The same timid soul who wants to preserve the Olympian mysteries inviolate is also disturbed by what he calls scientific dogmatism. The scientist is dogmatic; it must be admitted; but he is not dogmatic in the sense implied by his critics. He holds no inflexible confidence in plausible conclusions, insecurely founded, just because they bear the label of his trade union. If a new theory appears which is better substantiated than the one he holds, he will give the latter up at once. His only determined position is concerned with the validity of the scientific method, with the spirit of science. He holds that the one means of solving human problems is further advances in science. He takes this position for the simple reason that, in all its cycles of experience, the race has found no other method that really works. It is a substantiated belief and not a hope. If this is dogmatism, make the most of it.

We have recently had an episode of such criticisms of science that was rather interesting while it lasted. I refer to the rise and fall of the Humanist cult led by Irving Babbitt. I mention it only because the leaders of the movement have been literary men and have therefore been able to advertize their doctrine widely, and because the slovenly formulation of the ideas involved has led many readers to think they see in them a depth and value altogether undeserved. Humanism is the name of an undertaking begun about the year 1300 in which the goal was the discovery and promulgation of the good life on this lowly planet by the use of human faculties. With such announced intentions one might assume, it seems to me, that scientific work should have been promoted. Galileo and Kepler and Harvey should be the pride of the order, since ability to reason is certainly the distinctively human trait. But no; not even such master deriders of folly as Boccaccio and Rabelais are admitted to fellowship. The true humanist, as nearly as I can gather from the unintelligible though voluminous definitions of the modern exponent, is not he who bestows new knowledge upon his fellow men, but rather he who believes that progress ended with the decline of the classic Greek tradition. The announced tenets of humanism are a sense of decorum and a "will to refrain" and each humanist naturally writes a book to explain what these precepts mean. The resulting volumes achieve harmony on only one point, and this makes the contents far from dull: there is no need for restraint when attacking error.

Out of the modern humanist doctrine there somehow emerges an acute dislike for science. Professor Babbitt says that science is well enough in its place, but demands for the humanist the right to determine its place. The difficulty with science, according to L. T. More, who has received some training in the older type of physics, is that instead of confining itself to the simple problems of the atom and the molecule, it is also studying human attributes and emotions. It does not appear that he requires the closing of all medical schools, but he does urge fetters for all psychologists.

What has led to such queer and loose-jointed thinking? As Walter Lippmann has so ably shown, the immediate trouble with these gentlemen is that they have adopted as dogma an assumption long since disproved; namely, that there are determinative laws for things - and presumably for the lower organisms - but none for man. Having asserted this dogma, they hold it to be a demonstrated fact.

This interpretation is accurate, but it does not probe deeply. The stimulus which motivates the Babbitt group is an inferiority fixation. I dislike using the term because of its appropriation by the cultist Freudians; but it has a validity in the interpretation of certain types of behavior that is not to be denied. The inferiority complex is at the bottom of most tirades against science. In the particular case under discussion, the thing is acute. Nearly all present-day humanists are literary critics. Now Chesterton, who is sound enough when he sticks to professional items, says that learning to write is so difficult that "it prevents general 'education' in the customary sense of the term." The writer, therefore, is a privileged man, since "he is permitted to have no exact knowledge of anything in life - except his craft, and not always that." The literary critic is naturally in a worse case than the creative writer in this respect. Moreover, the critic gets in the habit of speaking with such cocksureness about literary artistry that it is only natural for him to react more violently still against creators of knowledge whose ways are a closed book.

Deeper still there is a reaction common to nearly all of us. It is the protest against the lowly place in the universe which the still, small voice of reason gives to man. Astronomers have shown the probable origin of the earth; geologists have divulged its history. Chemists have manufactured compounds which formerly were thought to be characteristic products of organic processes. Biologists have linked man with the humbler animals in structure, function, and behavior, thus demonstrating by overwhelming evidence the doctrine of evolution. Geneticists, psychologists, and physiologists have combined their evidence and seriously assert that man's individuality is the necessary product of his hereditary constitution plus physical environment and experience. It is perhaps to be expected that we who have created gods in our image should rebel at such tenets, and should declare that we will accept no conclusions which rob us of spiritual and moral values and leave us like so many automata, bereft of faith and hope, tossing helplessly amid other combinations of electrons in a mechanical universe ruled by chance. These things, we say with Jurgen, are lunacies of realists which we do not choose to believe. "For how shall I believe," says Cabell's hero, "hat all men who have ever lived or will ever live hereafter - that even I, am of no importance?"