EVOLUTION—ITS MEANING
is the feeling of being at home in God’s World. Whatever our conception of God the attitude remains. God’s World is to us no alien land. It is our home and it has been the home of our ancestors for aeons immeasurable, so that our life is fairly adjusted to it in all its details. And the more thoroughly and widely we become acquainted with its make-up the less sympathy we can feel with those who would “remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.”
Science is verified knowledge. Little by little, through processes of induction, we establish a basis of fact which, when stated in terms of human experience, becomes truth. No human truth, however, is absolutely without error. Yet though all truth must remain in some degree incomplete, given time it gains both momentum and accuracy. With such progress, error and false deduction fall off on every side, usually without any possibility of revival.
The history of science is marked by constant collision between tradition and discovery. In the majority of men, ideas are controlled by custom or by desire; hence arises the process, almost inescapable, called by Dr. Conklin “thinking wishly.” Our observations and experiments may be quite objective; our thought, perhaps, is never altogether so. Anthropomorphic tendencies spread through our philosophy and through all the minor affairs of life and form a constant obstruction to the spread of knowledge.
Yet despite all this, and despite all forms of human credulity, science has forced the civilized world to acknowledge a good many things not hoped for and often not desired. We now understand, for instance, that the stars are not pinholes in the celestial floor, through which rain drips upon us; that the sunset is not lighted by the red flames of hell into which the sun daily sinks; that planets are not carried back and forth by angels; that light and heat both come from the sun; that the earth is not the immovable
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