A majority of human beings are abundantly endowed...

Denver (Col.) Times

A majority of human beings are abundantly endowed with the denseness of the monkey kind—gazing, wondering, never creating. A truth put before humanity is often not accepted except after hundreds of years of fighting and arguing. The plainest facts create no impression until they have been repeated and fought over, and forced upon unwilling, dull human minds. At least the monkey, when he sees a fire burning, knows enough to come down from the tree and sit near the fire and get warm; but ordinary human beings, when they see a new idea, instead to accepting it, gathering around it, enjoying and blessing its light and warmth, turn against it and denounce it.

Suppose this family of monkeys, seeing the fire, had rushed to the topmost bough of the tree, denouncing the fire, expressing their hatred of it and their belief that it would probably freeze them? They would not act much more foolishly than does the average human being who has a plain and useful truth put before him.

When Galileo discovered that the earth was round and moved around the sun, turning on its axis, he was called a blasphemous maniac. And he would have been burned if he had not denied upon his kness the truth that he had given to the world. When Harvey announced such a simple, self-evident truth as the circulation of the blood, he was called a quack and a fool by almost the whole medical profession. It is the fact that no doctor over forty years of age would admit the truth of his discovery. Even the most intelligent human beings denounced as falsehood what every public school child now knows to be the truth.

When one of humanity's greatest benefactors discovered the use of anesthetics, making it possible to render the brain unconscious during surgical operations, he was denounced. They could not deny the truth of his statement—a whiff of chloroform could prove it; but they called him sacrilegious on the ground that he was trying to interfere with the will of God. "God," said the blasphemous ignoramuses, "wants human beings to suffer. If you give a man chloroform when you cut off his leg, and spare him the pain, you are thwarting the will of God." Thus it has ever been in history. The railroad was denounced, first as impossible, and then as dangerous, Illuminating gas, it was said, would blow cities to pieces. Many scientific inventors were denounced as partners of the devil—denounced by the devil's chief partner, ignorance—and compelled to hide their discoveries.

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