This paradox pursued and
tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity
repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people
come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the
telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to
have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;
or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.
In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientific
inquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There had
begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and
smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously
unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. This
began with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to the
early licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort of
fitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing called
Eugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneers
had not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule of
respectability, they were not required to prove it.
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