Betty Book, The

The history of all progress in knowledge is a "de-occultization." Fully half of the things we do daily as a matter of course would, even as recently as two centuries ago, have been considered magic, without explanation except as the product of occult forces and knowledge. The continuity of history is unbroken in that respect. If we should learn anything at all from the past, that one thing should stand out for us as invariable. The superstition of the past is the science of the present, the proverb of the future. The order of events is always the same. First a few people observed or did things which were denied or denounced vehemently by the old school as crazy or maleficent or supernatural. Exact knowledge overtook these things and found them to be harmonious examples of natural law.

The uses of humanity absorbed them and they became commonplaces of existence, thoroughly de-occultized, adopted into the body of usual mental life. This has happened over and over and over again with unvarying regularity. One of the most fascinating of scientific byplays is to backtrack through history picking up at random marvels and miracles, stripping them of warping legend, and explaining them in the light of what we now know. They became not the less marvels and miracles, if you please, but de-occultized. It should be added that all cannot be so explained. The unsolved residue is not the more-or less-improbable for that. Perhaps our grandchildren's progress will show this unexplained residue as simple as we have found some of the miracles that dumfounded our ancestors.

There are two things that this history of de-occultization, as I have called it, has taught us. One is, the extraordinary initial opposition that always meets the process. A combination of man's conservatism, dislike of being jarred loose once he has settled down to his satisfaction, a greater dislike of being proved mistaken, an intellectual pride in his achievements so far, and a rooted suspicion of the one who walks apart, have all contributed to this attitude.

The principle of the telescope is so much a commonplace of today that the very children catch and accept the idea; yet Galileo was branded as a madman, imprisoned, and only just escaped martyrdom. So certain were the scientists of his time of their reasoning according to "immutable physical law," that they refused to look through the telescope! They knew already what they would see! Joseph Thompson reported a mountain with snow under the equator, and died of a broken heart under the weight of scientific ridicule heaped upon him.

Science PROVED by the "immutable law of physics"-as then understood-that, no matter what the altitude, snow could not exist at such a latitude: only it does! Darwin was fought with savage ferocity. Langley was laughed to death. Why the bitterness? If these things, and all the others were not so, why rend and tear in attacking them? Answer that as you will, it is the history of progress; just as de-occultization is the invariable result.