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On the Dread and Dislike of Science.

SCIENCE DEMANDS EXACTNESS, AND this demand irritates the vulgar mind. The impatience with which your cook listens to your advice that she should measure and not guess the quantities (advice you can never get her to follow), is but the same movement which rouses your resistance when any one desires to test your opinions by weighing the evidence, or endeavours to show that your traditional beliefs rest on no verifiable observations. Is not he who insists on evidence commonly styled “a bore” by all whose opinions have been adopted quite irrespective of evidence? Is it not pronounced “narrow” to hesitate in accepting wide conclusions without a keen appreciation of their data?

The distaste for accuracy, and the impatience at any restriction of the divine right of judging without evidence, will disappear with the advance of knowledge; and with this advance will also disappear certain mistaken pretensions of scientific men too ready to step beyond their own domain. It is this which causes the distaste of artists, men of letters, and moralists; and their opposition to the spread of scientific teaching. They do not oppose knowledge in the abstract, nor any particular knowledge; what they resist is the idea that the conclusions reached in one department on inquiry are to dictate the conclusions in another. The artist is quite willing to accept the chemist’s methodised experience of chemical facts, but refuses to listen to the chemist theorising about Art. The moralist will accept from the physicist equations of light, and from the anatomist relations of structure; but reserves to himself the right of deciding on a moral question.

One must admit that in the inarticulate resistance of Sentiment and Common Sense against certain applications of scientific doctrines there is often a justification. For example, there are mechanical laws and equations which admirably explain the facts of motion, yet Sentiment is shocked at the attempt to explain Nature on mechanical principles only, and is sustained by Common Sense, which sees other facts besides facts of motion, and sees that Nature is not mechanical only. Again, when the stored-up wealth of sentiments laboriously evolved in civilised life is set aside in favour of some analogy drawn from observed processes in the inorganic world, when the moral impulse to cherish the weak and sickly is condemned because Nature (which is not moral) cherishes the strong and pitilessly destroys the weak, Common Sense protests, and the protest helps to intensify the popular distrust of Science. Yet, in truth, the wiser heads among men of science are equally alive to the mistake of such applications.

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