When I was
seven years old I discovered the sting of the wasp. But I do not ask
you to worship me on that account. I assure you, madam, the merest
mediocrities can discover the most surprising facts about the physical
universe as soon as they are civilized enough to have time to study
these things, and to invent instruments and apparatus for research. But
what is the consequence? Their discoveries discredit the simple stories
of our religion. At first we had no idea of astronomical space. We
believed the sky to be only the ceiling of a room as large as the earth,
with another room on top of it. Death was to us a going upstairs into
that room, or, if we did not obey the priests, going downstairs into
the coal cellar. We founded our religion, our morality, our laws, our
lessons, our poems, our prayers, on that simple belief. Well, the moment
men became astronomers and made telescopes, their belief perished. When
they could no longer believe in the sky, they found that they could no
longer believe in their Deity, because they had always thought of him
as living in the sky. When the priests themselves ceased to believe in
their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name
and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They
set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders
and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder
workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity,
men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped
the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples for his
telescopes. Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and
found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of
micro-organisms; so they gaped at these as foolishly as at the millions
of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices
were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the
microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible
and omniscient. Thus our discoveries instead of increasing our wisdom,
only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had. All I can grant you is
that they increased our knowledge.

ZOO. Nonsense! Consciousness of a fact is not knowledge of it: if it
were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the
naturalists.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That is an extremely acute remark, madam. Th