TO BE CONTINUED.
DRAPER’S CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE.[54]
The author of this volume became known to the public of New York a little over twenty years ago through a hand-book of chemistry, written at a time when that science was emerging into its present maturity. Almost simultaneously appeared from his pen a treatise on Human Physiology, when it likewise was running a swift race to its splendid proportions of to-day, impelled by the labors of Claude Bernard, Beaumont, and Bichat. Those works were received at the time with much favor by American teachers of both named sciences as being clear and succinct compilations of the labors of European investigators, while containing some original observations of undoubted scientific merit. Thus, the perception of the influence of endosmosis and exosmosis on the functions of respiration and circulation, and the reference of pitch, quality, and intensity of sound to different portions of the anatomical structure of the ear, constitute a valid claim, on Draper’s part, as a contributor to modern physiology. As a chemist, though painstaking and observant, he failed to keep pace with European researches, and so his book has been superseded in our schools and colleges by later and more thorough productions. Indeed, it may be said that his work on physiology likewise is rapidly becoming obsolete, its popularity having ceded place to the excellent treatises of Dalton and Austin Flint, Jr.
Had he in time recognized his exclusive fitness for experimental chemistry and physiology, his name might rank to-day with those of Liebig and Lehmann; but some disturbing idiosyncrasy or malevolent influence inspired him with the belief that he was destined for higher pursuits, and he burned to emulate Gibbon and Buckle. On the heels of the late civil war, accordingly, appeared from his ambitious pen a book with the pretentious title of History of the American Civil War, in which he strove to prove that the agencies which precipitated that sad quarrel dated back a thousand years; that thermal bands having separated the North from the South, the two sections could not agree; that the conflict is not yet over, and will be ended only when both sides recognize the East as the home of science, and make their salam to the rising sun. We speak not in jest; the book, we believe, is still extant, and may be consulted by the curious in such matters. Though the History of the American Civil War did not meet with flattering success, the new apostle of Islamism was not discouraged. No more trustworthy as a historian than Macaulay, he lacked the verve and eloquence of that brilliant essayist, and his bantling fell into an early decline.
But there still was Buckle, in another department of intellectual activity, whom it might be vouchsafed him to outsoar; and so, Dædalus-like, having readjusted his wings by means of a fresh supply of wax, he took a swoop into the Intellectual Development of Europe with precisely the results which befell his classical prototype. Here indeed was a wide field for the display of that peculiar philosophy of his which anathematizes the Pentateuch and the pope, and apotheosizes the locomotive and the loom. Accordingly, we find the Development to be a bitter attack on the church and all ecclesiastical institutions, with alternate rhapsodical praises of material progress and scientific discoveries.
In the view taken by Dr. Draper the Papacy defeated the kindly intents of the mild-mannered Mahomet; but with the death of Pio Nono or some immediate successor the pleasant doctrines of Averroës and Buddha will reassert themselves, and we shall all finally be absorbed in the great mundane soul. As we have said, in alluding to the History of the American Civil War, these are not mere idle words; they carry their black and white attestation in every page of the work referred to.
But we must hasten to the volume under review. It is entitled History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. The title of the book is indeed the fittest key to its purpose. It predicates this conflict on the first page; it assumes it from the start, and, instead of proving its existence, interprets statements and misstatements by the light of that assumption. Of this the reader is made painfully aware from the very outset, and his sense of logic and fair play is constantly shocked by the distortion of very many historical facts and the truthful presentment of a few in support of what is a plain and palpable assumption. The book is therefore a farrago of falsehoods, with an occasional ray of truth, all held together by the slender thread of a spurious philosophy.
In the preface the author promises to be impartial, and scarcely has he proceeded eight short pages in his little volume before a cynical and sneering spirit betrays him into errors which a Catholic Sunday-school child would blush to commit. On page 8 he says: “Immaculate Conceptions and celestial descents were so currently received in those days that whoever had greatly distinguished himself in the affairs of men was thought to be of supernatural lineage.” And a little further on: “The Egyptian disciples of Plato would have looked with anger on those who rejected the legend that Perictione, the mother of that great philosopher, a pure virgin, had suffered an immaculate conception.” This is but a forestalment of the wrath held in store by our author for the dogma proclaimed in 1854, a derisive comparison of it with the gross myths of the superstitious Greeks. And yet how conspicuous does not the allusion render his ignorance of the Catholic doctrine! For evidently the reference to a pure virgin subjected to an immaculate conception through the agency of a God reveals Draper’s belief that the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception consists in the conception of Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary without human intervention. Surely some malign agent had warped his judgment when he assumed to expound Catholic doctrine; had