The Unseen World and Other Essays | Page 4

world wrought out by early
priest-philosophers were in great part made up of such grotesque
notions; and having become variously implicated with ethical opinions
as to the nature and consequences of right and wrong behaviour, they
acquired a kind of sanctity, so that any thinker who in the light of a
wider experience ventured to alter or amend the primitive theory was
likely to be vituperated as an irreligious man or atheist. This sort of
inference has not yet been wholly abandoned, even in civilized

communities. Even to-day books are written about "the conflict
between religion and science," and other books are written with intent
to reconcile the two presumed antagonists. But when we look beneath
the surface of things, we see that in reality there has never been any
conflict between religion and science, nor is any reconciliation called
for where harmony has always existed. The real historical conflict,
which has been thus curiously misnamed, has been the conflict between
the more-crude opinions belonging to the science of an earlier age and
the less-crude opinions belonging to the science of a later age. In the
course of this contest the more-crude opinions have usually been
defended in the name of religion, and the less-crude opinions have
invariably won the victory; but religion itself, which is not concerned
with opinion, but with the aspiration which leads us to strive after a
purer and holier life, has seldom or never been attacked. On the
contrary, the scientific men who have conducted the battle on behalf of
the less-crude opinions have generally been influenced by this religious
aspiration quite as strongly as the apologists of the more-crude opinions,
and so far from religious feeling having been weakened by their
perennial series of victories, it has apparently been growing deeper and
stronger all the time. The religious sense is as yet too feebly developed
in most of us; but certainly in no preceding age have men taken up the
work of life with more earnestness or with more real faith in the unseen
than at the present day, when so much of what was once deemed
all-important knowledge has been consigned to the limbo of
mythology.
The more-crude theories of early times are to be chiefly distinguished
from the less-crude theories of to-day as being largely the products of
random guesswork. Hypothesis, or guesswork, indeed, lies at the
foundation of all scientific knowledge. The riddle of the universe, like
less important riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and
the most brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers.
Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so, in a
somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But the
guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from what it was
in older times. In the first place, we have slowly learned that a guess
must be verified before it can be accepted as a sound theory; and,

secondly, so many truths have been established beyond contravention,
that the latitude for hypothesis is much less than it once was. Nine
tenths of the guesses which might have occurred to a mediaeval
philosopher would now be ruled out as inadmissible, because they
would not harmonize with the knowledge which has been acquired
since the Middle Ages. There is one direction especially in which this
continuous limitation of guesswork by ever-accumulating experience
has manifested itself. From first to last, all our speculative successes
and failures have agreed in teaching us that the most general principles
of action which prevail to-day, and in our own corner of the universe,
have always prevailed throughout as much of the universe as is
accessible to our research. They have taught us that for the deciphering
of the past and the predicting of the future, no hypotheses are
admissible which are not based upon the actual behaviour of things in
the present. Once there was unlimited facility for guessing as to how
the solar system might have come into existence; now the origin of the
sun and planets is adequately explained when we have unfolded all that
is implied in the processes which are still going on in the solar system.
Formerly appeals were made to all manner of violent agencies to
account for the changes which the earth's surface has undergone since
our planet began its independent career; now it is seen that the same
slow working of rain and tide, of wind and wave and frost, of secular
contraction and of earthquake pulse, which is visible to-day, will
account for the whole. It is not long since it was supposed that a species
of animals or plants could be swept away only by some unusual
catastrophe, while for the origination of new species something called
an act of "special creation" was necessary; and as to the nature of