thing about the
history of modern science--even nineteenth century science, that there
is absolutely no foundation for this prejudice. Most of our greatest
investigators even in nineteenth century science have been faithful
believers not only in the ordinary religious truths, in a Providence,
in a hereafter, and in this life as a preparation for another, but
also in the great mysteries of revelation. I have shown this amply
even with regard to what is usually considered so unorthodox a science
as medicine, in my volume on the Makers of Modern Medicine. Most of
the men who did the great original work in last century medicine were
Catholics. The same thing is true for electricity, for example. All
the men after whom modes and units of electricity are named--Galvani,
Volta, Coulomb, Ampere, Ohm--were not only members of the Church, but
what would be even called devout Catholics.

A second and almost as important a reason for the superstition--for it
is a supposed truth accepted without good reasons therefor--that
somehow the Church was opposed to the inductive or experimental
method, is the persistent belief which, in spite of frequent {283}
contradictions, remains in the minds of so many scientists, that the
inductive or experimental method was introduced to the world by
Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Bacon himself was a Protestant; he did not do his
writing until the reformation so-called had been at work in Europe for
nearly a century, and somehow it is supposed that these facts are
linked together as causes and effects. The reason why such a
formulation of the inductive method had not come before was because
this was forbidden ground! Nothing could be less true than that Lord
Bacon had any serious influence in bringing about the introduction of
the inductive method into science. At most he was a chronicler of
tendencies that he saw in the science of his day. It is true that his
writings served to give a certain popular vogue to the inductive
method, or rather a certain exaggerated notion of the import of
experiment to those who were not themselves scientists. Bacon was a
popular writer on science, not an original thinker or worker in the
experimental sciences. Popularizers in science, alas! have from
Amerigo Vespucci down reaped the rewards due to the real discoverers.

Induction in the genuine significance of the word had been recognized
in the world long before