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قراءة كتاب Science and Morals and Other Essays
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SCIENCE AND MORALS
SCIENCE AND MORALS
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE
M.A., M.D., Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., K.S.G.
OF ST. MICHAEL'S COLLEGE, TORONTO, ONT.
LONDON
BURNS & OATES, LTD
28 ORCHARD STREET, W
1919
TO
JOHN ROBERT and MARY O'CONNELL
A TOKEN OF SINCERE FRIENDSHIP
Listarkin
September 1919
THESE Essays have all in one form or another appeared elsewhere; and I have to thank the Editors of the Dublin Review, Catholic World, America, and Studies respectively for kind permission to reproduce them. Some of them appear as they were published, others have been almost rewritten.
B. C. A. W.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
|---|---|---|
| I. | Science and Morals | 1 |
| § 1. The Gospel of Science | 1 | |
| § 2. Science as a Rule of Life | 14 | |
| II. | Theophobia and Nemesis | 26 |
| § 1. Theophobia: its Cause | 26 | |
| § 2. Theophobia: its Nemesis | 44 | |
| III. | Within and Without the System | 56 |
| IV. | Science in "Bondage" | 74 |
| V. | Science and the War | 106 |
| VI. | Heredity and "Arrangement" | 125 |
| VII. | "Special Creation" | 142 |
| VIII. | Catholic Writers and Spontaneous Generation | 152 |
| IX. | A Theory of Life | 160 |
| Index of Names | 175 | |
| General Index | 177 | |
SCIENCE AND MORALS
SCIENCE AND MORALS
§ 1. THE GOSPEL OF SCIENCE
In the days before the war the Annual Address delivered by the President of the British Association was wont to excite at least a mild interest in the breasts of the reading public. It was a kind of Encyclical from the reigning pontiff of science, and since that potentate changed every year there was some uncertainty as to his subject and its treatment, and there was this further piquant attraction, wanting in other and better-known Encyclicals, that the address of one year might not merely contradict but might even exhibit a lofty contempt for that or for those which had immediately preceded it.
During the three years immediately preceding the war we had excellent examples of all these things. In the first of them we were treated to a somewhat belated utterance in opposition to Vitalism. Its arguments were mostly based upon what even to the tyro in chemistry seemed to be rather shaky foundations. Such indeed they proved to be, since the deductions drawn from the behaviour of colloids and from Leduc's pretty toys were promptly disclaimed by leading chemists in the course of the few days after the delivery of the address.
Further, the President for the year 1914 in his address (Melbourne, p. 18)[1] told us that the problem of the origin of life, which, let us remind ourselves, in the 1912 address was on the point of solution, "still stands outside the range of scientific investigation," and that when the spontaneous formation of formaldehyde is talked of as a first step in that direction he is reminded of nothing so much as of Harry Lauder, in the character of a schoolboy, "pulling his treasures from his pocket—'That's a wassher—for makkin motor-cars!'" Nineteen hundred and twelve pinned its faith