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"They are all deceitful, having lost every record of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories and have no recollection of the truth." He hazards a few etymologies, which, as usual among Roman writers, are quite unscientific.
Imagination leaps the chasms, minimizes the difficulties, passes from the possible to the certain, from the "may have been" to the "must have been" and to "it was so," and, fascinated with the completeness of its scheme, commences to denounce and revile as ignorant and unscientific all that would, calmly appeal to evidence, and confess ignorance, or at least a suspended judgment, in any stage where the evidence is negative or incomplete.
Incomprehensible as it may seem that Spencer, holding such views, should be regarded as an Anarchist, and that too by men who ought to have understood him as well as the Anarchists, yet this has been the case. We should like, therefore, briefly to note the wide differences which separate the purely sociological standpoint of Spencer from the unscientific standpoint of the Anarchists.
He intended that before the evening was over the Irishman should have imparted to him some of his skill with the hands. He did not know that for a man absolutely unscientific with his fists there is nothing so fatal as to take a boxing lesson on the eve of battle. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Fortunately, however, the labours of many competent to judge have placed within the reach of the unscientific but careful student, the means of knowing what the conclusions of Science really are, as far as they affect the questions we have to consider.
The first affirm that that which ought to be IS; the second, that that which ought to be IS NOT. Consequently, while the first are defenders of religion, authority, and the other principles contemporary with, and conservative of, property, although their criticism, based solely on reason, deals frequent blows at their own prejudices, the second reject authority and faith, and appeal exclusively to science, although a certain religiosity, utterly illiberal, and an unscientific disdain for facts, are always the most obvious characteristics of their doctrines.
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
It is not irrelevant to notice that this story is introduced to the attention of the reader, 'who will, perhaps, see farther into it than others, in that chapter on toleration in which it is suggested that considering the fantastic, and unscientific, and unsettled character of the human beliefs and opinions, and that even 'the Fathers' have suggested in their speculations on the nature of human life, that what men believed themselves to be, in their dreams, they really became, it is after all setting a man's conjectures at a very high price to cause a man to be roasted alive on them; the chapter in which it is intimated that considering the natural human liability to error, a little more room for correction of blunders, a little larger chance of arriving at the common truth, a little more chance for growth and advancement in learning, would, perhaps, on the whole, be likely to conduce to the human welfare, instead of sealing up the human advancement for ever, with axe and cord and stake and rack, within the limits of doctrines which may have been, perhaps, the very wisest, the most learned, of which the world was capable, at the time when their form was determined.
Through investigation and reason, science to-day considers itself in a position to pronounce them totally unscientific; and the rule of reason concludes that they were presumably founded on the imagination, credulity and ignorance which prevailed in an unenlightened period.
Any thing, therefore, is to them a sufficient definition of a term, which will serve as a correct index to what the term denotes; though not embracing the whole, and sometimes, perhaps, not even any part, of what it connotes. This gives rise to two sorts of imperfect, or unscientific definition; Essential but incomplete Definitions, and Accidental Definitions, or Descriptions.
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