[233] Lawrence’s Lectures, p. 9, note. [↑]
[235] Yet Lawrence was created a baronet two months before his death. So much progress had been made in half a century. [↑]
[236] Work cited, pp. 355 sq., 375 sq. The tone is at times expressive of a similar attitude towards historical religion—e.g.: “Human testimony is of so little value ... that it cannot be received with sufficient caution. To doubt is the beginning of wisdom.” Id. p. 269. [↑]
[237] Cp. Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. iii, 505. [↑]
[238] White, as cited, i, 222–23, gives a selection of the language in general use among theologians on the subject. [↑]
[239] The early policy of the Geological Society of London (1807), which professed to seek for facts and to disclaim theories as premature (cp. Whewell, iii, 428; Buckle, iii, 392), was at least as much socially as scientifically prudential. [↑]
[240] See the excellent monograph of W. M. Mackenzie, Hugh Miller: A Critical Study, 1905, ch. vi; and cp. Spencer’s essay on Illogical Geology—Essays, vol. i; and Baden Powell’s Christianity without Judaism, 1857, p. 254 sq. Miller’s friend Dick, the Thurso naturalist, being a freethinker, escaped such error. (Mackenzie, pp. 161–64.) [↑]
[241] Cp. the details given by Whewell, iii, 406–408, 411–13, 506–507, as to early theories of a sound order, all of which came to nothing. Steno, a Dane resident in Italy in the seventeenth century, had reached non-Scriptural and just views on several points. Cp. White, Hist. of the Warfare of Science with Theology, i, 215. Leonardo da Vinci and Frascatorio had reached them still earlier. Above, vol. i, p. 371. [↑]