Abstract
THE vagaries of those near to us in kin are proverbially harder to understand than those of strangers, and it is equally true that it is less easy to appreciate the shibboleths of the generations immediately preceding our own than those of a remoter date. It is undoubtedly a fact that the common element in British culture and that of the United States has often served to obscure certain fundamental differences of which the occasional manifestation sometimes amazes and more often bewilders us. The tendency shown by certain State legislatures in America in their attitude towards the doctrine of evolution, which has culminated in the prosecution of a teacher in the State of Tennessee for the use of a text-book in which a reference to that doctrine was included, is indicative of a public opinion of a force and character which it is difficult for us in Great Britain and in these days to appreciate. Scientific workers on this side of the water are accustomed to meet their American colleagues on an equal footing. They expect to find among them a readiness equal to their own to accept the facts which scientific investigation may bring to light and an equal openness of mind in the discussion of the bearing of such facts upon accepted theory It has, therefore, come with something of a shock to them to find that a movement upon which they may have looked with some feeling of amusement, and as such may not have regarded more seriously than as a passing phase, is likely to prove an obstinate barrier to intellectual progress and freedom of discussion. Those who have followed the trend of thought among the intellectual section of the general public in the United States for any length of time may not be equally surprised. They have been aware that sooner or later some such question as this was bound to arise. It is not so long ago that a well-known American novelist put before hispublic, as a living question of to-day, in the church of an American city, the problems which exercised the readers of “Robert Elsmere” when first that book was published in Great Britain nearly forty years ago.
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Truth and Doctrine in Science and Religion. Nature 116, 83–84 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116083a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116083a0