ed a few weeks or months to the subject and acquired a rude
smattering of some of its terms, 'what intolerable fools they must all
be!'" Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by escaping the
limitations of knowledge! We see what happens when a person sets out to
deal with science untrammelled by any considerations as to what others
have thought and established. The necessary result is that he plunges
headforemost into all or most of the errors which were pitfalls to the
first labourers in the field. Or, again, he painfully and uselessly
pursues the blind alleys which they had wandered in, and from which a
perusal of their works would have warned off later comers.

Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of
scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course,
though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is
quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one
versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a
distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less,
then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in
the theological pool. His reply was that in so far as they were at all
constructive, they consisted mostly of exploded heresies of the first
century. Is not this precisely what one would have expected _a priori_?
A man commencing to write on science or religion who neglects the work
of earlier writers places himself in the position of the first students
of the subject and very naturally will make the same mistakes as they
made. He refuses to be hampered and biased by knowledge, and the result
follows quite inevitably. "A scientist," says Monsignor Benson, "is
hampered and biased by knowing the earth goes round the sun." The fact
of the matter is that the man of science is not a solitary figure, a
_chimaera bombinans in vacuo_. In whatever direction he looks he is faced
by the figures of other workers and he is limited and "hampered" by
their work. Nor are these workers all of them in his own area of
country, for the biologist, for example, cannot afford to neglect the
doings of the chemist; if he does he is bound to find himself led into
mistakes. No doubt the scientific man is at times needlessly hampered by
theories which he and others at the time take to be fairly well
established facts, but which after all turn out to be nothing of the
kind. This in no way weakens the argu