Page 413 - The Grotesque Children's Book

However, I wonder whether the portion of you who remain beyond the reach of
rational analysis will be the minority or the majority.

“Let me therefore undertake, before presenting the facts themselves, to
migrate you who are swayable to the side of the scientist, and the power of
scientific thinking.

“There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering
truth. The one currently in fashion is to believe in unprovable axioms and then
search the universe for corroboration, and in the absence of finding the axioms
false, deem them by default to be true. I charge that alchemy, pagan rituals,
astrology, and religion fall in this category, and that the advocates in these
disciplines are inherently searching for evidence where none can exist, leaving
them with faith or hearsay as the cornerstones of their worlds.

“I charge that science is based on observable, verifiable and repeatable
natural phenomenon. I charge that science, therefore, is true and knowable, even
if some of its axioms are yet to to be proven. Science’s axioms will one day be
declared true or they shall be rejected, whereas any other belief system will be
always and only that: belief.

“Those who have taken upon them to lay down accusations of my guilt as
a thing already searched out and understood, have therein done me and the
sciences great injury. For as you have been successful in inducing disbelief in me,
so you have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry laid forth in rational
incremental experiment and analysis; and have done more harm by spoiling and
putting an end to other men’s efforts than good by their own.

“Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted
that there is truth and power in alchemy, have started neither from true principles
nor rested in the just conclusion, and their zeal and affectation have carried them
much too far.

“Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this.
A scientist establishes progressive stages of certainty. Evidence observed by the
senses, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. In our
daily intercourse and conversation of life, we are occupied with unsound doctrines
and beset on all sides by vain imaginations. And therefore there remains but one
course for the recovery of a sound and healthy condition, — namely, that the
entire work of the understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself be
from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and
the business be done as if by machinery.

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