In 1799 Laplace worked it out again; but
it was a long time before it was accepted. And now we go back to Kant
and Laplace for our demonstration.
Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published in 1859. But it was
attacked by scientists as well as theologians on every hand. Huxley
even looked at it with a good deal of hesitancy before he accepted it.
To-day, however, everybody goes back to the "Origin of Species," and
finds the whole thing there, demonstration and all.
Lyell published a book on the antiquity of man in 1863. It was twenty-
five years before all the scientific men of the world were ready to
give up the idea that man had been on the earth more than six or eight
thousand years.
So we find that it is not theologians only; it is scientists, too, that
find it difficult to accept new ideas. I know scientific men among my
personal friends who are simply incapable of being hospitable to an
idea that would compel them to reconstruct a theory that they have
already accepted. Why are not all educated men Unitarians? Why do not
scientific men accept demonstrated truth when it is first demonstrated
as truth? It puts them to too much trouble. It touches their pride.
They do not like to feel that they have thrown away half their lives
following an hypothesis that is not capable of being substantiated.
Then, in the third place, there are men, and educated men as the world
goes, who deliberately decline to study new truth; and they are men in
the scientific field and in the religious field.
Pages:
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293