SCIENTISTS AND FAITH

New Zealand Tablet, 1 September 1910, Page 1394

SCIENTISTS AND FAITH

In the last issue of the American Catholic Quarterly there is an interesting and instructive article on ‘ Scientists and Faith,’ from which the' Sacred Heart Iteview quotes the following passages: The greatest scientists in practically every department of recent science have been the firmest believers. This is no mere assertion founded on a few scattered examples, but, on the contrary, represents the true story of the position of scientists in this matter very thoroughly. There is not a single department of nineteenth century science in which representative discoverers were not faithful believers. Of course, this is true in astronomy, for an unbelieving astronomer is always a contradiction in terms. At the very opposite pole of science, however, in medicine, usually considered so sceptical in its tendencies that the proverb runs, ‘ Where there are three physicians there are two atheists,’ the. rule with regard to great scientists being faithful believers holds quite as firmly. Morgagni, the father of pathology; Auenbrugger, the father of physical diagnosis; Galvani, the founder of medical electricity; Laennec, who laid the foundation of our knowledge of pulmonary diseases; Johann Muller, the father of modern German medicine; Schwann, the father of the cell doctrine; Claude Bernard, the great pioneer in modern physiology; Pasteur, the father of modern bacteriology; Jenner and Louis and Graves and Stokes and Corrigan, and any number more, were all of them believers, and, indeed, the great majority of them devout Catholics. Some of the developments of this assertion make rather startling reading, in view of the usual impressions. There are phrases and phases of the lives of these men that bring out very clearly their attitude to the things of faith. Of Morgagni’s ten living children, eight daughters became religious and one of his sons became a Jesuit. Over and over again he declared his happiness that they had 1 chosen the better part.’ All of the great pathologist’s philosophy of life is revealed by that phrase, but if more evidence of his faith were needed it could be had abundantly, for Morgagni, one of the most widely known of scientists in his time in Europe, was, as might be judged from the family conditions mentioned, a most devout Catholic, the friend and adviser of four Popes. Galvani, his great contemporary, was of very like character. Alibert, the secretary-general of the French Medical Society of Emulation, in his address on Galvani in 1801, quoted Galvani’s well known expression ‘ that small draughts of philosophy lead to atheism, but longer draughts bring one back to God.’ This was at the beginning of the century. At the close of it Pasteur, who perhaps did more for medical science than any other single man during the nineteenth century, declared that he was convinced that if he knew as much as he could know, he would have the faith of a Breton peasant if he knew all that there was to know, he would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman. Over the entrance of his tomb at the Pasteur Institute is his beautiful confession of faith: 1 Happy the man who bears within him a divinity, an ideal of beauty, and obeys it; an ideal of art, an ideal of science, an ideal of country, an ideal of the virtues of the Gospel.’ In the address before the French Academy, from which this confession is taken, there follow immediately two further sentences worthy to he recalled: ‘These are the living springs of great thought and great action. Everything grows clear in the reflections from the infinite.’ Midway between Galvani and Pasteur had come the great father of modern German medicine, Johann Muller. As a young man he once said: Nemo psychologies nisi physis —No one can be a psychologist unless he is a physiologist. How often has this been perverted in the years that followed into a declaration that for Muller psychology was merely a branch of physiologythat mental operations were a function of the brain, and nothing more. All that he meant was that if one were to know psychology well in the sense of being an expert psychologist, one must needs be a physiologist. This was the farthest in the world from saying that psychic actions were entirely dependent on the brain and that mental operations were merely mechanical. As a matter of fact, far from being a materialist as the perverted explanation of his expression might imply, Muller was all his life a faithful Catholic. In spite of all the influences against such a thing in Protestant Berlin, Muller continued to practise the religion in which he had been born in the Rhineland, and after his death in Berlin he was taken with great pomp for burial among his Catholic relatives, and the brother Catholics of his native Coblentz erected the monument over him.