as they may be, will acknowledge that there is a wisdom beyond their own, which the humblest Christian may possess, the wisdom of simple belief and love.
We are less familiar as yet with the invectives of scientific men against what has long passed for learning and philosophy in the world. Different sections of the scientific school bring the accusation in different language. Yet the same feeling, the same strong and contemptuous conviction, pervades the whole school. What they reject and assail is, in two words, knowledge based on authority, and knowledge wanting an inductive basis.
That the utterances of great and famous philosophers are to be taken as truth; that in science, as in the civil law, the responsa prudentum have a binding force; has been accepted in some departments of knowledge up to the present day. Long after the authority of Aristotle had been shaken, new thinkers were allowed to occupy a similar place in some branches, and from Descartes to Hegel a sort of monarchical rule has prevailed in metaphysics. The scientific school tolerates nothing of this kind. Not that it refuses to reverence superior minds, not perhaps that it is altogether incapable of yielding to the temptation of trusting a particular authority for a while too much, or following a temporary fashion. But as a general rule it rejects as a superstition the notion that the most superior mind is at all infallible; it dissents without scruple from those whom it reverences most; and on the other hand the most eminent members of it encourage this freedom, are well pleased to be contradicted, and avoid assuming an oracular style as a mark of charlatanry. Such a coup d'état in philosophy as that of Auguste Comte is resolutely resisted, and the autocracy of Hegel comes to an end, not by the accession of a new monarch, but rather by the proclamation of a republic in German philosophy.
By the introduction of this new principle a large proportion of the doctrine current in the world is branded with the mark of spuriousness. In theology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, history, politics, the principle of authority has reigned hitherto with more or less exclusiveness. The repudiation of it is a revolution in those departments of knowledge. It converts whole libraries into waste-paper, silences controversies that have raged for ages, reduces to worthlessness the whole store of learning hived up in many capacious memories. It throws discredit at the same time upon the very name of erudition; not as such, for there is a kind of erudition much appreciated by the scientific school; but because erudition, as hitherto understood, has commonly gone along with, has in a great degree grown out of, an excessive reverence for the opinions of famous men. All that part of erudition, in particular, which is to knowledge what relic-worship is to religion, the laborious collection of minute facts that concern illustrious men, begins to seem
