To my mind, he places the whole subject on its proper
foundation, and properly disposes of the supposed conflict between
religion or theology and science. He says:--

[Footnote 45: N. Y., Appleton, 1902.]

"But as I have said before, the real essence of conservatism lies
not in theology. The whole conflict is a struggle in the mind of
man. It exists in human psychology before it is wrought out in human
history. It is the struggle of realities against tradition and
suggestion. The progress of civilization would still have been just
such a struggle had religion or theology or churches or worship
never existed. But such a conception is impossible, because the need
for all these is part of the actual development of man.

Intolerance and prejudice is, moreover, not confined to religious
organizations. The same spirit that burned Michael Servetus and
Giordano Bruno for the heresies of science, led the atheist
"liberal" mob of Paris to send to the scaffold the great chemist
Lavoisier, with the sneer that "the republic has no need of
savants." The same spirit that leads the orthodox Gladstone to
reject natural selection because it "relieves God of the labor of
creation," causes the heterodox Haecekel to condemn Weismann's
theories of heredity, not because they are at variance with facts,
but because such questions are settled once for all by the great
philosophic dictum (his own) "of monism."

This very natural ultra-conservative mood of scientists is well
illustrated by a passage from Galileo's life, in which he himself
describes in a letter to Kepler, the great mathematician and
astronomer of his time, the reception that his new invention, the
telescope, met with from distinguished men of science, their
colleagues of the moment. The Italian astronomer encountered the
well-known tendency of men to reason from what they already know, that
certain advances in knowledge are impossible or absurd. The favorite
expression is that the thoughts suggested by some new discovery are
illogical. Men have always reasoned thus, and apparently they always
will. Knowledge that they learn before they are forty constitutes,
consciously or unconsciously, for them the possible sum of human
knowledge, and {394} they can only think that apparent progress that
contradicts their previous convictions must be founded on false
premises or faulty observation. We cannot help sympathizing with
Galileo, though it mu