, has impeded the progress of knowledge and the advance of science. He says:

"The great lesson to be learnt from our review of this subject is, distrust of all a priori judgments as to facts; for the whole history of the progress of human knowledge, and especially of that department of knowledge now known as psychical research, renders it certain that whenever the scientific men or popular teachers of any age have denied, on a priori grounds of impossibility or opposition to the 'laws of nature,' the facts observed and recorded by numerous investigators of average honesty and intelligence, these deniers have always been wrong."

"Future ages will, I believe, be astonished at the vast amount of energy and ignorance displayed by so many of the great men of this century in opposing unpalatable truths, and in supposing that a priori arguments, accusations of imposture or insanity, or personal abuse, were the proper means of determining matters of fact and of observation in any department of human knowledge."

If these hard-headed scientists, whose training has been obtained in what physical scientists themselves, at least, are fain to call the rigid school of the logic of facts, and under the severe mental discipline of the inductive method, accept on the evidence afforded them, the manifestations of the spiritual world and its influences in this as true, surely we will not condemn these men of the Middle Ages, who approached the subject in such a different temper, if they came to the same conclusion. We recognize that the modern scientist, with his trained powers of observation and his elaborate facilities for eliminating the adventitious in his experiments, is in a position to judge impartially with regard to such subjects. More than this, his life has usually been spent in making such syntheses of evidence for and against the significance of facts, as should enable him to be a proper judge. If, then, whenever he seriously devotes himself to such an investigation, he comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that spirits do intervene in our affairs, yet we refuse to believe with him, it is hard to know on what principle we shall accept his scientific conclusions. If we cannot bring ourselves to think his conclusions are of equal value in both cases, we place ourselves in a strange dilemma. The medieval scholars were prone, because of the faith to which they had given their whole-hearted adhesion, to see spiritual powers at work in many things. In this they were sometimes sadly mistaken, but not so much mistaken as certain generations of the nineteenth century, who absolutely refused to accept any possibility of spiritual interference in things mundane. Both the extremes are mistakes. It is manifestly more of a mistake, however, to deny spiritual influence entirely (I talk now from the standpoint of the scientist and not the believer), than to accept so much of spiritual interference as the medieval generations permitted themselves to be convinced of.

This whole subject is one that cannot be dismissed as the conclusion of a bit of vapid superficial argumentation. It is one of the great mysteries of life and of the significance of man in the world. The medieval peoples did much harm by accepting the position, that many persons suffering from ordinary nervous and mental diseases as we now know them were really possessed by the devil. The treatment accorded these supposedly possessed (for the moment we lay aside the question as to the possibility of the reality of diabolic possession) was not any worse than has frequently been accorded to sufferers from mental and nervous disease in presumably much more intelligent times, either because of fear of them, or neglect on account of the absence of a sufficient number of keepers, or because of curious theories of medical science. Mankind, it is hoped, is progressing, but the amount of progress from generation to generation is not enough, that any succeeding age should criticise severely the well-intentioned though mistaken efforts of their predecessors to meet, according to the best of their ability, problems that are as deep as those involved in nervous and mental diseases.

APPENDIX I.

OPPOSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

"The truth seeker has had to struggle for his physical life. Each acquisition of truth has been resisted by the full force of the inertia of satisfaction with preconceived ideas. Just as a new thought comes to us with a shock which rouses the resistance of our personal conservatism, so a new idea is met and repelled by the conservatism of society." (Jordan, The Struggle for Realities, in Footsteps of Evolution.)

The main purpose of this book has not been accomplished unless it has been shown that the Church, the Popes, and ecclesiastics generally during the Middle Ages, and especially during the three centuries before the reformation so-called, far from opposing scientific advance or investigation, were constantly in the position of encouraging and fostering science, even if the meaning of that term be limited, as it has come to be in modern times, to the physical or natural sciences. The Popes and the great ecclesiastics were patrons of learning of every kind, and that they not only encouraged, but aided very materially the institutions of learning in which the problems of science with which we are now engaged, were discussed in very much the same way as we discuss them at the present time, is evident from the story of the foundation of the universities. It will be a source of wonder to many people how, with all this as a matter of simple educational history, the traditions with regard to the supposed opposition of the Church and the Popes to science have grown up. This is not so difficult to understand, however, as might be thought, and a few words of explanation will serve to show that there was opposition to science, but that this was not due to religious intolerance in any proper sense of the term.

Those who give the religious element a prominent place in this, forget how much natural opposition to the introduction of new ideas there is in men's minds, quite apart from their religious convictions. Nearly two centuries ago Dean Swift said, in his own bitter frame of mind of course, but still with an approach to truth that has made the expression one of the oft-quoted passages from his works: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign–that all the asses are in confederacy against him."

