What has become of those anatomic-morphologic links between man and beast, the pithecanthropus erectus, the man dug out at Neandertal, Spy, Schipka, La Naulette, and Krapina, and shown with great confidence to the world? What has become of the prehistoric man, said to belong to the glacial period of Europe, and to have ranked far below the present man? J. Kohlmann writes: “I wish to state that I thoroughly adhere to the theory of evolution, but my own experience has led me to the result that man has not changed his racial characteristics since the glacial period. He appears on the soil of Europe physically complete, and there is no ape-man to be found” (apud Ranke, Ibid. 480). Prof. Branco, director of the Palæontological Institute of Berlin, says: “Palæontology tells us nothing about the missing link. This science knows of no ancestors of man” (at the 5th international Zoological Congress, 1901, Wasmann, Die mod. Biolog. 3, p. 488). And the palæontologist Zittel says: “The missing link between man and ape, though a postulate of the theory of evolution, has not been found”(Ranke, l. c. 504). E. Grosse concludes his studies on evolution with the significant words: “I began this book with the intention of writing a history of the evolution of the family, and I finish it convinced that at present the writing of that history is impossible for me or for anybody else” (Die Formen der Familie, 1896, Vorwort). Ranke is perfectly right in saying that “it behoves the dignity of science to confess that it knows nothing of the origin of man” (Thuermer V, 1902, I. Heft).
A century ago or so, ridicule was heaped in the name of science on the description in the Bible of the last day: “The stars shall fall,” “and the powers of heaven shall be moved,” “the elements shall be [pg 117]melted with heat, and the earth shall be burnt up” (Matt. xxiv. 29 seq.; Luke xxi. 25 seq.; Mark xiii. 24 seq.; 2 Pet. iii. 10). Then the assertion that stones could fall from the skies caused a smile, but now science has come to the general knowledge that this is not only possible, but perhaps really will be the end of all things, if once our earth on its journey through unknown spaces of the universe should collide with a comet or get into a cosmic cloud of large meteors. (Cf. the graphic description in K. Braun, Ueber Kosmogonie, 3d ed., 1905, p. 381 seq.)
An example of another kind: It is not so long since Protestant, liberal Bible-criticism and its history of early Christian literature, in the endeavour to remove everything supernatural from the beginning of Christianity, regarded the New Testament and the oldest Christian documents as unreliable testimony, even forgeries, and for this reason placed the date of their origin as late as possible. But now they have to retrace their steps.
A. Harnack writes: “There was a period—the general public is still living in it—when the New Testament and the oldest Christian literature were thought to be but a tissue of lies and forgeries. This time has passed. For science it was an episode in which much was learned of which much must be forgotten. The result of subsequent research over-reaches in a ‘reactionary’ effect what might be termed the central position of modern criticism. The oldest literature of the Church is in the main and in most details true and reliable, that is, from the literary and historical point of view.... I am not afraid to use the word ‘retrogressive’—for we should call a spade a spade—the criticism of the sources of the earliest Christianity is beyond doubt moving retrogressively towards tradition” (Chronologie der Alt-Christ. Literatur I, 1897, VIII). In a more recent work the same savant writes: “During the years from 30 to 70 all originated in Palestine, or, better, in Jerusalem, what later on was developed. This knowledge is steadily gaining and replacing the former ‘critical’ opinion that the fundamental development had extended over a period of about a hundred years”(Lukas der Arzt, 1906, Vorwort). This retrogression is continued still farther in his later work, “Neue Untersuchungen zur Apostolgesch. u. zur Abfassungszeit der synopt. Evang., 1911,” in which Harnack draws very near to the Catholic view regarding the date of writing of the Acts of the Apostles, as also regarding St. Paul's attitude towards Judaism and Christian-Judaism, and departs from the modern Protestant view (cf. pp. 28-47, 79 seq., 86, 93 seq.). “Protestant authorities on church-history,” he says elsewhere, “no longer take offence at the proposition that the main elements of Catholicism go back to the Apostolic era, and not only peripherically” (Theol. Literar. Zeitung, 1905, 52).
In a speech, much commented on, which he made at his university January 12, 1907, Prof. Harnack, discussing the religious question in Germany, called attention to the fact that there has been quite a marked return to the Catholic standpoint: “From the study of Church history we find that we all have become different from what our fathers were, whether we may like it or not. Study has shown that we are separated from our fathers by a long course of development; that we do not understand their ideas and words at all, much less do we use them in the sense they used them.” He then draws out the comparison [pg 118]more particularly: “Flacius and the older Protestants denied that Peter had ever been in Rome at all. Now we know that his having been there is a fact well evidenced in history.” The motto of the older Protestants was that the Scriptures are the sole source of revelation. “But now, and for a long time past, Protestant savants have realized that the Scriptures could not be separated from tradition, and that the collecting of the New Testament Scriptures was a part of tradition.” “Protestants of the sixteenth century taught justification by faith alone, without works. In the absence of confessional controversy, no evangelical Christian would now find fault with the teaching which declares only such faith to be of any worth which shows itself by the love of God and of the neighbour” (Protestantismus u. Katholizismus in Deutschland, Preussisch. Jahrbücher 127. Bd., 1907, 301 seq.).
Many similar instances of science confessing Erravimus in regard to the Christian or Catholic position could be cited. They are an admonition to be modest, not to overrate the value of a scientific proposition, and not, with supreme confidence and infallibility, to brand it as an offence against the human intellect to let one's self be guided by the principles of faith.
Moreover, it has often happened that science emphatically and sneeringly rejected propositions, and called them false and absurd, which to-day are considered elementary.
Newton, in 1687, had correctly explained the revolution of the moon around the earth, and of the planets around the sun, as the co-operation of gravitation and inertia, and thence concluded also the elliptic form of the orbits of planets previously discovered by Kepler. Leibnitz rejected this theory, Huygens called it absurd, and the Academy of Paris as late as 1730 still favoured the theory of revolution of Descartes; it was only about the year 1740 that it was generally accepted. Huygens, himself, had formed in 1690 his theory about light-waves. For a long time it was misunderstood. Only in 1800, or somewhat later, it received its merited acknowledgment, but noted physicists like Biot and Brewster rejected it still for some time and held to the theory of emission. “Even in the intellectual world the law of inertia holds good” (Rosenberger, Gesch. der Physik, III, 1887, 139).
The great discoverer Galvani complained of being attacked from two opposite sides, by the scientists and by the ignorant: “Both make fun of me. They call me the dancing master of frogs. Yet I know I have discovered one of the greatest forces of nature.”
When Benjamin Franklin explained the lightning-rod to the Royal Academy of Sciences, he was ridiculed as a dreamer. The same happened to Young with his theory of the undulation of light. “The Edinburgh Review” proposed to the public to put Thomas Grey in a strait-jacket when he presented his plan for railroads. Sir Humphry Davy laughed at the idea of illuminating the city of London by gas. The French Academy of Sciences actually sneered at the physicist Arago when he proposed a resolution to merely open a discussion of the idea of an electric telegraph (Wallace, Die wissensch. Ansicht des Uebernatuerlichen, 102 seq.).