y miracles, why, miracles
there must be. The blood of St. Januarius must liquefy whether the
Saint is in the humor or not. To trick a heathen into being a dutiful
Christian is no worse than to trick a whitewasher into trusting himself
in a room where a smallpox patient has lain, by pretending to exorcise
the disease with burning sulphur. But woe to the Church if in deceiving
the peasant it also deceives itself; for then the Church is lost, and
the peasant too, unless he revolt against it. Unless the Church works
the pretended miracle painfully against the grain, and is continually
urged by its dislike of the imposture to strive to make the peasant
susceptible to the true reasons for behaving well, the Church will
become an instrument of his corruption and an exploiter of his
ignorance, and will find itself launched upon that persecution of
scientific truth of which all priesthoods are accused and none with more
justice than the scientific priesthood.

And here we come to the danger that terrifies so many of us: the danger
of having a hygienic orthodoxy imposed on us. But we must face that: in
such crowded and poverty ridden civilizations as ours any orthodoxy
is better than laisser-faire. If our population ever comes to consist
exclusively of well-to-do, highly cultivated, and thoroughly instructed
free persons in a position to take care of themselves, no doubt they
will make short work of a good deal of official regulation that is now
of life-and-death necessity to us; but under existing circumstances, I
repeat, almost any sort of attention that democracy will stand is better
than neglect. Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as
to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more
honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. The one
lesson that comes out of all our theorizing and experimenting is that
there is only one really scientific progressive method; and that is the
method of trial and error. If you come to that, what is laisser-faire
but an orthodoxy? the most tyrannous and disastrous of all the
orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.

THE LATEST THEORIES

Medical theories are so much a matter of fashion, and the most fertile
of them are modified so rapidly by medical practice and biological
research, which are international activities, that the play which
furnishes the pretext for this preface is already slightly outmoded,
though I believe it may be taken