The Future of Science Author:Ernest Renan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTEB III. People may, if they like, consider the whole of the foregoing as absurd and chimerical, but I beg of them, in the name of Heaven, to grant me thi... more »sLthat science alone can supply mankind with those vital truths, without which life would be unbearable and society impossible If we could conceive the possibility of arriving at those truths in any other way than by the patient study of things, higher science would have meaning no longer. We should have erudition, the curiosity of the amateur, but not science in the noblest acceptation of the term, and noble natures would assuredly forbear engaging in researches, having neither horizon nor future. Thus those who think that metaphysical speculation, pure reasoning, can, without the pragmatic study of what is, supply us with the higher truths must necessarily despise that which -to them is nothing more than useless lumber, an unnecessary and cumbersome burden to the intellect. Malebranche has not been too severe upon those savants, " who make their brain a storehouse in which they pile up without discernment everything that presents a certain character of learning, and who pride themselves on their likeness to those collections of curiosities and antiquities and which have neither a monetary nor an archaeological value, and the price of which simply depends upon fancy, accident or passion." Those who think that matter of fact sense, common sense is a sufficiently efficient teacher to mankind must look uponthe savant in about the same way that Socrates looked upon the sophists ; as useless and subtle dis- putators. Those who think that feeling and imagination, the spontaneous instincts of human nature can get at essential truths of life by a kind of intuition will be equally consistent in considering the researches of the sa...« less