Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/47

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in the next age is received with enthusiastic applause.” As we travel in retrospect along the stepping-stones from myth to science, from credulity to logicality, we find rather little disproof and very much outgrowth.[1] It is because we have a more appropriate, that is, a truer way of regarding a certain cluster of phenomena, that we discard the old way; and this truer conception, reached partly by new fact, partly by new argument, partly by new insight, partly by new applications of method, is the logical legacy which the successive “heirs of all the ages”—each in turn “in the foremost ranks of time”—bequeath to their descendants.

The word-learning of the scholastics is reflected in their explanation of the existence of fossils by recourse to a “stone-making force,” or a “lapidific juice,” or a “seminal air,” or a “tumultuous movement of terrestrial exhalations”; the theologizing proclivities of the upholders of scriptural literalism appear in their accounting for fossils as “sports of nature,” as models made by the Creator before he had decided upon the most suitable forms for the animals to assume, or as snares hidden by the Almighty to tempt the unorthodox. Voltaire argued that “fossil fishes were the remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travelers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land,” and one Beringer indited ponderous tomes to prove that they were “stones of a peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of nature for his own pleasure.” Beringer’s work deserves a prominent place in the museum of credulity; for it is related

  1. What Dr. Holmes observes of the homeopathic extravagances is characteristically true of many another error. “Were all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to he unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in practice, this slippery delusion would slide thru their fingers without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.” “Many an error of thought and learning has fallen before such a gradual growth of thoughtful and learned opposition. But such things as the quadrature of the circle, etc., are never put down. And why? Because thought can influence thought, but thought cannot influence self-conceit; learning can annihilate learning, but learning cannot annihilate ignorance. A sword may cut thru an iron bar, and the severed ends will not unite; let it go thru the air, and the yielding substance is whole again in a moment” (De Morgan).