nvestigation. Now we have come
back once more to the complete acceptance of the old traditions.

Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of much nineteenth-century
criticism in all departments, even those strictly scientific, was the
marked tendency to reject previous opinions for new ones. Somehow men
felt themselves so far ahead of old-time writers and thinkers that they
concluded they must hold opinions different from their ancestors. In
nearly every case the new ideas that they evolved by supposedly newer
methods are not standing the test of time and further study. There had
been a continuous belief in men's minds, having its basis very probably
on a passage in one of St. Peter's Epistles, that the earth would
dissolve by fire. This was openly contradicted all during the nineteenth
century and the time when the earth would freeze up definitely
calculated by our mathematicians. Now after having studied
radioactivity and learned from the physicist that the earth is heating
up and will eventually get too hot for life, we calmly go back to the
old Petrine declaration. Some of the most distinguished of the German
biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly
tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down
because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far
as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in
its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many
people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different
from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it. Nothing shows
the necessity for being conservative in the matter of new views in
science or ethics or religion more than the curious transition state in
which we are with regard to many opinions at the present time, with a
distinct tendency toward reaction to older views that a few years ago
were thought quite untenable. We are rather proud of the advance that we
are supposed to be making along many lines in science and scholarship,
and yet over and over again, after years of work, we prove to have been
following a wrong lead and must come back to where we started. This has
been the way of man from the beginning and doubtless will continue. The
present generation are having this curious regression that follows
supposed progress strongly emphasized for them.

APPENDIX II

SCIENCE AT THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES[35]

With the growth of