The Warfare of Science

The new Academy entered into scientific investigations with energy; Borelli in mathematics, Redi in natural history, and many others, pushed on the boundaries of knowledge. Heat, light, magnetism, electricity, projectiles, digestion, the incompressibility of water, were studied by the right method and with results that enriched the world.

The Academy was a fortress of science, and siege was soon laid to it. The votaries of scholastic learning denounced it as irreligious. Quarrels were fomented. Leopold was bribed with a cardinal's hat and drawn away to Rome; and, after ten years of beleaguering, the fortress fell: Borelli was left a beggar; Oliva killed himself in despair. 105

Still later, just before the great discoveries by Stahl, we find his predecessor Becher opposed with the following syllogism: "King Solomon, according to the Scriptures, possessed the united wisdom of heaven and earth. But King Solomon sent his vessels to Ophir to seek gold, and he levied taxes upon his subjects. Now, if Solomon had known anything about alchemy, he would not have done this; therefore Solomon did not know anything about alchemy (or chemistry in the form which then existed); therefore alchemy (or chemistry) has no reality or truth." And we find that Becher is absolutely turned away from his labors, and obliged to devote himself to proving that Solomon used more money than he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his subjects, and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge of chemical methods and the philosopher's stone as the result of them. 106

And, in our time, Joseph de Maistre, uttering his hatred of physical sciences, declaring that man has paid too dearly for them, asserting that they must be subjected to theology, likening them to fire—good when confined, but fearful when scattered about—this brilliant thinker has been the centre of a great opposing camp, an army of good men who cannot relinquish the idea that the Bible is a text-book of science.

ANATOMY AND MEDICINE

I pass, now, to fields of more immediate importance to us—to anatomy and medicine.

It might be supposed that the votaries of sciences like these would be suffered to escape attack; unfortunately, they have had to stand in the thickest of the battle.

The Church, even in its earliest centuries, seems to have developed a distrust of them. Tertullian, in his "Treatise upon the Soul," stigmatizes the surgeon Herophilus as a "butcher," and evidently on account of his skill in his profession rather than on account of his want of it. St. Augustine, in his great treatise on the City of God, which remains to this day one of the treasures of the Church, speaks with some bitterness of "medical men who are called anatomists," and says that "with a cruel zeal for science they have dissected the bodies of the dead, and sometimes of sick persons, who have died under their knives, and have inhumanly pried into the secrets of the human body to learn the nature of disease and its exact seat, and how it might be cured!" 107

But it was not until the mixture of theology and science had begun to ferment, in the thirteenth century, and the ecclesiastical power had been aroused in behalf of this sacred mixture, that the feeling against medical science broke into open war. About the beginning of that century Pope Innocent III. forbade surgical operations by priests, deacons, or subdeacons. Pope Honorius went still further, and forbade medicine to be practised by archdeacons, priests, or deacons; in 1243 the Dominican authorities banished books on medicine from their monasteries; somewhat later, Pope Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege. 108

Toward the close of that great religious century came a battle which serves to show the spirit of the time.

The great physician and chemist of the day was Arnold de Villa Nova. Although he has been overrated by some modern historians as a votary of the experimental method, and under-rated by others as a votary of alchemy, the sober judgment of the most thoughtful has acknowledged him as one of the most useful forerunners of modern masters in medical and chemical science.

The missile usual in such cases was hurled at him. He was charged with sorcery and dealings with the devil. The Archbishop of Tarragona first excommunicated him and drove him from Spain; next he was driven from Paris, and took refuge at Montpellier; thence, too, he was driven, finally, every place in France was closed against him, and he became an outcast. 109

Such seemed the fate of men in that field who gained even a glimmer of new scientific truth. Even men like Cardan, and Paracelsus, and Porta, who yielded much to popular superstitions, were at once set upon if they ventured upon any other than the path which the Church thought sound—the insufficient path of Aristotelian investigation.

We have seen that the weapons used against the astronomers were mainly the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." We have also seen that the missiles used against the chemists and physicians were the epithets "sorcerer" and "leaguer with the devil," and we have picked up on various battle-fields another effective weapon, the epithet "Mohammedan."

On the heads of the anatomists and physicians were concentrated all these missiles. The charge of atheism ripened into a proverb: "Ubi sunt tres medici, ibi sunt duo athei." Magic seemed so common a charge that many of the physicians seemed to believe it themselves. Mohammedanism and Averroism became almost synonymous with medicine, and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark at Christ." 110

Not to weary you with the details of earlier struggles, I will select a great benefactor of mankind and champion of scientific truth at the period of the revival of learning and the Reformation—Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race.

The old methods were soon exhausted by his early fervor, and he sought to advance science by truly scientific means—by patient investigation and by careful recording of results.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he braved the most terrible dangers. Before his time the dissection of the human subject was thought akin to sacrilege. Occasionally an anatomist, like Mundinus, had given some little display with such a subject; but, for the purposes of investigation, such dissection was forbidden. 111 As we have already seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege.

Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear. Braving ecclesiastical censure and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure the material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses; in this search he risked alike the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid, modern foundations—on careful examination and observation of the human body. This was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent but mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas: so, in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen.

The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies—the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or making mechanical Greek verses at Eton instead of studying the handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations instead of Lessing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for "sound learning." The idea always is that these studies are safe.

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new. Its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he foresaw must come, Vesalius prefaced the work by a dedication to the Emperor Charles V. In this dedicatory preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediæval text-books; he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the ancient master.

The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the manner of their time, their first missiles were epithets; and, the almost infinite magazine of these having been exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons—weapons theologic.

At first the theologic weapons failed. A conference of divines having been asked to decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a decision in the negative. The reason is simple: Charles V. had made Vesalius his physician, and could not spare him. But, on the accession of Philip II. of Spain, the whole scene changed. That most bitter of bigots must of course detest the great innovator.

A new weapon was now forged. Vesalius was charged with dissecting living men, 112 and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II. allow, Vesalius became a wanderer. On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to this world.

And yet not lost. In this century he again stands on earth; the painter Hamann has again given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil, we look once more into Vesalius's cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labors; the corpse of the plague-stricken, over which he bends, ceases to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas which strengthen us for the good fight in this age. 113

He was hunted to death by men who conscientiously supposed he was injuring religion. His poor, blind foes destroyed one of religion's greatest apostles. What was his influence on religion? He substituted for repetition, by rote, of worn-out theories of dead men, conscientious and reverent searching into the works of the living God; he substituted for representations of the human structure—pitiful and unreal—truthful representations, revealing the Creator's power and goodness in every line. 114

I hasten now to the most singular struggle and victory of medical science between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Early in the last century, Boyer presented Inoculation as a preventive of small-pox, in France; thoughtful physicians in England, led by Lady Montagu and Maitland, followed his example.

Theology took fright at once on both sides of the Channel. The French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly condemned the practice. English theologians were most loudly represented by the Rev. Edward Massy, who, in 1722, preached a sermon in which he declared that Job's distemper was probably confluent small-pox, and that he had been doubtless inoculated by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin, and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation." This sermon was entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation." Not less absurd was the sermon of the Rev. Mr. Delafaye, entitled "Inoculation an Indefensible Practice." Thirty years later the struggle was still going on. It is a pleasure to note one great churchman, Maddox, Bishop of Worcester, giving battle on the side of right reason; but as late as 1753 we have the Rector of Canterbury denouncing inoculation from his pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren following his example. Among the most common weapons hurled by churchmen at the supporters of inoculation, during all this long war, were charges of sorcery and atheism. 115

Nor did Jenner's blessed discovery of vaccination escape opposition on similar grounds. In 1798 an anti-vaccine society was formed by clergymen and physicians, calling on the people of England to suppress vaccination as "bidding defiance to Heaven itself—even to the will of God," and declaring that "the law of God prohibits the practice." In 1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered against it in a sermon before the University of Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against Jenner; but Plumptre in England, Waterhouse in America, and a host of other good men and true, press forward to Jenner's side, and at last science, humanity, and right reason, gain the victory. 116

But I pass to one typical conflict in our days. In 1847 James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician of eminence, advocated the use of anæsthetics in obstetrical cases.

Immediately a storm arose. From pulpit after pulpit such a use of chloroform was denounced as impious. It was declared contrary to Holy Writ, and texts were cited abundantly. The ordinary declaration was, that to use chloroform was "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman." 117

Simpson wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought into use; but the battle seemed about to be lost, when he seized a new weapon. "My opponents forget," said he, "the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis. That is the record of the first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam."

This was a stunning blow; but it did not entirely kill the opposition. They had strength left to maintain that "the deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain into the world—in the state of innocence." 118 But now a new champion intervened—Thomas Chalmers. With a few pungent arguments he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest battle of science against suffering was won. 119

But was not the victory won also for religion? Go to yonder monument, in Boston, to one of the discoverers of anæsthesia. Read this inscription from our sacred volume: "This also cometh from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working."

GEOLOGY

I now ask you to look at another part of the great warfare, and I select it because it shows more clearly than any other how Protestant nations, and in our own time, have suffered themselves to be led into the same errors that have wrought injury to religion and science in other times. We will look very briefly at the battle-fields of Geology.

From the first lispings of this science there was war. The prevailing doctrine of the Church was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth;" that "all things were made at the beginning of the world;" and that to say that stones and fossils have been made since "the beginning," is contrary to Scripture. The theological substitutes for scientific explanations ripened into such as these: that the fossils are "sports of Nature," or "creations of plastic force," or "results of a seminal air acting upon rocks," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating various beings. But, while some latitude was allowed among these theologico-scientific explanations, it was held essential to believe that they were placed in all the strata, on one of the creation-days, by the hand of the Almighty; and that this was done for some mysterious purpose of his own, probably for the trial of human faith.

