Infelice eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 654 pages of information about Infelice.

Infelice eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 654 pages of information about Infelice.

“Provided you could reply upon the moderation of the teachers; for unless wisely and temperately inculcated, this system would soon make utter shipwreck of the noblest interests of humanity.  For many years I have watched attentively the doublings of this fox, and while I yield to no man in solemn fidelity to truth, I want to be sure that what I accept as such, is not merely old error under new garbs, only a change of disguising terms.  Science has its fetich, as well has superstition, and abstruse terminology does not always conceal its stolid gross proportions.  The complete overthrow and annihilation of the belief in a personal, governing, prayer-answering God, is the end and aim of the gathering cohorts of science, and the sooner masking technicalities are thrown aside the better for all parties.  Scientific research and analysis, nobly brave, patient, tireless, and worthy of all honour and gratitude, have manipulated, decomposed, and then integrated the universal clay, but despite microscope and telescope, chemical analysis, and vivisection, they can go no further than the whirring of the Potter’s wheel, and the Potter is nowhere revealed.  The moulding Creative hand and the plastic clay are still as distinct, as when the gauntlet was first flung down by proud ambitious constructive science.  Animal and vegetable organisms have been analyzed, and ’the idea of adaptation developed into the conception that life itself, “is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external co-existence and sequences."’ Now to the masses who are pardonably curious concerning this problem of existence, is this result perfectly satisfactory?  The ’Physical basis of life’ has been driven into a corner, hunted down, seized at last, and over the heads of an eager, panting, chasing generation, is triumphantly dangled this ‘Scientific Fox’ brush, ’Nucleated Protoplasm, the structural unit!’ But how or whence sprang the laws of ‘Protein’?  Hatred of certain phrases is more bitter than of the principles they express, and because theologians cling to the words God,’ Creative Acts, Divine Wisdom, Providential Adaptation, scientists declare them the dicta of ignorance, superstition, and tradition, and demand that we shall bow before their superior wisdom, and substitute such terms as ‘Biogenesis,’ ‘Abiogenesis,’ and ‘Xenogenesis.’  But where is the economy of credulity?  The problems are only crowded by a subtle veil of learned or scientific verbiage, and their solution does not induce the expenditure of faith.  The change of names is not worth the strife, for the Clay and the Potter are still distinct, and He who created cosmic laws cannot reasonably or satisfactorily be confounded with, or merged in His own statutes.  Creeds, theories, systems are not valuable because they are religious and traditional, or because they are scientific or philosophical, but solely on account of their truth.  So, Douglass, I am not sure that your essentially scientific method will teach Regina any more real wisdom in ethics, or in AEtiolgy, than her great-grandmother possessed.”

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Infelice from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.