The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope by Henry Edward Crampton
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page 10 of 313 (03%)
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everyday work of seeking food and building huts and carrying on warfare,
and yet even he found time to classify the objects of his world and to construct some theory about the powers that made them. His attainments may seem crude and childish to-day, but they were the beginnings of classified knowledge, which advanced or stood still as men found more or less time for observation and thought. Freed from the strife of primeval and medieval life, more and more observers and thinkers have enlarged the boundaries and developed the territory of the known. The history of human thought itself demonstrates an evolution which began with the savages' vague interpretation of the "what" and the "why" of the universe, and culminates in the science of to-day. What, now, is a science? To many people the word denotes something cold and unfeeling and rigid, or something that is somehow apart from daily life and antagonistic to freedom of thought. But this is far from being true. Karl Pearson defines science as _organized knowledge_, and Huxley calls it _organized common sense_. These definitions mean the same thing. They mean that in order to know anything that deserves confidence, in order to obtain a real result, it is necessary in the first place to establish the reality of facts and to discriminate between the true, the not so sure, the merely possible, and the false. Having accurate and verified data, scientific method then proceeds to classify them, and this is the _organizing_ of knowledge. The final process involves a summary of the facts and their relations by some simple expression or formula. A good illustration of a scientific principle is the natural law of gravitation. It states simply that two bodies of matter attract one another directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely in proportion to the square of the distance between them. In this concise rule are described the relations which have been actually determined for masses of varying sizes and at different distances apart,--for snowflakes falling to the earth, for the |
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