Professor Draper's Book [pp. 155-174]

Professor Draper's Books.
tive physiology is, therefore, unlike
comparative philology; for, however
diverse may be the dialects compared, there is no difference of species among them, and nothing hinders philological inductions from
possessing, in the secondary order,
a true scientific character. Physiological inductions, resting on the
comparative study of different individuals, or different races or families
of men, may also be truly scientific;
for all these individuals, and all these
races or families belong to one and
the same species. But the comparative physiology that compares men
and animals, gives only analogies, not
science.
We do not undervalue science;
on the contrary, what we complain
of is, that our physiologists do not
give us science; they give us facts,
theories, or hypotheses. Facts are
not science till referred to the principles that explain them, and these
principles themselves are not science
till integrated in the principles of that
high and universal science called theology, and which is really the science
of the sciences. The men who pass for
sazans, and are the hierophants and
lawgivers of the age, sin not by
their science, but by their want of
science. Their ideal of science is
too low and grovelling. Science is
vastly more than they conceive it;
is higher, deeper, broader than they
look; and the best of them are, as
Newton said of himself, mere boys
picking up shells on the shores of
the great ocean of truth. They, at
best, remain in the vestibule of the
temple of science; they have not
entered the penetralia and knelt before the altar. We find no fault with
Professor Draper's science, where science he has; we only complain of
him for attempting to palm off upon
us his ignorance for science, and accepting, and laboring to make us ac
cept as science what is really no
science. Yet he is not worse than
others of his class.
The second work named in our
list is the professor's attempt to extend the principles of his human
physiology to the human race at
large, and to apply them specially
to the intellectual development of
Europe; the third is an attempt to
apply them to the civil policy of
America, and the fourth is an attempt to get a counter-proof of his
theories in the history of our late civil war. Through the four works we
detect one and the same purpose,
one and the same doctrine, of which
the principal data are presented in
his work on human physiology, which
is cast in a purely materialistic mould.
They are all written to show that all
philosophy, all religion, all morality,
and all history are to be physiologically explained, that is, by fixed, inflexible, and irreversible natural laws.
He admits, in words, that man has
free-will, but denies that it influences events or anything in the life and
conduct of men. He also admits,
and claims credit for admitting, a
Supreme Being, as if there could be
subordinate beings, or any being bit
one who declares himself I AM THAT
AMI; but a living and ever-present
God, Creator, and upholder of the
universe, finds no recognition in his
physiological system. His God, lilke
the gods of the old, Epicureans,
has nothing to do, but, as Dr. Evarist de Gypendole, in his Oiztment
for the Bite of the Black Serpent,
happily expresses it, to "sleep all
night and to doze all day." He is
a superfluity in science, like the immaterial soul in the author's ]rizoana
Physiology. All things, in Professor
Draper's system, originate, proceed
from, and terminate in, natural development, with a most superb contempt
for the ratio sifficiens of Leibnitz,
I57