th regard
to this, that "An original mind is rarely understood until it has been
reflected from some half-dozen congenial with it, so {392} averse are
men to admitting the true in an unusual form; whilst any novelty,
however fantastic, however false, is greedily swallowed." This
principle will be of great service in making clear the real
significance of many incidents in the history of science, in which not
only intelligent men without special scientific training have been
found in opposition to real scientific progress, but in which men
having had the advantage of long experience in scientific
investigation, having themselves sometimes as younger men done
original work of value, have yet placed themselves squarely in
opposition to scientific advance that eventually proved of the highest
possible significance.

Scientific men have, as a rule, been quite ready at all times to argue
that an announced new discovery could not be true, that indeed it was
absurd to think of it. The word nonsense is perhaps oftener on
scientists' tongues than on any others'. It is not because he is
deliberately opposed to scientific progress that this is the case with
the scientist, but that he is so convinced of the ultimate
significance of many things that he knows already, that he cannot
readily bring himself to admit the idea of progress along lines with
which he is familiar. To do so, indeed, supposes that he himself has
been lacking in perspicacity and in powers of observation. The fact
that it is usually a young man who makes the new observation, not
infrequently a young man who does not know the great body of science
that the older acknowledged scientist does, only adds to the readiness
with which the senior is apt to consider the new proposition as
absurd. Ecclesiastics have done this same thing, but not nearly so
frequently as scientists. There was a time when the majority of
educated men belonged to the clerical order, and then it seemed as
though it must be religion that prompted some of the conservatism
which led them to oppose what proved eventually to be new truths. It
was not, however, but only human nature asserting itself in spite of
education.

Prof. David Starr Jordan in reviewing briefly the history of the
Struggle for Realities in one of the essays in his Foot-notes to
Evolution, [Footnote 45] has summed up the genuine {393} significance
of this supposed opposition of science and theology in some striking
paragraphs.