In the sixteenth century Fracastoro and Palissy broached the true idea, but produced little effect. Near the beginning of the seventeenth century De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon revived it; straight-way the theologic faculty of Paris protested against the doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished the authors from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public resort. 120 At the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffon made another attempt to state simple and fundamental geological truths. The theological faculty of the Sorbonne immediately dragged him from his high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. It required a hundred and fifty years for science to carry the day fairly against this single preposterous theory. The champion who dealt it the deadly blow was Scilla, and his weapons were facts revealed by the fossils of Calabria.

But the advocates of tampering with scientific reasoning now retired to a new position. It was strong, for it was apparently based on Scripture, though, as the whole world now knows, an utterly false interpretation of Scripture. The new position was, that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.

In vain had it been shown, by such devoted Christians as Bernard Palissy, that this theory was utterly untenable; in vain did good men protest against the injury sure to result to religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded: the doctrine that fossils were the remains of animals drowned at the flood continued to be upheld by the great majority as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture. 121

To sustain this "Scriptural view," so called, efforts were put forth absolutely herculean, both by Catholics and Protestants. Mazurier declared certain fossil remains of a mammoth, discovered in France, to be bones of giants mentioned in Scripture. Father Torrubia did the same thing in Spain. Increase Mather sent similar remains, discovered in America, to England, with a similar statement. Scheuchzer made parade of the bones of a great lizard discovered in Germany, as the homo diluvii testis, the fossil man, proving the reality of the Deluge. 122

In the midst of this appears an episode very comical but very instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet the exigencies of theology may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.

About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too, had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews. He feared that these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge. All his wisdom and wit, therefore, were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were 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 that sundry fossil bones found between Paris and Étampes were parts of a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology, fights desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of his time. 123

But far more widespread and disastrous was the effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.

No supposition was too violent to support a theory which was considered vital to the Bible. Sometimes it was claimed that the tail of a comet had produced the Deluge. Sometimes, by a prosaic rendering of the expression regarding the breaking up of "the fountains of the great deep," a theory was started that the earth contained a great cistern, from which the waters came and to which they retired. By taking sacred poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, Thomas Burnet, in his "Sacred Theory of the Earth," Whiston, in his "Theory of the Deluge," and others like them, built up systems which bear to real geology much the same relation that the "Christian Topography" of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoölogical, astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any great extent of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did Bishop Clayton declare, that the Deluge could not have taken place save in that district where Noah lived before the flood; in vain was it shown that, even if there had been a universal deluge, the fossils were not produced by it: the only answers were the citation of the text, "And all the high mountains which were under the whole heaven were covered," and denunciations of infidelity. In England, France, and Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation. 124 It took a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth as revealed in Nature—such men as Buffon, Linnæus, Whitehurst, and Daubenton—to push their works under these mighty fabrics of error, and, by statements which could not be resisted, to explode them.

Strange as it may at first seem, the war on geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant countries than in Catholic; the older Church had learned, by her earlier wretched mistakes, what dangers to her claim of infallibility lay in meddling with a growing science; in Italy, then entirely under papal control, little open opposition was made; and, of all countries, England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology at first, and the most active negotiators in patching up a truce on a basis of sham science afterward. 125

You have noted already that there are, generally, two sorts of attack on a new science. First, there is the attack by pitting against science some great doctrine in theology. You saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmin and others insisted that the doctrine of the earth revolving about the sun is contrary to the doctrine of the incarnation. So now, against geology, it was urged that the scientific doctrine that the fossils represented animals which died before Adam, was contrary to the doctrine of Adam's fall, and that "death entered the world by sin."

Then, there is the attack by literal interpretation of texts, based upon the idea that the Bible is a compendium of history or a text-book of natural science, which serves a better purpose, generally, in rousing prejudices.

Toward the close of the last century, in England, the opponents of geology on Biblical grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our sacred volume within the rules of an historical compend, they showed the terrible dangers arising from the revelations of geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years required by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament. Nor was this panic confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and atheism, and are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty Creator of the universe from his office." The poet Cowper, one of the mildest of men, was also roused by these dangers, and in his most elaborate poem wrote:

"Some drill and boreThe solid earth, and from the strata thereExtract a register, by which we learnThat he who made it, and revealed its dateTo Moses, was mistaken in its age!"

And difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many of us the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full play, and filling the civilized world with their roar.

About thirty years ago, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry Cole, and others, were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at such Christian divines as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare, and Pye Smith, and such religious scholars as Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of the volume of God." 126

Their favorite weapon was the charge that these men were "attacking the truth of God," forgetting that they were simply opposing the mistaken interpretations of Messrs. Brown, Cole, and others, like them, inadequately informed.

They declared geology "not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a dark art," as "dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden province," as "infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of the testimony of revelation." 127