Instinct taught it that the universe
in its thought must be in danger when its reflection lost itself
in space. The danger was all the greater because men of science
covered it with "larger synthesis," and poets called the undevout
astronomer mad. Society knew better. Yet the telescope held it
rigidly standing on its head; the microscope revealed a universe
that defied the senses; gunpowder killed whole races that lagged
behind; the compass coerced the most imbruted mariner to act on
the impossible idea that the earth was round; the press drenched
Europe with anarchism. Europe saw itself, violently resisting,
wrenched into false positions, drawn along new lines as a fish
that is caught on a hook; but unable to understand by what force
it was controlled. The resistance was often bloody, sometimes
humorous, always constant. Its contortions in the eighteenth
century are best studied in the wit of Voltaire, but all history
and all philosophy from Montaigne and Pascal to Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche deal with nothing else; and still, throughout it all,
the Baconian law held good; thought did not evolve nature, but
nature evolved thought. Not one considerable man of science dared
face the stream of thought; and the whole number of those who
acted, like Franklin, as electric conductors of the new forces
from nature to man, down to the year 1800, did not exceed a few
score, confined to a few towns in western Europe.
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