[1] In the rise of Christian Science, against which I have no special grudge, although I have already taken exceptions to its claims, there is a special case, special because affecting a single, relatively small class, of the popular hospitality to contradiction. Thus, the Christian Scientists would reduce all reality to mind, but at the same time they busily deny reality to a large group of mind facts, namely and notably, the ideas of disease. Recently, it is true, according to the newspapers, their healers have been told to "decline to doctor infectious or contagious diseases," yet not because such diseases have any reality, but because the illusion of them is so real as to make the "Christian" treatment of them both imprudent and impractical. Philosophies and religions of illusion are certainly weird, uncanny things!
THE VIEW OF SCIENCE: ITS RISE AND CHARACTER.
With science we usually associate accuracy and consistency, and at first thought we are not likely to expect that the work and standpoint of science can contain anything substantial enough for the doubter to base his claim upon; but second thought is our first duty at this time, and second thought always changes the view, and in this particular instance it will show science in important respects to be quite as vulnerable as the unreflective consciousness of practical life, for science also is honeycombed with contradiction and paradox.
More than once scientists themselves have turned sceptical about their work and its results. The cry of bankruptcy in science, not merely as a charge, but also as a confession, has been heard in the land not infrequently; now perhaps low and uncertain, but again clear and strong. And why not? Why should the scientist escape the questioning of other men? Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend humanity? Surely, when all is said, the scientific consciousness is not formally different from the ordinary consciousness. The same eye is looking at [p.057] the same world, only through microscopes and telescopes. The same mind is measuring the same environment, only with carefully devised instruments of precision instead of arm's lengths or stone's throws and rules of thumb. In a word, science is merely the ordinary consciousness highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically conscious method and clearest possible perception. Indeed, perhaps without myself clearly knowing all my reasons, I am constrained to say that science is related to ordinary perception very much as the inventor's consciousness of his wonderful flying-machine to the simple sensations of a bird. The mechanics of flying, so elaborately present to the former, are nevertheless also present in the latter, while with both we have the same eye or the same mind looking and the same world seen. The boasted methods and ideals of the one are but the only half-waking instincts of the other, and whatsoever is essential to either belongs also to the other. But, to mark the great difference between them, the inventor has the disposition to treat flying abstractly--that is, as if a thing by itself, as if for its own sake; and he goes even farther, making abstraction of the mere explanation and mechanical expression of flying; while the bird simply flies, and, if I may hope to be understood, all things else, the sun and the wind, the trees, and all living things, and you and I who follow his course are flying with him.