Theodore Roosevelt

“ No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. ”

“ Surely we must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the soul. ”

“ The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile itself—and astronomy as well—to a universe only six thousand years old. ”

“ Genuine harm has been done by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which, in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers—such masters not only of philosophy but of material science—as William James, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. ”

“ Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to "science overthrowing religion" are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. ”

“ Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny—physical, intellectual, spiritual—which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong ”

“ It is this growth which so sharply distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus's voyage, from all preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased man's power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and command over things spiritual no less than material. ”

“ He sees that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. ”

“ But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators here and in other lands. ”

“ But the professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority, and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: "The only setting for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind." ”

“ This conquest could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. ”

“ M. Bergson, in his "Creative Evolution," has brought out with convincing clearness the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily narrow limitations—limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never to be made really broad by mere intellect—when it comes to grasping any part of the great principle of life. ”

“ It is just as idle for a man to try to explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp materialism. ”

“ Whenever any so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory, instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his theory, answered: "So much the worse for the facts." ”

“ Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one's opponents and to justify one's own case are two very different things. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. ”

“ As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of all else that modern science has ever taught ”

“ This attitude is as profoundly repellent as that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are ”

“ The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. ”

“ The very blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mysteries. ”

“ He could go even further than he does in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight's view of religion is that it is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically right ”

“ Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason be humble—just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble. ”

“ Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet; the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution ”

“ We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions, without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. ”

“ For, as these writers point out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body, in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived of as something always dynamic and never static, as a "stream of consciousness," a "becoming." ”

“ THERE is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. ”

“ Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he calls it, "an essay in constructive biology," who in his theory of group development has opened a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence can not understand it. ”

“ A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T. Ely was tried for economic heresy: "In all lines of investigation the investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth wherever they may lead." ”

“ Their astounding success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside the realm of the body. ”

“ Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when he summed up a notably fine address in defence—as he truly says, friendly defence—of his own church by enunciating the plea for "true peace founded on justice," worked out in accordance with what he properly calls one of the "dearest blessings that heaven can give, the spirit that springs from religious liberty." ”

“ All of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson's pregnant saying that "pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing." ”

“ Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion ”

“ In the world of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. ”

“ Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. ”