The poet of science Author:William North Rice 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: Ill ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LESSONS OF SCIENCE1 The study of the relations of science and religion, which has seemed to me probably the most important part o... more »f my life-work, has required a division of my time and interest between the two great territories of thought whose relations to each other I have sought in some degree to interpret. In a certain sense, therefore, I have lived a double life, functioning sometimes, so to speak, as the Reverend Doctor Jekyll, and sometimes as Professor Hyde. In the two different capacities in which I have acted, I have been associated with two classes of intellectual workers whose habits of thought differ considerably from each other. I have learned to regard both groups of my associates with profound respect and admiration for their high intellectual and moral qualities, and tofeel a genial sympathy with both in what seem to me their faults and limitations. 1 Address before the Mid-year Assembly of the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908. I wish to speak first of one exceedingly wholesome ethical effect of the habits of mind involved in scientific study, altogether irrespective of the particular opinions to which that study may lead. Scientific men, I think, exhibit the virtue of truthfulness in a higher degree than any other class of people. Of course, I do not mean that every individual of the class is thoroughly truthful. I have heard of a really able and justly renowned paleontologist who is said to have printed false dates on some of his publications, in order to secure a claim of priority in the naming and description of certain species of fossils. But, if now and then a scientific man lies, it no more invalidates the claim of truthfulness for scientific men in general, than the fact that once in a wh...« less