Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “Socialism Versus Fads” by Father Thomas Hagerty, Part I

Quote Father Hagerty, ISR p452, Feb 1903 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 6, 1903
Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic

From the International Socialist Review of February 1903:

Socialism Versus Fads.

[-by Father Thomas Hagerty]
———-

[Part I of II]

A LACK of what Whewell so aptly calls “the habit of geometrical thought” is noticeable in much of the confusion which upsets men’s judgment of Socialism. Many persons, earnest in their work for the co-operative common wealth, have only one measure for all problems. From their iron prejudices they forge a Procustean bed upon which they stretch every event too small to fit it and foreshorten every long-limbed fact which has the misfortune to stick over its rigid limits. Thus, as Locke has observed, “some men have so used their heads to mathematical figures, that in giving a preference to the methods of that science, they introduce lines and diagrams into their study of divinity or political inquiries, as if nothing could be known with out them; and others accustomed to retired speculations run natural philosophy into metaphysical notions and the abstract generalities of logic; and how often may one meet with religion and morality treated of in the terms of the laboratory, and thought to be improved by the methods and notions of chemistry?” *

Evidences of the effect of this method abound in every age. Thales of Miletus, the founder of Greek philosophy, based his teachings of Nature on the theory that out of water all things are made. Water is the primal matter and the earth itself floats upon water. The great Philo of Alexandria taught, after the manner of Plato, that the stars are persons endowed with reason and akin to the Divinity. The early churchmen took the Bible as the sole measure of scientific truth and, in consequence, fell into the most childish errors. Many of them denied the sphericity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes. The learned St. Augustine declared that no men live on the other side of the earth because “Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam.”

Martin Luther bitterly assailed the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and asserted that “this fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”** When Newton advanced the doctrine of the unequal refrangibility of different rays to account for colors, Goethe wrote his Farbenlehre (Tübingen, 1810), in fierce opposition to the doctrine. He held up Newton to the world as a scientific impostor, and propounded the utterly absurd hypothesis of “the dim medium.” Both his training in Natural History and his poetic turn of mind operated to unfit him for the tasks imposed by the mechanical sciences and, in the words of Tyndal, “he became a mere ignis fatuus to those who followed him.”*** We know that it took the geologists one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic. Voltaire**** ridiculed Bernard Palissy, Moro, and Vallisneri and argued that fossils are mere sports of nature due to the plastic power of the earth itself. And it required almost one hundred and fifty years to prove that fossils are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

Indeed, almost every new science has to suffer from its function and limitation warping and misconceiving from within and without. The science of economics has not escaped a like experience. Some men take it out of the realm of the practical and the material and set it up as the standard to which all knowledge and faith must conform or suffer rejection. In its name they damn all creeds and dogmas. As part of what they consider the legitimate philosophy of Socialism they deny the spirituality of mind and the existence of an unseen world, or affirm the necessity of vegetarianism and the Suchness of the Mahâyâna. Anti-vaccination, absent treatment, vitaopathy, Buddhism, osteopathy, faith-cure, total abstinence, free love, self-hypnotic healing, personal vibration, breakfast foods, atheism, naturopathic regeneration, astrology, or drugless medication—as the case may be—are offered us in virtue of, and by logical inclusion with, the Socialism of the man who has only one measure, for all things.

* Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 24.

** Andrew D. White; History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, vol. I., ch. Ill., p. 126. New York, 1901.

*** Fragments of Science, vol. II., ch. ii., p. 148. New York, 1807.

**** Oeuvres completes de M. de Voltaire, Paris, Sanson it Cle., 1792, vol. 48, p. 131 et seq.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]