The weapon seemed resistless and the
wound fatal, but M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.
His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary
proofs that Prof. See never made such a declaration. He held the
notes used by Prof. See in his lecture. Prof. See, it appeared,
belonged to a school in medical science which combated certain
ideas regarding medicine as an _art_. The inflamed imagination of
the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the
lecture-notes proved, led him to mistake the word "_art_" for
"ame," and to exhibit Prof. See as treating a theological when
he was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence
of the soul the professor had said nothing.
The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated
in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet,
dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors
by Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their discomfiture.
Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in
bringing ridicule on religion, and in thrusting still deeper
into the minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all
mistaken ideas: the conviction that religion and science are
enemies.
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