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SCIENCE & EDUCATION
ESSAYS
BY
THOMAS H. HUXLEY
PREFACE
The apology offered in the Preface to the first volume of this series
for the occurrence of repetitions, is even more needful here I am
afraid. But it could hardly be otherwise with speeches and essays, on
the same topic, addressed at intervals, during more than thirty years,
to widely distant and different hearers and readers. The oldest piece,
that "On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences,"
contains some crudities, which I repudiated when the lecture was first
reprinted, more than twenty years ago; but it will be seen that much of
what I have had to say, later on in life, is merely a development of
the propositions enunciated in this early and sadly-imperfect piece of
work.
In view of the recent attempt to disturb the compromise about the
teaching of dogmatic theology, solemnly agreed to by the first School
Board for London, the fifteenth Essay; and, more particularly, the note
n. 3, may be found interesting.
T. H. H.
Hodeslea, Eastbourne, _September 4th, 1893_.
CONTENTS
I JOSEPH PRIESTLEY [1874]
(An Address delivered on the occasion of the presentation of a statue
of Priestley to the town of Birmingham)
II ON THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES [1854]
(An Address delivered in S. Martin's Hall)
III EMANCIPATION--BLACK AND WHITE [1865]
IV A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE TO FIND IT [1868]
(An Address to the South London Working Men's College)
V SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION: NOTES OF AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH [1869]
(Liverpool Philomathic Society)
VI SCIENCE AND CULTURE [1880]
(An Address delivered at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's Science
College, Birmingham)
VII ON SCIENCE AND ART IN RELATION TO EDUCATION [1882]
(An Address to the members of the Liverpool Institution)
VIII UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL [1874]
(Rectorial Address, Aberdeen)
IX ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION [1876]
(Delivered at the opening of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)
X ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY [1876]
(A Lecture in connection with the Loan Collection of Scientific
Apparatus, South Kensington Museum)
XI ON ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY [1877]
XII ON MEDICAL EDUCATION [1870]
(An Address to the students of the Faculty of Medicine in University
College, London)
XIII THE STATE AND THE MEDICAL PROFESSION [1884]
XIV THE CONNECTION OF THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES WITH MEDICINE [1881]
(An Address to the International Medical Congress)
XV THE SCHOOL BOARDS: WHAT THEY CAN DO, AND WHAT THEY MAY DO [1870]
XVI TECHNICAL EDUCATION [1877]
XVII ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROMOTION OF
TECHNICAL EDUCATION [1887]
COLLECTED ESSAYS
VOLUME III
I
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY
[1874]
If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have this day raised a statue
had been asked on what part of his busy life's work he set the highest
value, he would undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous
contributions to theology. In season and out of season, he was the
steadfast champion of that hypothesis respecting the Divine nature
which is termed Unitarianism by its friends and Socinianism by its
foes. Regardless of odds, he was ready to do battle with all comers in
that cause; and if no adversaries entered the lists, he would sally
forth to seek them.
To this, his highest ideal of duty, Joseph Priestley sacrificed the
vulgar prizes of life, which, assuredly, were within easy reach of a
man of his singular energy and varied abilities. For this object he put
aside, as of secondary importance, those scientific investigations
which he loved so well, and in which he showed himself so competent to
enlarge the boundaries of natural knowledge and to win fame. In this
cause he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy from the bigoted and the
unthinking, and came within sight of martyrdom; but bore with that
which is much harder to be borne than all these, the unfeigned
astonishment and hardly disguised contempt of a brilliant society,
composed of men whose sympathy and esteem must have been most dear to
him, and to whom it was simply incomprehensible that a philosopher
should seriously occupy himself with any form of Christianity.
It appears to me that the man who, setting before himself such an ideal
of life, acted up to it consistently, is worthy of the deepest respect,
whatever opinion may be entertained as to the real value of the tenets
which he so zealously propagated and defended.
But I am sure that I speak not only for myself, but for all this
assemblage, when I say that our purpose to-day is to do honour, not to
Priestley, the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley, the fearless
defender of rational freedom in thought and in action: to Priestley,
the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place
among "the swift runners who hand over the lamp of life," [1] and
transmit from one generation to another the fire kindled,
in the childhood of the world, at the Promethean altar of Science.
