ABSTRACT
One might maintain the thesis that science in America is both too much honored and too little appreciated. There is no doubt that the prestige of science today is pre-eminent. The coming of many cultivated Germans to the United States after 1848 accelerated the study of science and philosophy, and the generation which came to maturity at the time of the Civil War and immediately thereafter was greatly stirred by the works of Spencer and Darwin. The attitude of religious leaders to science has generally been either avowedly or implicitly hostile. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the works of Voltaire and Diderot affected the intellectual climate of the United States. The refusal to recognize that the strength and source of science lies in its methodology has led to some interesting and confusing notions of what science is, both among laymen and among scientific workers.
