Читать книгу The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions онлайн

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The deficiencies of Scientific education do not exhaust the objections against it. There seem to be positive evils almost inseparable from such training when carried far with the young. One of the worst is the danger of the adoption by the student of materialistic views on all subjects. He need not become a theoretic or speculative Materialist: that is another risk, which may or may not be successfully eliminated. But he will almost inevitably fall into practical materialism. Of the two sides of human life, his scientific training will compel him to think always in the first place of the lower. The material (or, as our fathers would have called it, the carnal) fact will be uppermost in his mind, and the spiritual meaning thereof more or less out of sight. He will view his mother’s tears not as expressions of her sorrow, but as solutions of muriates and carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime; and he will reflect that they were caused not by his heartlessness, but by cerebral pressure on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he will “peep and botanize” on her grave,—not with the poet’s sense of the sacrilegiousness of such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate observation among the scientifically interesting “Flora” of a cemetery.