The main incidents of Priestley's life are so well known that I need
dwell upon them at no great length.
Born in 1733, at Fieldhead, near Leeds, and brought up among Calvinists
of the straitest orthodoxy, the boy's striking natural ability led to
his being devoted to the profession of a minister of religion; and, in
1752, he was sent to the Dissenting Academy at Daventry--an institution
which authority left undisturbed, though its existence contravened the
law. The teachers under whose instruction and influence the young man
came at Daventry, carried out to the letter the injunction to "try all
things: hold fast that which is good," and encouraged the discussion of
every imaginable proposition with complete freedom, the leading
professors taking opposite sides; a discipline which, admirable as it
may be from a purely scientific point of view, would seem to be
calculated to make acute, rather than sound, divines. Priestley tells
us, in his "Autobiography," that he generally found himself on the
unorthodox side: and, as he grew older, and his faculties attained
their maturity, this native tendency towards heterodoxy grew with his
growth and strengthened with his strength. He passed from Calvinism to
Arianism; and finally, in middle life, landed in that very broad form
of Unitarianism by which his craving after a credible and consistent
theory of things was satisfied.
On leaving Daventry Priestley became minister of a congregation, first
at Needham Market, and secondly at Nantwich; but whether on account of
his heterodox opinions, or of the stuttering which impeded his
expression of them in the pulpit, little success attended his efforts
in this capacity. In 1761, a career much more suited to his abilities
became open to him. He was appointed "tutor in the languages" in the
Dissenting Academy at Warrington, in which capacity, besides giving
three courses of lectures, he taught Latin, Greek, French, and Italian,
and read lectures on the theory of language and universal grammar, on
oratory, philosophical criticism, and civil law. And it is interesting
to observe that, as a teacher, he encouraged and cherished in those
whom he instructed the freedom which he had enjoyed, in his own student
days, at Daventry. One of his pupils tells us that,
"At the conclusion of his lecture, he always encouraged his
students to express their sentiments relative to the subject of it,
and to urge any objections to what he had delivered, without
reserve. It pleased him when any one commenced such a conversation.
In order to excite the freest discussion, he occasionally invited
the students to drink tea with him, in order to canvass the
subjects of his lectures. I do not recollect that he ever showed
the least displeasure at the strongest objections that were made to
what he delivered, but I distinctly remember the smile of
approbation with which he usually received them: nor did he fail to
point out, in a very encouraging manner, the ingenuity or force of
any remarks that were made, when they merited these characters. His
object, as well as Dr. Aikin's, was to engage the students to
examine and decide for themselves, uninfluenced by the sentiments
of any other persons." [2]
It would be difficult to give a better description of a model teacher
than that conveyed in these words.
From his earliest days, Priestley had shown a strong bent towards the
study of nature; and his brother Timothy tells us that the boy put
spiders into bottles, to see how long they would live in the same
air--a curious anticipation of the investigations of his later years.
At Nantwich, where he set up a school, Priestley informs us that he
bought an air pump, an electrical machine, and other instruments, in
the use of which he instructed his scholars. But he does not seem to
have devoted himself seriously to physical science until 1766, when he
had the great good fortune to meet Benjamin Franklin, whose friendship
he ever afterwards enjoyed. Encouraged by Franklin, he wrote a "History
of Electricity," which was published in 1767, and appears to have met
with considerable success.
In the same year, Priestley left Warrington to become the minister of a
congregation at Leeds; and, here, happening to live next door to a
public brewery, as he says,
"I, at first, amused myself with making experiments on the fixed
air which I found ready-made in the process of fermentation. When I
removed from that house I was under the necessity of making fixed
air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have
distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the
subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the
purpose, but of the cheapest kind.
"When I began these experiments I knew very little of _chemistry_,
and had, in a manner, no idea on the subject before I attended a
course of chemical lectures, delivered in the Academy at
Warrington, by Dr. Turner of Liverpool. But I have often thought
that, upon the whole, this circumstance was no disadvantage to me;
as, in this situation, I was led to devise an apparatus and
processes of my own, adapted to my peculiar views; whereas, if I
had been previously accustomed to the usual chemical processes, I
should not have so easily thought of any other, and without new
modes of operation, I should hardly have discovered anything
materially new." [3]
The first outcome of Priestley's chemical work, published in 1772, was
of a very practical character. He discovered the way of impregnating
water with an excess of "fixed air," or carbonic acid, and thereby
producing what we now know as "soda water"--a service to naturally, and
still more to artificially, thirsty souls, which those whose parched
throats and hot heads are cooled by morning draughts of that beverage,
cannot too gratefully acknowledge. In the same year, Priestley
communicated the extensive series of observations which his industry
and ingenuity had accumulated, in the course of four years, to the
Royal Society, under the title of "Observations on Different Kinds of
Air"--a memoir which was justly regarded of so much merit and
importance, that the Society at once conferred upon the author the
highest distinction in their power, by awarding him the Copley Medal.
In 1771 a proposal was made to Priestley to accompany Captain Cook in
his second voyage to the South Seas. He accepted it, and his
congregation agreed to pay an assistant to supply his place during his
absence. But the appointment lay in the hands of the Board of
Longitude, of which certain clergymen were members; and whether these
worthy ecclesiastics feared that Priestley's presence among the ship's
company might expose His Majesty's sloop _Resolution_ to the fate
which aforetime befell a certain ship that went from Joppa to Tarshish;
or whether they were alarmed lest a Socinian should undermine that
piety which, in the days of Commodore Trunnion, so strikingly
characterised sailors, does not appear; but, at any rate, they objected
to Priestley "on account of his religious principles," and appointed
the two Forsters, whose "religious principles," if they had been known
to these well-meaning but not far-sighted persons, would probably have
surprised them.
In 1772 another proposal was made to Priestley. Lord Shelburne,
desiring a "literary companion," had been brought into communication
with Priestley by the good offices of a friend of both, Dr. Price; and
offered him the nominal post of librarian, with a good house and
appointments, and an annuity in case of the termination of the
engagement. Priestley accepted the offer, and remained with Lord
Shelburne for seven years, sometimes residing at Calne, sometimes
travelling abroad with the Earl.
Why the connection terminated has never been exactly known; but it is
certain that Lord Shelburne behaved with the utmost consideration and
kindness towards Priestley; that he fulfilled his engagements to the
letter; and that, at a later period, he expressed a desire that
Priestley should return to his old footing in his house. Probably
enough, the politician, aspiring to the highest offices in the State,
may have found the position of the protector of a man who was being
denounced all over the country as an infidel and an atheist somewhat
embarrassing. In fact, a passage in Priestley's "Autobiography" on the
occasion of the publication of his "Disquisitions relating to Matter
and Spirit," which took place in 1777, indicates pretty clearly the
state of the case:--
"(126) It being probable that this publication would be unpopular,
and might be the means of bringing odium on my patron, several
attempts were made by his friends, though none by himself, to
dissuade me from persisting in it. But being, as I thought, engaged
in the cause of important truth, I proceeded without regard to any
consequences, assuring them that this publication should not be
injurious to his lordship."
It is not unreasonable to suppose that his lordship, as a keen,
practical man of the world, did not derive much satisfaction from this
assurance. The "evident marks of dissatisfaction" which Priestley says
he first perceived in his patron in 1778, may well have arisen from the
peer's not unnatural uneasiness as to what his domesticated, but not
tamed, philosopher might write next, and what storm might thereby he
brought down on his own head; and it speaks very highly for Lord
Shelburne's delicacy that, in the midst of such perplexities, he made
not the least attempt to interfere with Priestley's freedom of action.
In 1780, however, he intimated to Dr. Price that he should be glad to
establish Priestley on his Irish estates: the suggestion was
interpreted, as Lord Shelburne probably intended it should be, and
Priestley left him, the annuity of £150 a year, which had been promised
in view of such a contingency, being punctually paid.
After leaving Calne, Priestley spent some little time in London, and
then, having settled in Birmingham at the desire of his brother-in-law,
he was soon invited to become the minister of a large congregation.
