Two on the races of men.
These lectures are what is known as the Cosmos, and present a
scientific picture of the world--of infinite diversity in unity; of
ceaseless motion in the eternal grasp of law.
These lectures contain the result of his investigation, observation and
experience; they furnish the connection between phenomena; they
disclose some of the changes through which the earth has passed in the
countless ages; the history of vegetation, animals and men; the effects
of climate upon individuals and nations; the relation we sustain to
other worlds, and demonstrate that all phenomena, whether insignificant
or grand, exist in accordance with inexorable law.
There are some truths, however, that we never should forget:
Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has
been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its
dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom.
Since the murder of Hypatia in the fifth century, when the polished
blade of Greek philosophy was broken by the club of ignorant
Catholicism, until today, superstition has detested every effort of
reason.
It is almost impossible to conceive of the completeness of the victory
that the church achieved over philosophy. For ages science was utterly
ignored; thought was a poor slave; an ignorant priest was master of the
world; faith put out the eyes of the soul; the reason was a trembling
coward; the imagination was set on fire of hell; every human feeling
was sought to be suppressed; love was considered infinitely sinful;
pleasure was the road to eternal fire, and God was supposed to be happy
only when his children were miserable. The world was governed by an
Almighty's whim; prayers could change the order of things, halt the
grand procession of nature; could produce rain, avert pestilence,
famine, and death in all its forms. There was no idea of the certain;
all depended upon divine pleasure--or displeasure, rather; heaven was
full of inconsistent malevolence, and earth of ignorance. Everything
was done to appease the divine wrath; every public calamity was caused
by the sins of the people; by a failure to pay tithes, or for having,
even in secret, felt a disrespect for a priest. To the poor multitude
the earth was a kind of enchanted forest, full of demons ready to
devour, and theological serpents lurking, with infinite power, to
fascinate and torture the unhappy and impotent soul. Life to them was
a dim and mysterious labyrinth, in which they wandered weary, and lost,
guided by priests as bewildered as themselves, without knowing that at
every step the Ariadne of reason offered them the long lost clue.
The very heavens were full of death; the lightning was regarded as the
glittering vengeance of God, and the earth was thick with snares for
the unwary feet of man. The soul was supposed to be crowded with the
wild beasts of desire; the heart to be totally corrupt, prompting only
to crime; virtues were regarded as deadly sins in disguise; there was a
continual warfare being waged between the Deity and the devil for the
possession of every soul, the latter generally being considered
victorious. The flood, the tornado, the volcano, were all evidences of
the displeasure of heaven and the sinfulness of man. The blight that
withered, the frost that blackened, the earthquake that devoured, were
the messengers of the creator.
The world was governed by fear.
Against all the evils of nature there was known only the defense of
prayer, of fasting, of credulity, and devotion. Man, in his
helplessness, endeavored to soften the heart of God. The faces of the
multitude were blanched with fear, and wet with tears; they were the
prey of hypocrites, kings and priests.
My heart bleeds when I contemplate the sufferings endured by the
millions now dead; of those who lived when the world appeared to be
insane; when the heavens were filled with an infinite HORROR, who
snatched babes, with dimpled hands and rosy cheeks, from the white
breasts of mothers and dashed them into an abyss of eternal flame.
Slowly, beautifully, like the coming of the dawn, came the grand truth
that the universe is governed by law--that disease fastens itself upon
the good and upon the bad; that the tornado cannot be stopped by
counting beads; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended knees, the
lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, nor the cruel waves of the
sea for prayer; that paying tithes causes rather than prevents famine;
that pleasure is not sin; that happiness is the only good; that demons
and gods exist only in the imagination; that faith is a lullaby, sung
to put the soul to sleep; that devotion is a bribe that fear offers to
supposed power; that offering rewards in another world for obedience in
this, is simply buying a soul on credit; that knowledge consists in
ascertaining the laws of nature, and that wisdom is the science of
happiness. Slowly, grandly, beautifully, these truths are dawning upon
mankind.
From Copernicus we learned that this earth is only a grain of sand on
the infinite shore of the universe; that everywhere we are surrounded
by shining worlds vastly greater than our own, all moving and existing
in accordance with law. True, the earth began to grow small, but man
began to grow great.
