The Practical Dangers arising from erroneous Scientific Method.—1. It diverts invaluable intellectual activity into methods of comparatively futile investigation. These investigations lead very widely to the exercise of fraud and cruelty upon the lower animals, and tend to reckless experiment on the poor. They waste much time and spread the contagion of intellectual error amongst the students of all our medical schools, where the false practices of experimentation are increasingly carried on. They also pervert the moral sense of the great army of assistants, caretakers, porters, nurses, and others connected with our medical institutions, who become aware of the cruel practices which so largely accompany this method of research.
2. This perversion of medical activity misleads our Parliamentary representatives, who are bewildered by pseudo-science authoritatively announcing itself as Truth, and permits a rapid increase of officialism to crush opposition and force the dicta of superficial ‘science’ upon the protesting conscience of intelligent people. It also misleads the community by fallacious articles in popular magazines, in which facts, theories, statistics, and assertions, often incorrect, are given with an imposing air of science, in relation to which the ordinary reader is quite unable to discriminate the true from the false.
3. The diversion of medical activity from the true path of Preventive Medicine not only hinders the progress of sanitation, but is producing an increasing revolt of common-sense and popular feeling against what are erroneously supposed to be the necessary methods of medicine and the practice of dispensary and hospital. This growing feeling in the community increases the dread with which the poor generally regard the hospital, and it also seriously diminishes the pecuniary support which the well-to-do would otherwise gladly extend to their sick and suffering fellow-creatures.
Conclusion.—In considering the foregoing record of facts it is seen to be a fundamental error, not only in a Hygienic Congress, but in all medical thought and practice, to look only at the body, and not consider those spiritual facts which precede, animate, and succeed the flesh. It is also certain that in the application of hygiene to daily life we may as well pour water into a sieve as hope to enforce permanently practical hygienic measures without enlisting the goodwill of the people in their observance.
As the solution of the two great problems of hygiene—viz., ‘What are the laws and conditions of healthy growth?’ and ‘How can these conditions be secured?’ rests upon principles of spiritual truth, those principles are of fundamental importance in directing human intelligence into right lines of investigation. Being compelled to use the imperfect symbolism of language, we speak of mind and matter, of spiritualism and materialism, as if they were separate or contradictory entities. But this is a limitation in the expression of thought to be recognised and carefully guarded against in thought itself. There can be no real contradiction between Religion and Science; they are only varying manifestations in human thought of Truth, which is essentially one. Our effort must be to unite these manifestations in thought, and thus gain the only safe guidance possible to us for practical action.
The great fundamental principle of our human constitution is incarnation—i.e., spirit shaping form—the Universal manifesting itself in the phenomenal. This principle is the foundation of sanitary science. It forms the basis of the Moral Law which must be the guide of science.
When this principle is understood and applied, it enlarges the intellect and enlightens the conscience. It transforms the narrow, self-centred or arrogant individual into the humble inquirer and sharer of the larger Diviner life.
This universalization of the individual resides essentially in the Will of man, and is the foundation of conscience—conscience which, gradually enlarged by the growing intellect, is the great guide of the human race in its struggle upwards.