I suppose the Dean himself would have been the first to insist that some of his colleagues in the ministry eminently deserved the opprobrious substantive epithet he employed. It would be too much to expect that there should not be as many foolish ones among the clergy of the olden times as in any other of the professions. Occasionally one of these foolish clergymen rose up in opposition to science. Whenever he did, especially if he belonged to the class mentioned by Dean Swift, then he surely made his religion the principal reason for his opposition. That gave an added prestige in his mind and in the minds of those who accepted his teachings, to whatever he had to say on the subject. This no more involved the Church itself, nor ecclesiastics generally, in the condemnation of the particular scientific doctrine, than does the frequent opposition of peculiar members of medical societies to real progress in medicine, involve the organization to which they belong in the old-fogyism which would prevent advance.

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 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.

Prof. David Starr Jordan in reviewing briefly the history of the Struggle for Realities in one of the essays in his Foot-notes to Evolution, [Footnote 45] has summed up the genuine significance of this supposed opposition of science and theology in some striking paragraphs. To my mind, he places the whole subject on its proper foundation, and properly disposes of the supposed conflict between religion or theology and science. He says:–

[Footnote 45: N. Y., Appleton, 1902.]

"But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need for all these is part of the actual development of man.

Intolerance and prejudice is, moreover, not confined to religious organizations. The same spirit that burned Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno for the heresies of science, led the atheist "liberal" mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist Lavoisier, with the sneer that "the republic has no need of savants." The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to reject natural selection because it "relieves God of the labor of creation," causes the heterodox Haecekel to condemn Weismann's theories of heredity, not because they are at variance with facts, but because such questions are settled once for all by the great philosophic dictum (his own) "of monism."

This very natural ultra-conservative mood of scientists is well illustrated by a passage from Galileo's life, in which he himself describes in a letter to Kepler, the great mathematician and astronomer of his time, the reception that his new invention, the telescope, met with from distinguished men of science, their colleagues of the moment. The Italian astronomer encountered the well-known tendency of men to reason from what they already know, that certain advances in knowledge are impossible or absurd. The favorite expression is that the thoughts suggested by some new discovery are illogical. Men have always reasoned thus, and apparently they always will. Knowledge that they learn before they are forty constitutes, consciously or unconsciously, for them the possible sum of human knowledge, and they can only think that apparent progress that contradicts their previous convictions must be founded on false premises or faulty observation. We cannot help sympathizing with Galileo, though it must be a consolation for others who are struggling to have ideas of theirs adopted, to read the words addressed to his great contemporary and sympathetic fellow worker by the Italian astronomer.

"What wilt thou say," he writes, "of the first teachers at the University at Padua, who when I offered to them the opportunity, would look neither at the planets nor the moon through the telescope? This sort of men look on philosophy as a book like the AEneid or Odyssey, and believe the truth is to be sought not in the world of nature, but only in comparison of texts. How wouldst thou have laughed, when at Pisa the leading Professor of the University there endeavored, in the presence of the Grand Duke, to tear away the new planets from Heaven with logical arguments, like magical exorcisms!"

This gives the key to the real explanation of the Galileo incident better than would a whole volume of explanation of it. It is now realized that very few of those who have been most ready to quote the example of Galileo's condemnation as an argument for Church intolerance in the matter of science, know anything at all about the details of his case. The bitter intolerance of many men of science of his time, including even that supposed apostle of the experimental method–Bacon–to the Copernican system, is an important but ignored phase of the case of Galileo, as it came before the Roman inquisition. The peculiar position occupied by Galileo caused Prof. Huxley, writing to Prof. St. George Mivart, November 12th, 1885, to say that, after looking into the case of Galileo when he was in Italy, he had arrived at the conclusion "that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it." In our own time, M. Bertrand, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that "the great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was learned without any profound sorrow to Galileo himself; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon as the most serene and enviable in the history of science."

Certain historical incidents in which Church authorities and ecclesiastics assumed an attitude distinctly opposed to true scientific advance can be found. They are, however, ever so much rarer than is thought. Let those who accept unquestioningly the supposed opposition of Church to science, count over for themselves the definite cases of this in history which they know for certain, and they will be surprised, as a rule, on what slight grounds their persuasion in this matter is founded. We have detailed the policy of the Church with regard to education and science. Such incidents of opposition as can be gathered were breaks away from that policy. They were not due so much to faith or theology, though these were often made excuses for them, as to the natural opposition to novelty, so common in man.