The moment the fact was established that other worlds are governed by
law, it was only natural to conclude that our little world was also
under its dominion. The old theological method of accounting for
physical phenomena by the pleasure and displeasure of the Deity was, by
the intellectual, abandoned. They found: that disease, death, life,
thought, heat, cold, the seasons, the winds, the dreams of man, the
instinct of animals--in short, that all physical and mental phenomena
are governed by law, absolute, eternal and inexorable.
Let it be understood by the term Law is meant the same invariable
relations of succession and resemblance predicated of all facts
springing from like conditions. Law is a fact--not a cause. It is a
fact that like conditions produce like results; this fact is LAW. When
we say that the universe is governed by law, we mean that this fact,
called law, is incapable of change; that it is, has been, and forever
will be, the same inexorable, immutable FACT, inseparable from all
phenomena. Law, in this sense, was not enacted or made. It could not
have been otherwise than as it is. That which necessarily exists has
no creator.
Only a few years ago this earth was considered the real center of the
universe; all the stars were supposed to revolve around this
insignificant atom. The German mind, more than any other, has done
away with this piece of egotism. Purbach and Mullerus, in the
fifteenth century, contributed most to the advancement of astronomy in
their day. To the latter the world is indebted for the introduction of
decimal fractions, which completed our arithmetical notation, and
formed the second of the three steps by which, in modern times, the
science of numbers has been so greatly improved; and yet both of these
men believed in the most childish absurdities--at least in enough of
them to die without their orthodoxy having ever been questioned.
Next came the great Copernicus, and he stands at the head of the heroic
thinkers of his time, who had the courage and the mental strength to
break the chains of prejudice, custom and authority, and to establish
truth on the basis of experience, observation and reason. He removed
the earth, so to speak, from the center of the universe, and ascribed
to it a twofold motion, and demonstrated the true position which it
occupies in the solar system.
At his bidding the earth began to revolve. At the command of his
genius it commenced its grand flight amid the eternal constellations
around the sun. For fifty years his discoveries were disregarded. All
at once, by the exertions of Galileo, they were kindled into so grand a
conflagration as to consume the philosophy of Aristotle, to alarm the
hierarchy of Rome, and to threaten the existence of every opinion not
founded upon experience, observation and reason.
The earth was no longer considered a universe governed by the caprices
of some revengeful Deity, who had made the stars out of what he had
left after completing the world, and had stuck them in the sky simply
to adorn the night.
I have said this much concerning astronomy because it was the first
splendid step forward! The first sublime blow that shattered the lance
and shivered the shield of superstition; the first real help that man
received from heaven. Because it was the first great lever placed
beneath the altar of a false religion; the first revelation of the
infinite to man, the first authoritative declaration that the universe
is governed by law; the first science that gave the lie direct to the
cosmogony of barbarism; and because it is the sublimest victory that
reason has achieved.
In speaking of astronomy I have confined myself to the discoveries made
since the revival of learning. Long ago, on the banks of the Ganges,
ages before Copernicus lived, Aryabhatta taught that the earth is a
sphere and revolves on its own axis. This, however, does not detract
from the glory of the great German. The discovery of the Hindoo had
been lost in the midnight of Europe--in the age of faith--and
Copernicus was as much a discoverer as though Aryabhatta had never
lived.
In this short address there is no time to speak of other sciences, and
to point out the particular evidence furnished by each to establish the
dominion of law, nor to more than mention the name of Descartes, the
first who undertook to give an explanation of the celestial motions, or
who formed the vast and philosophic conception of reducing all the
phenomena of the universe to the same law; of Montaigne, one of the
heroes of common sense; of Galvani, whose experiments gave the
telegraph to the world; of Voltaire, who contributed more than any
other of the sons of men to the destruction of religious intolerance;
of August Comte, whose genius erected to itself a monument that still
touches the stars; of Guttenberg, Watt, Stephenson, Arkwright, all
soldiers of science in the grand army of the dead kings.
The glory of science is that it is freeing the soul-breaking the mental
manacles--getting the brain out of bondage--giving courage to
thought--filling the world with mercy, justice and joy.
