Science and Morals and Other Essays

by Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

Then there arose another Catholic churchman, Nicolaus Stensen (1631-1686), who, by the way, ended his days as a bishop, who did solve the riddle, giving the answer which we accept to-day as correct, and on whom was conferred by his brethren two hundred years later the title of "The Father of Geology." It is a little difficult to understand how the "unchanging Church" should have welcomed, or at least in no way objected to, Stensen's views when the mere entertainment of them by Fallopius is supposed to have terrified him into silence. But when the story of Fallopius is mistold, as indicated above, it need hardly be said that the story of Stensen is never so much as alluded to.

The real facts of the case are these: Fallopius was one of the most distinguished men of science of his day. Every medical student becomes acquainted with his name because it is attached to two parts of the human body which he first described. He made a mistake about fossils, and that is the plain truth—as we now know, a most absurd mistake, but that is all. As we hinted above, he is very far from being the only scientific man who has made a mistake. Huxley had a very bad fall over Bathybius and was man enough to admit that he was wrong. Curiously enough, what Huxley thought a living thing really was a concretion, just as what Fallopius thought a concretion had been a living thing.

Another extremely curious fact is that another distinguished man of science, who lived three hundred years later than Fallopius and had all the knowledge which had accumulated during that prolific period to assist him, the late Philip Gosse, fell into the same pit as Fallopius. As his son tells us, he wrote a book to prove that when the sudden act of creation took place the world came into existence so constructed as to bear the appearance of a place which had for æons been inhabited by living things, or, as some of his critics unkindly put it, "that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." Gosse had the real answer under his eyes which Fallopius had not, for the riddle was unread in the latter's days. Yet Gosse's really unpardonable mistake was attributed to himself alone, and "Plymouth Brethrenism," which was the sect to which he belonged, was not saddled with it, nor have the Brethren been called obscurantists because of it.

Of course there is a second string to the accusation we are dealing with. If the scientific man did really express new and perhaps startling opinions, they would have been much newer and much more startling had he not held himself in for fear of the Church and said only about half of what he might have said. It is the half instead of the whole loaf of the former accusation. Thus, in its notice of Stensen, the current issue of the Encyclopædia Britannica says: "Cautiously at first, for fear of offending orthodox opinion, but afterwards more boldly, he proclaimed his opinion that these objects (viz. fossils) had once been parts of living animals."

One may feel quite certain that if Stensen had not been a Catholic ecclesiastic this notice would have run—and far more truthfully—"Cautiously at first, until he felt that the facts at his disposal made his position quite secure, and then more boldly, etc. etc."

What in the ordinary man of science is caution, becomes cowardice in the Catholic. We shall find another example of this in the case of Buffon (1707-1788) often cited as that of a man who believed all that Darwin believed and one hundred years before Darwin, and who yet was afraid to say it because of the Church to which he belonged. This mistake is partly due to that lamentable ignorance of Catholic teaching, not to say that lamentable incapacity for clear thinking, on these matters, which afflicts some non-Catholic writers. Let us take an example from an eminently fairly written book, in which, dealing with Buffon, the author says: "I cannot agree with those who think that Buffon was an out-and-out evolutionist, who concealed his opinions for fear of the Church. No doubt he did trim his sails—the palpably insincere Mais non, il est certain par la révélation que tous les animaux ont également participé à la grâce de la création, following hard upon the too bold hypothesis of the origin of all species from a single one, is proof of it." Of course it is nothing of the kind, for, whatever Buffon may have meant, and none but himself could tell us, it is perfectly clear that whether creation was mediate (as under transformism considered from a Christian point of view it would be) or immediate, every created thing would participate in the grace of creation, which is just the point which the writer from whom the quotation has been made has missed.

The same writer furnishes us with the real explanation of Buffon's attitude when he says that Buffon was "too sane and matter-of-fact a thinker to go much beyond his facts, and his evolution doctrine remained always tentative." Buffon, like many another man, from St. Augustine down to his own times, considered the transformist explanation of living nature. He saw that it unified and simplified the conceptions of species and that there were certain facts which seemed strongly to support it. But he does not seem to have thought that they were sufficient to establish it and he puts forward his views in the tentative manner which has just been suggested.

The fact is that those who father the accusations with which we have been dealing either do not know, or scrupulously conceal their knowledge, that what they proclaim to be scientific cowardice is really scientific caution, a thing to be lauded and not to be decried.

Let us turn to apply the considerations with which we have been concerned to the case of Galileo, to which generally misunderstood affair we must very briefly allude, since it is the standby of anti-Catholic controversialists. Monsignor Benson, in connection with the quotation recently cited, proclaimed himself "a violent defender of the Cardinals against Galileo." Perhaps no one will be surprised at his attitude, but those who are not familiar with his Life and Letters will certainly be surprised to learn that Huxley, after examining into the question, "arrived at the conclusion that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it."[28]