Critics of Christian Science have sometimes taken exception to the use of the term Science in this connection, on the ground that the adherents of this system refuse to submit its practical operations in the healing of disease to the test of clinical observation and experimentation, conducted in accordance with the requirements of the so-called "laboratory method" of research. That the great bulk of human learning has ever been uncertain and transient will be admitted by every student of the history of thought, for not only have standards of scholarship and criteria of knowledge undergone constant modification, but at intervals they have suffered the most radical and revolutionary departures. Not infrequently has it occurred that the most widely accepted scientific inferences of a particular period have been relegated to the domain of myth and superstition by the leaders of thought in a subsequent epoch. Lewes observes that "Aristotle with all his knowledge . . . would be as a child in Liebig's laboratory."
It is proverbially true that experts and specialists in general are among the most reluctant to concede the merits of new discoveries involving a radical departure from previously accepted ideals and standards. Revolutions in thought have almost invariably been accomplished in the face of the inveterate and organized opposition of an intellectual oligarchy entrenched in the strongholds of conventional learning. Is it reasonable, then, to assume that still further progress in understanding will not be attended by similar conditions?
The proposition is self-evident, that the most elaborately framed and seemingly substantial superstructure that may be reared by the human intellect is destined sooner or later to crumble into dust, unless it rests on absolute truth. May we not expect, therefore, that as human thought approximates to the true standard of Science, theories and inferences derived from observation of and experimentation with material values—which from the very nature of the case must always be purely problematical—will give place to knowledge of a higher order based on self-evident certainty which can only be discerned spiritually?
