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 above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof.

George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, to whose

contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and cautions I am most

deeply indebted; also to my friends U. G. Weatherly, formerly

Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and now Assistant Professor in the

University of Indiana,--Prof. and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof.

William H. Hudson, of Stanford University,--and Prof. E. P

Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich,

for extensive aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated

to them, but which I could never have prosecuted without their

co-operation.  In libraries at home and abroad they have all

worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful to them.



This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift--a tribute to

Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of its

existence, and probably my last tribute.



The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its

foundation have triumphed.  Its faculty, numbering over one

hundred and, fifty; its students, numbering but little short of

two thousand; its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent

gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars, which it has

received from public-spirited men and women; the evidences of

public confidence on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of

its cardinal principles and main features by various institutions

of learning in other States, show this abundantly.  But there has

been a triumph far greater and wider.  Everywhere among the

leading modern nations the same general tendency is seen.  During

the quarter-century just past the control of public instruction,

not only in America but in the leading nations of Europe, has

passed more and more from the clergy to the laity.  Not only are

the presidents of the larger universities in the United States,

with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is

seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology.

At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they

were entirely under ecclesiastical control.  Now, all this is

changed.  An eminent member of the present British Government has

recently said, "A candidate for high university position is

handicapped by holy orders."  I refer to this with not the

slightest feeling of hostility toward the clergy, for I have

none; among them are many of my dearest friends; no one honours

their proper work more than I; but the above fact is simply noted

as proving the continuance of that evolution which I have

endeavoured to describe in this series of monographs--an

evolution, indeed, in which the warfare of Theology against

Science has been one of the most active and powerful agents.  My

belief is that in the field left to them--their proper field--the

clergy will more and more, as they cease to struggle against

scientific methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more

beautiful than anything they have heretofore done.  And this is

saying much.  My conviction is that Science, though it has

evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and

ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and

that, although theological control will continue to diminish,

Religion, as seen in the recognition of "a Power in the universe,

not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," and in the love of

God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and

stronger, not only in the American institutions of learning but

in the world at large.  Thus may the declaration of Micah as to

the requirements of Jehovah, the definition by St. James of

"pure religion and undefiled," and, above all, the precepts and

ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity himself, be brought

to bear more and more effectively on mankind.



I close this preface some days after its first lines were

written.  The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva; the

great river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the mujiks

are forgotten.

A. D. W.

LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG,

April 14,1894.



P.S.--Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to

some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until

the present date.

A. D. W.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N.Y.,

August 15, 1895.