SCIENCE

ZETETIC COSMOGONY:
OR
Conclusive Evidence
THAT THE WORLD IS NOT A
ROTATING—REVOLVING—GLOBE,
BUT
A STATIONARY PLANE CIRCLE.
By Thomas Winship
1899

 start here

(Post 40/47)

SCIENCE.

"Lux" of the 13th January, 1894, has the following:

"What a lovely thing the word 'science' is! There was an old lady who, in times of trouble and anxiety, always found comfort and peace in 'that blessed word, Mesopotamia'. But that aged person is not in it with the old women who find a solace in that blessed word 'science'. The latest thing in 'science' is the 'Interstellar Medium'. Space is not void, we are to believe as commanded by 'science', but it is filled with a kind of stuff called ether. It conveys lights from the stars at, say, the rate of 186,300 miles per second. Light comes in waves. The waves have a mean value of 50,000 to the inch. This light comes 60,000,000,000,000,000 waves in one second of time. Some stars, according to Herschel, take 300,000 years to send their light to our earth! Go on, work it out!! When found, make a note of it, and then say 'science' doesn't want about 1,000 times more faith than Christianity, if you can!"

In "Paul Petoff," by F. Marion Crawford, on page 117, it is stated:

"We talk more nonsense about science than would fill many volumes: because, though we devote so much time to the pursuit of knowledge, nevertheless the amount of knowledge actually acquired, beyond all possibility of contradiction, is ludicrously small as compared with the energy expended in the pursuit of it, and the noise made over its attainment. Science lays many eggs, but few are hatched. Science boasts much, but accomplishes little; is vainglorious, puffed up, and uncharitable; desires to be considered the root of all civilization, and the seed of all good, whereas it is the heart that civilises, and never the head."

"Sigma," in the "English Mechanic" for 5th October, 1894, supplements the above as follows:

"We have any quantity of hypotheses thrust upon us as discoveries, which are merely false knowledge that later science will have to unlearn. As a matter of fact, the fashionable notions that are paraded as 'science' stand only because their advocates shut their eyes to realities, make assertions with little or no fact to start from, ignore the facts which do not suit them, refuse to meet objections, and ignore any really scientific (that is provable) explanations which do not agree with the specialistic facts."

"Science" is a very inclusive term, as the foregoing extracts show. It is the cloak under which thousands of humbugs flourish and grow great, "science," however, sometimes exposes "science," as the following from "Modern Science and Modern Thought," page 43, shows:

"In this state of things the moon is supposed to have been thrown off from the earth . . . . Now these conclusions may be true or not as regards phases of the earth's life prior to the Silurian period, from which downwards GEOLOGY SHOWS UNMISTAKABLY THAT NOTHING OF THE SORT, OR IN THE LEAST DEGREE APPROACHING IT, HAS OCCURRED."

When Geology mocks at Astronomy, we may leave the two combatants to fight it out, for they are both fables.

The "English Mechanic" of 4th January, 1889, says:

"The whole of astronomical science so far as the stellar universe is concerned is founded upon a false basis. This arises from the fact that the construction of the heavens in respect to the apparent arrangements of the stars in space is always erroneous, and yet necessarily all astronomy is founded upon this suppositious situation of the stars."

Commenting on "Scientific Dogmatism," the "Daily News" of 5th December, 1893, says:     

"Mr. Tyndall resigned in 1887 the Professorship at the Royal Institution which he had held for more than thirty years . . . . . He never had any doubt about anything, from Home Rule to spontaneous generation, from the composition of dust to the origin of things . . . But while Professor Tyndall, the brilliant lecturer, the luminous expositor, the intrepid climber, the pugnacious controversialist, the genial and amiable companion, was in many respects an interesting personage, no part of his character would repay study so well as the scientific dogmatism in which it was all steeped. Dr. Arnold protested half a century ago in his entertaining, if not very practical, notes on Thucydides, against what, as a philological student, he discerned to be a tendency of the times. 'It is not to be endured, he said, that scepticism should run at once into dogmatism, and that we should be required to doubt with as little discrimination as we were formerly called upon to believe.' Dr. Arnold was of course referring directly and immediately to the tampering of commentators with the text of the Greek historian. But the symptom which he observed has spread into other spheres, and for the old tyranny of the Church there has been substituted the despotism of the laboratory. The 'delight of dealing with certainties' described by an accomplished man of letters, who made an hasty plunge into the 'Principia', is a high form of mental enjoyment. But it is rather a dangerous guide through the maze of conflicting probabilities, from which even the sacred College of Science has not yet succeeded in delivering the human race .... Mr. Balfour wrote a book which is not nearly so well known as it ought to be. The 'Defence of Philosophic Doubt' is dry and unattractive in form. But it is acute and ingenious in substance. It would be a more agreeable work if it were written in literary English. It would be a more candid one if it mentioned the name of David Hume. It is, notwithstanding these drawbacks, a valuable antidote to the pretensions of modern science. In it Mr. Balfour, one of the few living Englishmen with a real aptitude for philosophy, turns against the exaggerated claims of science the argument formerly employed with so much vigour against the exaggerated claims of theology. 'It is useless,' he says in effect, 'to tell me that your conclusions are true because they are universally accepted. What is the ignorant impression of the unthinking multitude really worth?' .... Mr. Balfour is fond of paradox, and he may press his theory too far. But at least he deserves credit for pointing out that the infallibility of science rests on no surer foundation than any other form of orthodox opinion. The greatest names in scientific history cannot be cited to support the doctrine that a knowledge of physics, however accurate and extensive, entitles its possessor to lay down the law on final causes and the origin of things. In his famous address at Belfast nearly twenty years ago, Professor Tyndall declared that matter contained the power and potency of every form of life. If this phrase was more than empty rhetoric it implied that Professor Tyndall knew how the world came into existence, and how life began. Mr. Darwin, the greatest man of science since Newton, if not since Aristotle, put forward no such assumption. In humble and dignified language he explained that his marvellous generalisations with reference to the origin of species and the decent of man began, as they ended, with a living creature. He traced man to the marine ascidian. The marine ascidian he did not pretend to trace."

~ ~ ~

Origin of Species.

CHAPTER VI, DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY.

 Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication.

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility."