Adams had no more to do with the correctness of the science
than the gar-pike or the Port Jackson shark, for its correctness
in no way concerned him, and only impertinence could lead him to
dispute or discuss the principles of any science; but the history
of the mind concerned the historian alone, and the historian had
no vital concern in anything else, for he found no change to
record in the body. In thought the Schools, like the Church,
raised ignorance to a faith and degraded dogma to heresy.
Evolution survived like the trilobites without evolving, and yet
the evolutionists held the whole field, and had even plucked up
courage to rebel against the Cossack ukase of Lord Kelvin
forbidding them to ask more than twenty million years for their
experiments. No doubt the geologists had always submitted sadly
to this last and utmost violence inflicted on them by the Pontiff
of Physical Religion in the effort to force unification of the
universe; they had protested with mild conviction that they could
not state the geological record in terms of time; they had
murmured Ignoramus under their breath; but they had never dared
to assert the Ignorabimus that lay on the tips of their tongues.
Yet the admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming
change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by
attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other
times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual,
electrolytic -- who knew what? -- defying science, if not denying
known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church,
and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again.
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