



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM

By Andrew Dickson White


Two Volumes Combined


To the Memory of

EZRA CORNELL

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.



Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we

Breathe cheaply in the common air.--LOWELL


Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.--PUBLIUS SYRUS


Truth is the daughter of Time.--BACON


The Truth shall make you free.--ST. JOHN, viii, 32.




INTRODUCTION


My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my eye
lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva under my
windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun
into the great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays and the
old granite fortress where lie the bones of the Romanoff Czars.

This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places
thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so
crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into
crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from
thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage
and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield.
But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break
suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations,
bringing desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the
subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fertile
breeding-bed for the germs of disease.


But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier, exposed
more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of channels they are
making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent
and beautiful.

My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik on the Neva. I
simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that
decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to
mediaeval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among
us--a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the
whole normal evolution of society.

For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising--the flood
of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier also, though
honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger--danger of a
sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not
only out worn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles
and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious and moral
foundations of the whole social and political fabric.

My hope is to aid--even if it be but a little--in the gradual and
healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of
"religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to
humanity.

And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.

It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with Ezra
Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored name.

Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an institution for
advanced instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied,
should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of
literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as
possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless
trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not
most, of the American universities and colleges.

We had especially determined that the institution should be under the
control of no political party and of no single religious sect, and with
Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent provisions to this effect in
the charter.

It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that in all
this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian. Mr. Cornell
was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had from his fortune
liberally aided every form of Christian effort which he found going on
about him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library
which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen of
the town--Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, I had been bred a
churchman, had recently been elected a trustee of one church college,
and a professor in another; those nearest and dearest to me were
devoutly religious; and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so
personal to my self, my most cherished friendships were among deeply
religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were
ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms
of poetry. So, far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to
promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we
saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities as
a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction then given
in so many of them.

It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control which, in
selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics
or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what
wing or branch of a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance
the moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind.

The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so cogent that
we expected the co-operation of all good citizens, and anticipated no
opposition from any source.

As I look back across the intervening years, I know not whether to be
more astonished or amused at our simplicity.

Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it confronted us at
every turn, and it was soon in full blaze throughout the State--from the
good Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all professors should be in
holy orders, since to the Church alone was given the command, "Go, teach
all nations," to the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin
Smith--a profoundly Christian scholar--had come to Cornell in order
to inculcate the "infidelity of the Westminster Review"; and from the
eminent divine who went from city to city, denouncing the "atheistic
and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid
minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last
great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism
and atheism" in the new institution.

As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were introduced into
various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen solemnly warned
their flocks first against the "atheism," then against the "infidelity,"
and finally against the "indifferentism" of the university, as devoted
pastors endeavoured to dissuade young men from matriculation, I took the
defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from pulpits and religious
newspapers, attempted to allay the fears of the public. "Sweet
reasonableness" was fully tried. There was established and endowed in
the university perhaps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of
the most vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the
United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack.
The clause in the charter of the university forbidding it to give
predominance to the doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact that
much prominence was given to instruction in various branches of science,
seemed to prevent all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand
on the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that there was
borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty--the antagonism between
the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in
relation to it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a
lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took
as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this thesis which
follows:

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed
interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference
may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion
and science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammeled
scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of
its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted
in the highest good both of religion and science.

The lecture was next day published in the New York Tribune at the
request of Horace Greeley, its editor, who was also one of the Cornell
University trustees. As a result of this widespread publication and
of sundry attacks which it elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis
before various university associations and literary clubs; and I shall
always remember with gratitude that among those who stood by me and
presented me on the lecture platform with words of approval and cheer
was my revered instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, at that
time President of Yale College.

My lecture grew--first into a couple of magazine articles, and then into
a little book called The Warfare of Science, for which, when republished
in England, Prof. John Tyndall wrote a preface.

Sundry translations of this little book were published, but the
most curious thing in its history is the fact that a very friendly
introduction to the Swedish translation was written by a Lutheran
bishop.

Meanwhile Prof. John W. Draper published his book on The Conflict
between Science and Religion, a work of great ability, which, as I then
thought, ended the matter, so far as my giving it further attention was
concerned.

But two things led me to keep on developing my own work in this field:
First, I had become deeply interested in it, and could not refrain from
directing my observation and study to it; secondly, much as I admired
Draper's treatment of the questions involved, his point of view and mode
of looking at history were different from mine.

He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I believed
then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and
Dogmatic Theology.

More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs in the
evolution of human thought--the theological and the scientific.

So I kept on, and from time to time published New Chapters in the
Warfare of Science as magazine articles in The Popular Science Monthly.
This was done under many difficulties. For twenty years, as President of
Cornell University and Professor of History in that institution, I was
immersed in the work of its early development. Besides this, I could not
hold myself entirely aloof from public affairs, and was three times sent
by the Government of the United States to do public duty abroad: first
as a commissioner to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to
Germany, in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and was
also called upon by the State of New York to do considerable labor in
connection with international exhibitions at Philadelphia and at Paris.
I was also obliged from time to time to throw off by travel the effects
of overwork.

The variety of residence and occupation arising from these causes may
perhaps explain some peculiarities in this book which might otherwise
puzzle my reader.

While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials over a
very wide range--in the New World, from Quebec to Santo Domingo and from
Boston to Mexico, San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from
Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo--they have often
obliged me to write under circumstances not very favorable: sometimes
on an Atlantic steamer, sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my
own library at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich,
Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the
benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions of the
same authority in different chapters, but some iterations which in the
steady quiet of my own library would not have been made.

It has been my constant endeavour to write for the general reader,
avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible and stating
the truth simply as it presents itself to me.

That errors of omission and commission will be found here and there is
probable--nay, certain; but the substance of the book will, I believe,
be found fully true. I am encouraged in this belief by the fact that, of
the three bitter attacks which this work in its earlier form has already
encountered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and
the others based upon ignorance of facts easily pointed out.

And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me. First and
