MISTAKES OF SCIENTISTS

Every reflecting student of history is struck by the divergence of
opinions manifest among educated men in regard to the great problems
of life. Why is it that so few of us are able to state the facts and
arguments which favour conclusions to which we are utterly opposed?
Take, for instance, the great question of religious belief. Can one
refer to any Protestant writer of our time who has placed before his
readers the arguments which inclined men like Newman or Manning to the
Catholic faith? Has any Catholic writer of our time been able to
present fairly the arguments which seem so overwhelmingly convincing
to Protestant thinkers? In either case, is there not something of
distortion or exaggeration? Certainly it cannot be due to intentional
and perverse obliquity of mental vision. As a rule reasonable men
endeavour to be just and fair. Now and then, in the heat of
controversy, a tendency to overstatement or exaggeration may be
evident, especially where great issues appear to be involved; but
the purpose can be reconciled with honesty. Is it not more than
probable that the principal reason for divergent views on the part of
honest opponents is IGNORANCE OF FACTS?

Take, for example, the opinion held to-day by the great majority of
young physicians concerning animal experimentation. As a rule they
regard all criticism of vivisection with infinite contempt. During
their medical studies they were continually imbued with the idea that
the opposition to laboratory freedom of experimentation was an
agitation of comparatively recent date, and confined to a small class
of unthinking sentimentalists. Of that strong protest against cruel
experiments which made itself heard more during more than a century,
and of the atrocities which led to that protest, the average physician
of to-day knows nothing whatever. Plunged into the practice of a
profession which may absorb every moment of time, he has perhaps
neither leisure to investigate nor disposition to doubt whatever he
has been told.

Now, if the average student of medicine is thus ignorant of history,
is it not because those who have taught him were equally devoid of
knowledge of the facts? Of the history of the vivisection controversy
previous to 1875, some of the most distinguished men in the medical
profession have proved themselves profoundly ignorant. Illustrations
of this lack of information might be almost indefinitely adduced, but
I