History as literature, and other essays

by Theodore Roosevelt

“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L. Pogson.

“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.

“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.

I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest type, both scientific and religious.

Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest. There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”

Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:

“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company. There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent to make, and finally the mob of the sans-culottes rejoicing in the overthrow of law, order, and decency.”

This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny—physical, intellectual, spiritual—which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s to be published with the approval—as in his case—of the orthodox thought of the church to which the writer belongs.

The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the doctrine of evolution, although—quite rightly, and in true scientific spirit, by the way—he insists most strongly upon the fact that we are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He, of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically condemned.

But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the—surely very slight—strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which, in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers—such masters not only of philosophy but of material science—as William James, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught “a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.