The Dogmatism of Science Page 3

Scientific caution is necessary at all times, and more especially so with discoveries which antagonize the established order of what is supposed to be scientific truth. But of quite a different nature is that stolid and contemptuous indifference manifested by those "lights of science," who consider it derogatory to their dignity to interest themselves in an examination of claims that, if proved to be true, would revolutionize the accepted dogmas of science. When Italy was disturbed by Galileo's discovery, the same thing occurred. It was a professor of the University at Padua who refused Galileo's invitation to look through his telescope and obtain proof of his assertion that "the world moves."

The world of thought moves faster than in the days of Galileo. Under the pressure of outside opinion and the gradual infiltration of new truths, men of science will, in the end, be awakened into honest and serious attention to Keely's claims. New truths pass more quickly, now than formerly, through stages of blind, unreasoning opposition. This improvement does not spring out of any change in human nature in scientific men, for their "good-fellowship," among themselves, is never extended beyond those researchers who maintain orthodox views and support each other in their claims.

The hope of Keely's life being prolonged "to conquer too" (nearly three score years and ten as he is now), would be much more likely to be realized if the certainties of the scientific value of his discoveries were made known more widely, together with the uncertainties of his living to complete all that is necessary before there can be any financial gain therein.

Notwithstanding the persistent denial of physicists, who have not examined into Keely's claims, the advancing wave of interest in his work cannot be kept back, for it will be sustained in its course by the ever-increasing pressure of a larger outside public of intelligent and interested minds, not wedded by long association of thought to special systems, and having no motives of self-preservation prompting them to repel what appeals to their intellectual capacity of