The knowledge grows, but the things known remain. The knowledge is not
treated as if independent of the things known or believed to be known,
as a phenomenon belonging merely to the human mind, with beginnings and
laws and consequences and history of its own. And, consequently, its
having a regular growth is not used as an argument against its
substantial truth.
The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but no
mathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects its
claims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought to
believe the deductions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer our
own question by tracing the steps; but our conviction is not shaken that
these deductions are true.
And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisations
of Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out of
Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler; but the proof that the knowledge
of one truth has been evolved out of the knowledge of another, and that
out of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all this
Science has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a natural
growth of human thought. Science has grown through all manner of
mistakes--mistakes made by the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakes
which men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be no
doubt laughed at in turn hereafter.
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