ABSTRACT
Agitation for the removal of religious tests in the English universities coincided with a vigorous episcopal crusade against the evolutionary doctrine. This circumstance is chiefly responsible for the growth of a movement to check the influence of the Churches on English educational policy and public discussion of such matters as the age of the earth, the spiritual value of venereal disease, and the personal convenience of anæsthetics. It is then clear that many people who are not scientific workers do not use them in the same sense as we do. When some people talk about rational argument they mean confidence in a logical edifice built on a foundation of self-evident principles. The scientific worker distrusts the exercise of man’s reasoning powers except in so far as they are continually disciplined by the factual verification and the search for new data.
