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The physicist or chemist is not now required to prove the ethical importance of his ions or atoms; the biologist is not expected to prove the utility of the plants or animals which he dissects. In pre-scientific ages this was not the case.
But when this is clearly understood, it has on the other hand to be as frankly admitted indeed, it is stating the obvious to say that in modern times the idea of the uniformity of nature has obtained such a hold upon the general educated mind as renders any breach of that order far more improbable to us than it could have appeared to a pre-scientific generation.
Curious it is to note how science has returned in this latter day to the views of a pre-scientific era. Professor Reichenbach was only restrained from abolishing the genus Cattleya, and merging all its species into Epidendrum, by regard for the weakness of human nature. Cattleya labiata vera was sent from Brazil to Dr. Lindley by Mr. W. Swainson, and reached Liverpool in 1818.
The need of the pre-scientific age was knowledge and refinement; the need of our age is health and sanity, cool heads and good digestion. And to this end the bitter and drastic remedies from the shore and the mountains are for us. The gospel of the average man, Matthew Arnold thought, was inimical to the ideal of a rare and high excellence.
In the one case, if the Pope had once defined a dogma, it was changeless; in the other, if the Bible had once formulated a pre-scientific cosmology, or used demoniacal possession as an explanation of disease, or personified evil in a devil, all such mental categories were changelessly to be received.
The atmosphere of mystery and miracle and sanctity that our religious training has thrown around our introduction upon this planet and around our relations and destiny science dispels. Our language and many of our ideas and habits of thought date back to pre-scientific times when there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, separated by a gulf.
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