The Coming Age.
THE COMING AGE.
BY ALEXANDER DEL !vrAR.
democratic progress. When we democratize education and freedom of speech and press, and so become unafraid of the democratization of labor and welfare, no sane man can be persuaded that revolution by violence can serve him any purpose.
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THREE or four thousand years ago the prevailing religion of the
world was the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, as personified
by Sol, Luna, Saturn, Jupiter, \>nus. Mercury, Mars, all of which
heavenly bodies were believed to circulate about the earth, as the
center of the entire system ; while their personifications governed
the aftairs of man.
This geocentric religion received an admonitory shock when the
opening of Phoenician commerce with the Orient, about the fifteenth
century B. C, led to a vague suggestion of the heliocentric theory
and to a second and more forcible shock when the Indian conquests
of Darius and the voyage of Scylax brought to the West further
proofs against the prevailing cosmogonal belief. These evidences,
when echoed more or less publicly by Pythagoras, Thales,
Anaximander, and Qlnopides, though suppressed by the temples and, in
the case of Pythagoras, followed by the assassination of the
philosopher, were nevertheless not extinguished.
Between the Indian expeditions of Darius and Alexander there
were not a few philosophers who ventured to question the
geocentric theory, upon which the religions of Greece were founded.
Among them were Philolaus, Plato, Archytas, Heraclides of Pontus,
Nicetas, and Aristarchus. But the information that Alexander
acquired and Megasthenes brought from India was overwhelming,
and the disquisitions of Aristotle, Dicsearchus, Seleucus, Timceus
of Locris, Archimedes, and numerous other philosophers, though
more or less cautiously disseminated, proved sufficient to efifectually
destroy the bulwarks of an erroneous astronomy and the fantastic
creeds which grew out of or were sustained by it.
The immediate cause of their fall was, however, not due to
scientific revolution, but to the degrading worship of Alexander,
the Ptolemies, the Seleucidse. and Demetrius Poliorcetes. It was
revolt from this lowest form of anthropomorphism which swept
THE OPEN COURT.
away all that remained of the ancient Greek schools and oi)ened
the way to the conquest of the heliocentric theory.
\o enlarged survey of religious evolution during the past three
thousand years will fail to afford similar lessons ; the ever-increasing
j^Tound-swell of scientific advance and the top-wave of some
immediate cause, something that aroused popular interest in public
affairs after science or discovery had furnished the basis of progress.
The con(iucst of luiro])e. Asia Minor, and Xorthern Africa by
I'omjiey. Gcsar and Augustus, brought to one focus of comparison
the astronomical and geographical information of the principal
civilized regions of the earth and resulted in that Augustan age of
learning which afforded a point of departure for all scientific knowledge
in the West. Later on, it was the disgust occasioned, not so much
by the worship of Augustus, as of that of his imperial successors,
whicii furnished the impetus for Christianity. It was the
deadening influence of the conflict of the political and religious systems
tliat followed, which is responsible for the Dark Ages.
.\s usual, the first heralds of returning light came from the
East ex oricntc lux. Tn A. D. 530, Aryabhatta, a Hindu
astronomer, revi\'ed and taught tlie heliocentric theory, and in one
magnificent essay brushed aside the entire mass of false science and
idiotic fables which were based upon the astrology of the Hindu
temples. The knowledge of Aryabhatta's essay and of the
obser\ations ui)on which it was founded, was brought into Europe by
tlie .Arabians in the ninth century, the same in which the Norsemen
coasted the continent of America. Tn A. D. 1020 Alberuni. an
Arabian astronomer, in a work which became widely known in
luiroi)e. taught the heliocentric theory and accompanied it with a
mass of scientific observations sufificient to afiford food for
cogitation to several generations of doubters. During six or seven
centuries of darkness the .Arabians alone held aloft the torch of science
and when it shone in Spain it lit a new and memorable light in the
mind of a certain Galician navigator.
There is little risk in assigning the Protestant Reformation to
the voyages of "Columbus." They smashed to pieces at once and
forever the theory of a flat earth and the thousand and one
delusions based tipon it, in which the schools had previously indulged.
They undermined the authority of the "fathers." of the saints, and
of their pretended miracles. Yet the immediate cause of the
Reformation was not the proofs of sphericity (for it was believed by most
peo])le that "Columbus" had landed upon the coast of India), nor
the aberration of the compass, nor the art of high-sea navigation. (...truncated)