DISCARDED THEORIES OF THE PAST.
Prof. George Frederick Wright says, "The history of science is little else than one of discarded theories.... The so-called science of the present day is largely going the way so steadily followed in the past. The things about which true science is certain are very few and could be contained in a short chapter of a small book." (The Advance, May 12, 1902.)
It is sometimes charged to the church that it has held theories which the discoveries of science have shown to be untrue. But it must be borne in mind that these false theories were just as firmly held by the scientists of the day as by the church.
Dr. Andrew White has written two great volumes on the warfare between science and theology. He might write many and larger volumes on the wars between the theories of science. Every one of these discarded theories, and they are numbered by thousands, has been the center of terrific conflicts.
Galileo's discovery of the satellites of Jupiter was opposed by his fellow astronomers, who even refused to look at them through his telescope. Dr. J. A. Zahm quotes Cardinal Wiseman as saying that the French Institute in 1860 could count more than eighty theories opposed to Scripture, not one of which has stood still or deserves to be recorded. At a meeting of the British Association, Sir William Thomson announced that he believed life had come to this globe by a meteor. His theory lived less than a year. Mr. Huxley said that the origin of life was a sheet of gelatinous living matter which covered the bottom of the ocean. This theory had even a shorter life. Among the most recent reversals of this kind is that of a universally held theory, namely, that coral reefs are built up by the coral insects in their desire to keep near the surface as the ocean's bottom sinks. Prof. A. Agassiz has just demolished this theory.
Scholars were unanimous a short time ago that Troy was a myth. But Dr. Schliemann's great discoveries have overthrown that "consensus of scholarship." Prof. Harnack, one of the greatest of critics in his great work, The Chronology of the Christian Scriptures, admits that science, meaning Higher Criticism, has made many mistakes and has much to repent of. Joseph Cook said, "Within the memory of man yet comparatively young, the mythical theory of Strauss has had its rise, its fall, its burial."
The thirty thousand citizens of St. Pierre on Martinique, trusting in the assurances of the scientists, remained in their fated city and the next day were overwhelmed in the most awful calamity of modern times.
We may consider in this connection the dissatisfaction of some of the greatest minds of evolutionary circles with the results of their own theory.
Mr. Herbert Spencer is thus quoted, writing in his eighty-third year: "The intellectual man, who occupies the same tenement with me, tells me that I am but a piece of animated clay equipped with a nerve system and in some mysterious way connected with the big dynamo called the world; but that very soon now the circuit will be cut and I will fall into unconsciousness and nothingness. Yes I am sad, unutterbly sad, and I wish in my heart I had never heard of the intellectual man with his science, philosophy and logic." (Facts and Comments.)
Prof. Frederic Harrison, the agnostic, thus writes: "The philosophy of evolution and demonstration promised but it did not perform. It raised hopes, but it led to disappointment. It claimed to explain the world and to direct man, but it left a great blank. That blank was the field of religion, of morality, of the sanctions of deity. It left the mystery of the future as mysterious as ever and yet as imperative as ever. Whatever philosophy of nature it offered, it gave no adequate philosophy of Man. It was busy with the physiology of Humanity and propounded inconceivable and repulsive guesses about the origin of Humanity." (North American Review, December, 1900, p. 825.)
From the opposite side of the field, President Woodrow Wilson writes: "This is the dis-service scientific study has done for us; it has given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy, scientific anarchism in the field of politics. It has made the legislator confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God cannot." (Forum, December, 1896.)