Andrew Dickson White

“ In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old—the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation—has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired. ”

“ It was like the pedal bass of an organ, steadily giving the ground tone of a requiem—the vanity and evanescence of all things earthly. There had I seen, in the midst of their jubilant supporters, Pierce, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Harrison, and, finally, so short a time before, McKinley. It seemed all a dream. In his conversations the new President showed the same qualities that I had before known in him—earnestness, vigor, integrity, fearlessness, and, at times, a sense of humor, blending playfully with his greater qualities. ”

“ Persons who clamor for governmental control of American railways should visit Germany, and above all Russia, to see how such control results. In Germany its defects are evident enough; people are made to travel in carriages which our main lines would not think of using, and with a lack of conveniences which with us would provoke a revolt; but the most amazing thing about this administration in Russia is to see how, after all this vast expenditure, the whole atmosphere of the country seems to paralyze energy. ”

“ First among the distinguished men who, in that century, laid foundations for modern science, was Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great, the most renowned scholar of Germany.
Fettered though he was by the absurd methods of his time, led astray as he was by the scholastic spirit, he had conceived ideas of better methods and aims. His eye pierces the mists of scholasticism; he sees the light, and draws the world toward it. He stands among the great pioneers of modern physical and natural science. ”

“ The whole voting body are equals. Each, too, is free. No King, no Noble, is allowed to trench upon his freedom. So free is each that no will of the majority is binding upon him, except by his own consent. Here is equality indeed! Equality pushed so far that each man is not only the equal of every other—but of all others together;—the equal of the combined nation.
These men are brave, hardy, and, as you have seen, free, equal, and allowed more rights than the citizens of any republic before or since. ”

“ He seemed to anticipate, before long, a collapse in the systems and institutions of Western Europe. To him socialism and anarchism, with all they imply, were but symptoms of a wide-spread political and social disease—indications of an approaching catastrophe destined to end a civilization which, having rejected orthodoxy, had cast aside authority, given the force of law to the whimsies of illiterate majorities, and accepted, as the voice of God, the voice of unthinking mobs, blind to their own interests and utterly incapable of working out their own good. ”

“ Of all occupations, I know of none more satisfactory than that of a university professor who feels that he is in right relations with his students, that they welcome what he has to give them, and that their hearts and minds are developed, day by day, by the work which he most prizes. I may justly say that this pleasure was mine at the University of Michigan and at Cornell University. It was at times hard to satisfy myself; for next to the pleasure of directing younger minds is the satisfaction of fitting one's self to do so. ”

“ The more we study man, the more does it appear that pride is his ruling passion, and that he affects grandeur even in his misery. Mean and perishable creature that he is, he has been able to persuade men that he can not die without disturbing the whole course of Nature and obliging the heavens to put themselves to fresh expense. In order to light his funeral pomp. Foolish and ridiculous vanity! If we had a just idea of the universe, we should soon comprehend that the death or birth of a prince is too insignificant a matter to stir the heavens. ”

“ History is full of interferences which have cost the earth dear. Strangest of all, some of the direst of them have been made by the best of men, actuated by the purest motives, and seeking the noblest results. These interferences, and the struggle against them, make up the warfare of science.
One statement more, to clear the ground. You will not understand me at all to say that religion has done nothing for science. It has done much for it. The work of Christianity, despite the clamps which men have riveted about it, has been mighty indeed. ”

“ May we not, then, hope that the greatest and best men in the Church—the men standing at centres of thought—will insist with power, more and more, that religion be no longer tied to so injurious a policy as that which this warfare reveals; that searchers for truth, whether in theology or natural science, work on as friends, sure that, no matter how much at variance they may at times seem to be, the truths they reach shall finally be fused into each other? The dominant religious conceptions of the world will doubtless be greatly modified by science in the future, as they have been in the past ”

“ A more lovely spirit never abode in mortal frame. No man was ever more generally beloved in a community; none, more lamented at his death. The splendid organ erected as a memorial to him in the great auditorium of the university; the noble monument which his students have placed over his grave; his portrait, which hangs in one of the principal rooms; the society which commemorates his name—all combine to show how deeply he was respected and beloved.
Entwined also with my happiest recollections is Brunnow, professor of astronomy and director of the observatory. ”

“ I might show from the history of Russia how the despotism of the Autocrat has been made necessary to save the empire from a worse foe—from a serf-mastering aristocracy. And I might go further and show how the statesmanship which has emancipated the lower class in Russia has recognized the great truth that the nation is not safe against the aristocracy—that no barrier can stand against them except the enfranchised endowed with rights and lands. ”

“ We stand upon the principle of considering one student the equal of another—the student in science and industry the equal of the student in classics. We stand against any separation which shall serve to perpetuate that old subordination of men in the new education to men in the old.
But it is objected that the new system does not provide for mental discipline. Never was a charge more absurd. Discipline comes by studies that take hold of a man, and of which he takes hold. ”

“ But thus recognizing the normal need of religious ideas, feelings, and observances, I see in the history of these an evolution which has slowly brought our race out of lower forms of religion into higher, and which still continues. Nowhere is this more clearly mirrored than in our own sacred books; nowhere more distinctly seen than in what is going on about us; and one finds in this evolution, just as in the development of our race in other fields, survivals of outworn beliefs and observances which remain as mile-stones to mark human progress. ”

“ More than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the experimental method, Roger Bacon practised it, and the results as now revealed are wonderful. He wrought with power in philosophy and in all sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact. By him, more than by any other man of the middle ages, was the world put on the most fruitful paths of science—the paths which have led to the most precious inventions. ”