With regard to this matter, as with regard to opposition in general to science, President Jordan has once more set forth the realities of the situation so as to make it clear that, even when it was the dogmatic spirit that was behind the refusal to accept certain scientific truths, not only was there the best of intentions in this in all cases, but in nearly all, the results were such as to benefit mankind, and even to help rather than hinder science. He says:

"The desire of dogmatism to control action is in its essence the desire to save men from their own folly. The great historic churches have existed 'for the benefit of the weak and the poor.' By their observances they have stimulated the spirit of devotion. By their commands they have protected men from unwise action. By their condemnations they have saved men from the grasp of vice and crime."

The ultra-conservatism which is the real factor at fault in these cases exists in all men beyond middle life. It is a wise provision of nature very probably to prevent the young and headstrong from running away with the race. We would be plunged into all sorts of curious experimental conditions only for the fact that those beyond middle life act as a brake on the initiative of their juniors. While it does some harm, there is no doubt of its supremely beneficial effects in the long run. For one announced great discovery that proves its actual right to the title, there are at least a hundred that are proclaimed with loud blare of trumpet, yet prove nonentities. This sometimes becomes a very troublesome brake on progress, however. Some three hundred years ago, Harvey said with regard to his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood, that he did not expect any of his contemporaries who was over forty years of age to accept it. His premonition in this matter was fully confirmed by the event. Darwin, I believe, once remarked that he did not think that men of his own age in his own generation would accept his theory, and most of them did not.

The opposition which, as a consequence of this natural conservatism, is so constantly ready to manifest itself, is as human as the envy which, much as we may bewail the fact, accompanies all individual success. A history of this phase of scientific progress is of itself very interesting and of great psychological importance. A short sketch of it will serve the purpose of placing the opposition of churchmen to science in the category where it belongs, and will make this subject appear in its true light of a very natural and universal psychic manifestation, not a religious or supposed theological phenomenon.

As a matter of fact, it is comparatively easy to show that there are many more incidents of opposition to the progress of science on the part of scientists because of their conservatism, than on the part of ecclesiastics because of religion or theology. There has scarcely ever been a really important advance made in science, a really new discovery announced, which has not met with such bitter opposition on the part of the men who were most prominent in the science concerned at the time, as to make things very uncomfortable for the discoverer, and on many occasions this opposition has taken on the character of real persecution. It will be at once said that this is very different from the formal condemnation by organized bodies of truths in science, with all that this implies of ostracization and of discouragement on the part of scientific workers. The history of science is full of stories showing that formal scientific bodies refused to consider seriously what were really great discoveries, or that scientific editors not only rejected papers representing valuable original research, but even did not hesitate to discredit their authors in such a way as to make it extremely difficult for them to pursue their studies in science successfully, and still more to prevent them from securing such positions as would enable them to carry on their scientific investigations under favorable circumstances. In a word, persecution was carried out just as far as possible, and the result was quite as much discouragement as if the opposition were more formal. It is not hard to show, on the other hand, that while formal opposition by Church authorities was very rare, rejection by medical and scientific societies and by the scientific authorities for the moment of new discoveries was so common, as to be almost the rule in the history of progress in science.

This is so different from what is ordinarily supposed to be the calm course of scientific evolution, that it will need a series of illustrative cases to support it. In recent years, however, the cultivation of the history of science has been more ardent than in the past, and the result has been that many more know of this curious anomaly and paradox in scientific history than was the case a few years ago, and it is comparatively easy to obtain the material to demonstrate it. One of the most striking instances is that of Harvey.

Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, at a time and under circumstances that would surely lead us to expect its immediate acceptance and the hailing of him as a great original thinker in science. He first expounded it to his class, very probably in 1616, which will be remembered as the year of Shakespeare's death. The glory of the great Elizabethan era in England was not yet passed. Men's minds had been opened to great advances in every department of thought during the preceding century, by the Renaissance movement and the New Learning in England. Probably no greater group of original thinkers has ever existed than were alive in England during the preceding twenty-five years. Four years after Harvey had sufficiently elaborated his ideas on the circulation to present them to his class, and the very year after he wrote his treatise on the subject, though he dared not publish it as yet, Lord Bacon published his Novum Organum, in which he advocated the use in science of the very principles of induction on which Harvey's great discovery was founded.

What happened is interesting for our purpose. Harvey was so well acquainted with the intolerant temper of men as regards new discoveries, that he hesitated to publish his book on the subject until men had been prepared for it, by his ideas gradually filtering out among the medical profession through the members of his class. He waited nearly fifteen years after his first formal lesson on the subject, before he dared to commit it to print. Shakespeare had made Brutus say to Portia: