Beside his almsgiving, he now had another occupation which took up
all his surplus time. Schrotter had not let the suggestion drop
which he made at Dorfling's dinner-party, and had persuaded Wilhelm
so long that he finally rouse himself to attempt an account of the
ways and means by which the human mind has freed itself of its
grossest errors. It was to be entitled "A History of Human
Ignorance," and promised to be a most original work. He would
endeavor to show what idea people had had of the universe at various
periods, how they explained the phenomena of nature, their
connection, their causes and effects. He would begin with the
childish superstitions of the savages, and continuing through the
so-called learned systems of the ancients and of the Middle Ages,
would bring his history up to the theories of contemporary
scientists. He would demonstrate the psychological causes of the
fact that man, at a certain stage of intellectual development, must
necessarily fall into certain errors, and by the aid of what
experiments, experiences, and conclusions he had come gradually to
recognize them as such. How the fresh interpretation of a single
phenomenon would overturn, at one blow, a number of other phenomena
hitherto considered entirely satisfactory, how prevailing scientific
theories, instead of assisting the fearless observer or discoverer,
invariably hindered him and turned him from the right path, in proof
of which assertion he brought forward such striking examples as
Aristotle's convulsive endeavors to make each of the senses
correspond to one of the four elements in which they believed in his
day, and Kepler with his fantastic efforts to prove the supremacy of
the Pythagorean seven in the solar system.
Pages:
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290