In our arrival at the age of these seers, we feel the play of a freer, purer air; a lull in the miasmatic currents that bring intolerance on their wings. The tolerance that approaches is due to no surrender of its main position by dogmatic theology, but to that larger perception of the variety and complexity of life, ignorance of, or wilful blindness to, which is the secret of the survival of rigid opinion. The demonstration of the earth’s roundness; the discovery of America; the growing conception of inter-relation between the lowest and the highest life-forms; the slow but sure acceptance of the Copernican theory; and, above all, the idea of a Cosmos, an unbroken order, to which every advance in knowledge contributes, justified and fostered the free play of the intellect. Foreign as yet, however, to the minds of widest breadth, was the conception of the inclusion of Man himself in the universal order. Duality—Nature overruled by supernature—was the unaltered note; the supernature as part of Nature a thing undreamed of. Nor could it be otherwise while the belief in diabolical agencies still held the field, sending wretched victims to the stake on the evidence of conscientious witnesses, and with the concurrence of humane judges. Animism, the root of all personification, whether of good or evil, had lost none of its essential character, and but little of its vigour.
“I flatter myself,” says Hume, in the opening words of the essay upon Miracles, in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “that I have discovered an argument of a like nature (he is referring to Archbishop Tillotson’s argument on Transubstantiation) which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kind of superstitious delusion, and, consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.” Hume certainly did not overrate the force of the blow which he dealt at supernaturalism, one of a series of attacks which, in France and Britain, carried the war into the camp of the enemy, and changed its tactics from aggressive to defensive. But none the less is it true that the “superstitious delusions” against which he planted his logical artillery were killed neither by argument nor by evidence. Delusion and error do not perish by controversial warfare. They perish under the slow and silent operation of changes to which they are unable to adapt themselves. The atmosphere is altered: the organism can neither respond nor respire; therefore, it dies. Thus, save where lurks the ignorance which is its breath of life, has wholly perished belief in witchcraft; thus, too, is slowly perishing belief in miracles, and, with this, belief in the miraculous events, the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets of Christianity are based, and in which lies so largely the secret of its long hostility to knowledge.
PART III.
THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE.
A. D. 1600 ONWARDS.
“Though science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again.”—Huxley, Prologue to Collected Essays, vol. v.
The exercise of a more tolerant spirit, to which reference has been made, had its limits. It is true that Dr. South, a famous divine, denounced the Royal Society (founded 1645) as an irreligious body; although a Dr. Wallis, one of the first members, especially declared that “matters of theology” were “precluded”: the business being “to discourse and consider of philosophical inquiries and such as related thereunto; as Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Staticks, Magneticks, Chymicks, and Natural Experiments; with the state of these studies, and their cultivation at home and abroad.” Regardless of South and such as agreed with him, Torricelli worked at hydrodynamics, and discovered the principle of the barometer; Boyle inquired into the law of the compressibility of gases; Malpighi examined minute life-forms and the structure of organs under the microscope; Ray and Willughby classified plants and animals; Newton theorized on the nature of light; and Roemer measured its speed; Halley estimated the sun’s distance, predicted the return of comets, and observed the transits of Venus and Mercury; Hunter dissected specimens, and laid the foundations of the science of comparative anatomy; and many another illustrious worker contributed to the world’s stock of knowledge “without let or hindrance,” for in all this “matters of theology were precluded.”
But the old spirit of resistance was aroused when, after a long lapse of time, inquiry was revived in a branch of science which, it will be noticed, has no distinct place in the subjects dealt with by the Royal Society at the start. That science was Geology; a science destined, in its ultimate scope, to prove a far more powerful dissolvent of dogma than any of its compeers.