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reconcile science, religion, and the arts. However, I know only one liter-
ary example that took the opposite stand and ridiculed the hubris motif
with respect to chemistry, which is from the American novelist Herman
Melville (1819-91). In his picaresque satire The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade (1857), 52 this confidence-man, scene-by-scene, transforms
into various pseudomoralistic figures. One is a herb doctor who lectures
at length in front of a very sick man about the wrongs of chemistry-based
medicine as opposed to his own natural herbs. Here, I quote only a small
part (chap. 16): 53
Oh, who can wonder at that old reproach against science, that it is atheis-
tical? And here is my prime reason for opposing these chemical practi-
tioners, who have sought out so many inventions. For what do their in-
ventions indicate, unless it be that kind and degree of pride in human
skill, which seems scarce compatible with reverential dependence upon
the power above? Try to rid my mind of it as I may, yet still these chem-
ical practitioners with their tinctures, and fumes, and braziers, and occult
incantations, seem to me like Pharaoh's vain sorcerers, trying to beat
down the will of heaven. Day and night, in all charity, I intercede for
them, that heaven may not, in its own language, be provoked to anger
with their inventions; may not take vengeance of their inventions. A
thousand pities that you should ever have been in the hands of these
Egyptians.
Eventually the sick man, unable to listen to the chatter of the quack any
longer, buys a few of his herbs to get rid of him.
In the metaphysical battle against the emergence of modern science,
which chemistry embodied for nineteenth-century writers, the hubris
theme was the weakest argument, but became the strongest blow. It was
weak not only because the actual research, such as the rudimentary steps
of medicinal chemistry and the synthesis of some organic substances,
gave little reason to compare chemists with the Christian creator; also,
based on any of the ethical theories of the time, there was simply no
moral objection to the improvement of medical or other material condi-
tions of life. Moreover, the whole idea of hubris, which is rooted in and
52 First published New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857.
53 On the herb doctor, see Browner 2005, pp. 91-101; for related biographical anec-
dotes, see Cook 1996, pp. 91f., 106-9.
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