“ Still another law is, that when once a group of sacred books has been evolved—even though the group really be a great library of most dissimilar works, ranging in matter from the hundredth Psalm to the Song of Songs, and in manner from the sublimity of Isaiah to the offhand story-telling of Jonah—all come to be thought one inseparable mass of interpenetrating parts; every statement in each fitting exactly and miraculously into each statement in every other; and each and every one, and all together, literally true to fact, and at the same time full of hidden meanings. ”

“ There was Seward, of my own State, whom I had been brought up to revere, and who seemed to me, in the struggle then going on, the incarnation of righteousness; there was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, just recovering from the murderous blows given him by Preston Brooks of South Carolina, —a martyr, as I held, to his devotion to freedom; there was John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, who had been virtually threatened with murder, as a penalty for his opposition to slavery; and there was bluff Ben Wade of Ohio, whose courage strengthened the whole North. ”

“ To-day it is a church-floor which gives way, and a multitude of children are taken from the ruins mangled and dead; to-morrow it is a whole city quarter swept away by fire, because some half-taught architects knew no other way of producing architectural effect than by piling up combustible ornaments on inaccessible roofs.
Nor is that all. Our people are laying out millions on millions in buildings which within thirty years—in the advance of taste and knowledge—will be eye-sores and must come down. A building erected by a true architect will grow more beautiful for hundreds of years. ”

“ By opposing arbitration, you not only put a club into the hands of socialists, anarchists, and all the other anti-social forces, but you alienate the substantial middle class and the great body of religious people in all nations. You have no conception of the depth of feeling on this subject which exists in my own country, to say nothing of others; and if Germany stands in the way, the distrust of her which Americans have felt, and which as minister and ambassador at Berlin I have labored so hard to dispel, will be infinitely increased. ”

“ They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All church services were to cease; the people at large, no matter how faithful, were to be as brute beasts,—not to be legally married,—not to be consoled by the sacraments,—not to be shriven, and virtually not to be buried; other Christian peoples were to be forbidden all dealings with them, under pain of excommunication; their commerce was to be delivered over to the tender mercies of any and every other nation; their merchant ships to be as corsairs; their cargoes, the legitimate prey of all Christendom; and their people, on sea and land, to be held as enemies of the human race. ”

“ I could tell of pathetic devotion and self-sacrifice on his part, not only to the university, but to individual students. No professor ever had a kindlier feeling toward any scholar in need, sickness, or trouble. Those who knew him best loved him most; and, in the hard, early days of the university, he especially made good his title to the gratitude of every Cornellian, not only by his university work, but by his unostentatious devotion to every deserving student. ”

“ And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God—pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should—since they borrow the mask of science—be refuted by true science. ”

“ Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?—that the crops and trees grow downward? that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... But if you inquire from those who defend these marvelous fictions, why all things do not fall into that lower part of the heaven, they reply that such is the nature of things, that heavy bodies are borne toward the middle, like the spokes of a wheel; while light bodies, such as clouds, smoke, and fire, tend from the centre toward the heavens on all sides. ”

“ The fictions, too, of those who have not feared to deduce and confirm from the principles and authority of philosophies the true Christian religion, have the same tendency, though in a different way. These celebrated the wedding of faith and sense, as though it were lawful, with much pomp and solemnity, and soothed the minds of men with a grateful variety of things, but, meanwhile, mingled the divine with the human in ill-matched state. And in mixtures like this of theology with natural philosophy, those things only which are now received in philosophy are included ”

“ These have given to the world various strong types, and especially such as the Great Elector, Frederick II, and William I. Mainly under them and under men trained or selected by them, Germany, from a great confused mass of warriors and thinkers and workers, militant at cross-purposes, wearing themselves out in vain struggles, and preyed upon by malevolent neighbors, has become a great power in arms, in art, in science, in literature; a fortress of high thought; a guardian of civilization; the natural ally of every nation which seeks the better development of humanity. ”

“ He was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking.
He who visits the tomb of Linnaeus to-day, entering the beautiful cathedral of Upsala by its southern porch, sees above it, wrought in stone, the Hebrew legend of creation. In a series of medallions, the Almighty—in human form—accomplishes the work of each creative day. ”

“ Let the warfare of Science, then, be changed. Let it be a warfare in which Religion and Science [Pg 151] shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind; for justice against injustice; for right against wrong; for the living kernel of religion rather than the dead and dried husks of sect and dogma; and the great powers, whose warfare has brought so many sufferings, shall at last join in ministering through earth God's richest blessings. ”

“ A simple, thoughtful account of this evolution of the former glory of Spain, and then of the causes of her decline to her present condition, would be full of suggestions for fruitful thought regarding politics, religion, science, literature, and art. To write such a history was the best of my dreams. Perhaps, had I been sent in 1879 as minister to Madrid instead of to Berlin, I might at least have made an effort to begin it, and, whether successful or not, might have led other men to continue it. It is now too late for me, but I still hope that our country will supply some man to undertake it. ”

“ Let us look into this vast creation—the highest achievement of theology—somewhat more closely.
Its first feature shows a development out of earlier theological ideas. The earth is no longer a flat plain inclosed by four walls and solidly vaulted above, as theologians of previous centuries had believed it, under the inspiration of Cosmas; it is no longer a mere flat disk, with sun, moon, and stars hung up to give it light, as the earlier cathedral sculptors had figured it; it has become a globe at the centre of the universe. ”