Science found agriculture plowing with a stick--reaping with a
sickle--commerce at the mercy of the treacherous waves and the
inconstant winds--a world without books--without schools--man denying
the authority of reason, employing his ingenuity in the manufacture of
instruments of torture--in building inquisitions and cathedrals. It
found the land filled with malicious monks--with persecuting
Protestants, and the burners of men. It found a world full of fear,
ignorance upon its knees; credulity the greatest virtue; women treated
like beasts, of burden; cruelty the only means of reformation. It
found the world at the mercy of disease and famine; men trying to read
their fates in the stars, and to tell their fortunes by signs and
wonders; generals thinking to conquer their enemies by making the sign
of the cross, or by telling a rosary. It found all history full of
petty and ridiculous falsehood, and the Almighty was supposed to spend
most of his time turning sticks into snakes, drowning boys for swimming
on Sunday, and killing little children for the purpose of converting
their parents. It found the earth filled with slaves and tyrants, the
people in all countries downtrodden, half naked, half starved, without
hope, and without reason in the world.
Such was the condition of man when the morning of science dawned upon
his brain, and before he had heard the sublime declaration that the
universe is governed by law.
For the change that has taken place we are indebted solely to
science--the only lever capable of raising mankind. Abject faith is
barbarism; reason is civilization. To obey is slavish; to act from a
sense of obligation perceived by the reason is noble. Ignorance
worships mystery; reason explains it--the one grovels, the other soars.
No wonder that fable is the enemy of knowledge. A man with a false
diamond shuns the society of lapidaries, and it is upon this principle
that superstition abhors science.
In all ages the people have honored those who dishonored them. The have
worshiped their destroyers--they have canonized the most gigantic
liars, and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the
loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.
Imposture has always worn a crown.
The world is beginning to change because the people are beginning to
think. To think is to advance. Everywhere the great minds are
investigating the creeds and the superstitions of men--the phenomena of
nature, and the laws of things. At the head of this great army of
investigators stood Humboldt--the serene leader of an intellectual
host--a king by the suffrage of science, and the divine right of genius.
And today we are not honoring some butcher called a soldier--some wily
politician called a statesman--some robber called a king--nor some
malicious metaphysician called a saint. We are honoring the grand
Humboldt, whose victories were all achieved in the arena of thought;
who destroyed prejudice, ignorance and error--not men: who shed
light--not blood, and who contributed to the knowledge, the wealth and
the happiness of all mankind.
His life was pure, his aims lofty, his learning varied and profound,
and his achievements vast.
We honor him because he has ennobled our race, because he has
contributed as much as any man living or dead to the real prosperity of
the world. We honor him because he honored us--because he labored for
others--because he was the most learned man of the most learned
nation--because he left a legacy of glory to every human being. For
these reasons he is honored throughout the world. Millions are doing
homage to his genius at this moment, and millions are pronouncing his
name with reverence, and recounting what he accomplished.
We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents mountains and
volcanoes--with the great plains--the wide deserts--the snow-lipped
craters of the Andes--with primeval forests and European capitals--with
wildernesses and universities--with savages and savants--with the
lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes--with peaks and pampas, and steppes,
and cliffs and crags--with the progress of the world--with every
science known to man, and with every star glittering in the immensity
of space.
Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking creeds of his day; wasted
none of his time in the stupidities, inanities and contradictions of
theological metaphysics; he did not endeavor to harmonize the astronomy
and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the nineteenth
century. Never, for one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard of
truth; he investigated, he studied, he thought, he separated the gold
from the dross in the crucible of his grand brain. He was never found
on his knees before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the
grand, tranquil column of reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer
of nature, and at the age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a
century, covered with the insignia of honor, loved by a nation,
respected by a world, with kings for his servants, he laid his weary
head upon her bosom--upon the bosom of the universal mother--and with
her loving arms around him, sank into that slumber called death.
History added another name to the starry scroll of the immortals.
The world is his monument; upon the eternal granite of her hills he
inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting stone, his genius wrote
this, the sublimest of truths:
"THE UNIVERSE IS GOVERNED BY LAW!"