Note 121 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Woodward’s book is in its own way instructive as regards the history of opinion. A “Professor of Physick” in Gresham College, F.C.P., and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses “only as an historian,” and to give him credit finally because he finds his narrative “punctually true.”121 He had before him an abundance of facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story; yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition and dissolution of the earth’s strata by the flood’s action122—a hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition, and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward’s; and beyond his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone further than scientific; and men’s thinking on certain problems of cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline in experiential science.