Scientific errors

Just as the body has its organs of locomotion, of nutrition, of respiration, etc., so too the Spirit has varied faculties, which relate respectively to each particular situation of its being. If the body has its infancy, if the members of that body are weak and feeble, incapable of moving burdens that they will later lift without effort, the Spirit possesses, first of all, faculties that must, like everything that exists, pass from infancy to youth and from youth to mature age. Would you ask the child in the cradle to act with the rapidity, the assurance, and the skill of a grown man? No; that would be madness, would it not? One should require of each only what falls within the scope of his strength and his knowledge. To ask one who has never touched a book of Mathematics or of Physics, to reason on any branch of the knowledge that depends on those sciences, would be as little logical as to claim to demand an exact description of a distant country from a Parisian who has never left the limits of his native land and, at times, of his neighborhood! It is, then, necessary, in order to judge a thing sensibly, to have of that thing as complete a knowledge as possible. It would be absurd to submit to an examination of fluent reading one who is only beginning to spell out letters; and yet!… yet man, this human-animal endowed with reason, this mighty one of Creation, for whom everything is an obstacle in the book of worlds, this terrible child who barely stammers the first words of true science, this one mystified by appearance, claims to read, without hesitation, the most indecipherable pages of the manual that Nature daily presents to his eyes. The unknown is born beneath his steps; it brushes against his sides; ahead, behind, everywhere, in everything, there are nothing but problems without solution, or whose known solutions are illogical and irrational, and the big child turns his eyes away from the book, saying: I know you; for another!… Ignorant of things, he attaches himself to the causes of those things and, without a compass, without dividers, embarks on the stormy sea of preconceived systems, which fatally leads him to shipwreck, whose result is doubt and incredulity! Fanaticism, son of error, holds him under its scepter; because, know it well, the fanatic is not he who believes without proofs and who, through a misunderstood faith, would give his life. There are fanatics of incredulity, as there are fanatics of faith! The path of truth is narrow and it is necessary to sound the ground before advancing, so as not to plunge into the abysses that flank it, on the right and on the left.

Make haste slowly, says the wisdom of the nations; and, as always, when it agrees with good sense, the wisdom of the nations is right. — Do not leave an enemy behind you, and do not advance except when you are sure of not being obliged to retreat. — God is patient because He is eternal; man, who has eternity before him, can also be patient.

That he judge by appearances, that he be mistaken and acknowledge his error in the future, is logical; but that he claim to be unable to err, that he set any limit whatsoever to human understanding, the child reappears upon the water with his caprices and his impotent angers!… The colt has not yet made its mischief; it grows irritated, it rears up! The blood boils in its veins!… Let it be: age will know how to calm its ardor without destroying it, and from this it will draw profit, more wisely measuring its expenditures!

At his birth, man saw a plain formed of earth and rock extend without limit beneath his steps; a blue plain, sprinkled with sparkling fires, extended over his head and seemed to move regularly; from this he concluded that the Earth was a vast uneven plateau, surmounted by a dome animated by a constant movement. Referring everything to himself, he made himself the center of a system created by him, and the immutable Earth contemplated the Sun turning in the celestial plain. Today the Sun no longer turns and the Earth has set itself in motion; the first point would perhaps not be difficult to elucidate according to the Bible, because if Joshua one day commanded the Sun to stop, nowhere is it seen that he commanded it to resume its course. Today human intelligence gives the lie to the labors of the intelligences of a more remote epoch and, thus, from age to age back to the origin; and yet, despite the lessons of the past, although it perceives, by precedents, that the utopia of yesterday is often the reality of tomorrow, man persists in saying: No! you shall go no further! Who could do more than we? Intelligence is at the top of the ladder; after us one can only descend!… And yet, those who say this are the witnesses, the propagators, and the promoters of the marvels accomplished by present-day science. They have made numerous discoveries, which singularly modified the theories of their predecessors; but, what does it matter!… The self in them speaks louder than reason. Enjoying a royalty of a day, they cannot admit that tomorrow they will be subjected to a power that the future keeps sheltered from their gazes. They deny the Spirit, as they denied the movement of the Earth!… Let us pity them and console ourselves for their blindness, telling ourselves that what is cannot remain eternally hidden; light cannot become shadow; truth cannot become error; the darkness dissolves before the dawn.

O Galileo!… wherever you may be, you rejoice because it moves… and we too can rejoice, because our Earth, our world, intelligence, the Spirit also has its movement, misunderstood, unknown, but which will soon become as evident as the axioms recognized by Science.

François Arago. n [1]

[see François Arago.]