This settlement Priestley considered, at the time, to be "the happiest
event of his life." And well he might think so; for it gave him
competence and leisure; placed him within reach of the best makers of
apparatus of the day; made him a member of that remarkable "Lunar
Society," at whose meetings he could exchange thoughts with such men as
Watt, Wedgwood, Darwin, and Boulton; and threw open to him the pleasant
house of the Galtons of Barr, where these men, and others of less note,
formed a society of exceptional charm and intelligence. [4]
But these halcyon days were ended by a bitter storm. The French
Revolution broke out. An electric shock ran through the nations;
whatever there was of corrupt and retrograde, and, at the same time, a
great deal of what there was of best and noblest, in European society
shuddered at the outburst of long-pent-up social fires. Men's feelings
were excited in a way that we, in this generation, can hardly
comprehend. Party wrath and virulence were expressed in a manner
unparalleled, and it is to be hoped impossible, in our times; and
Priestley and his friends were held up to public scorn, even in
Parliament, as fomenters of sedition. A "Church-and-King" cry was
raised against the Liberal Dissenters; and, in Birmingham, it was
intensified and specially directed towards Priestley by a local
controversy, in which he had engaged with his usual vigour. In 1791,
the celebration of the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille
by a public dinner, with which Priestley had nothing whatever to do,
gave the signal to the loyal and pious mob, who, unchecked, and indeed
to some extent encouraged, by those who were responsible for order, had
the town at their mercy for three days. The chapels and houses of the
leading Dissenters were wrecked, and Priestley and his family had to
fly for their lives, leaving library, apparatus, papers, and all their
possessions, a prey to the flames.
Priestley never returned to Birmingham. He bore the outrages and losses
inflicted upon him with extreme patience and sweetness, [5] and betook
himself to London. But even his scientific colleagues gave him a cold
shoulder; and though he was elected minister of a congregation at
Hackney, he felt his position to be insecure, and finally determined on
emigrating to the United States. He landed in America in 1794; lived
quietly with his sons at Northumberland, in Pennsylvania, where his
posterity still flourish; and, clear-headed and busy to the last, died
on the 6th of February 1804.
Such were the conditions under which Joseph Priestley did the work
which lay before him, and then, as the Norse Sagas say, went out of the
story. The work itself was of the most varied kind. No human interest
was without its attraction for Priestley, and few men have ever had so
many irons in the fire at once; but, though he may have burned his
fingers a little, very few who have tried that operation have burned
their fingers so little. He made admirable discoveries in science; his
philosophical treatises are still well worth reading; his political
works are full of insight and replete with the spirit of freedom; and
while all these sparks flew off from his anvil, the controversial
hammer rained a hail of blows on orthodox priest and bishop. While thus
engaged, the kindly, cheerful doctor felt no more wrath or
uncharitableness towards his opponents than a smith does towards his
iron. But if the iron could only speak!--and the priests and bishops
took the point of view of the iron.
No doubt what Priestley's friends repeatedly urged upon him--that he
would have escaped the heavier trials of his life and done more for the
advancement of knowledge, if he had confined himself to his scientific
pursuits and let his fellow-men go their way--was true. But it seems to
have been Priestley's feeling that he was a man and a citizen before he
was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are
at least as imperative as those of the latter. Moreover, there are men
(and I think Priestley was one of them) to whom the satisfaction of
throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends
the discovery of a new truth; who feel better satisfied with the
government of the world, when they have been helping Providence by
knocking an imposture on the head; and who care even more for freedom
of thought than for mere advance of knowledge. These men are the
Carnots who organise victory for truth, and they are, at least, as
important as the generals who visibly fight her battles in the field.
Priestley's reputation as a man of science rests upon his numerous and
important contributions to the chemistry of gaseous bodies; and to form
a just estimate of the value of his work--of the extent to which it
advanced the knowledge of fact and the development of sound theoretical
views--we must reflect what chemistry was in the first half of the
eighteenth century.
The vast science which now passes under that name had no existence.
Air, water, and fire were still counted among the elemental bodies; and
though Van Helmont, a century before, had distinguished different
kinds of air as _gas ventosum_ and _gas sylvestre_, and Boyle and Hales
had experimentally defined the physical properties of air, and
discriminated some of the various kinds of aëriform bodies, no one
suspected the existence of the numerous totally distinct gaseous
elements which are now known, or dreamed that the air we breathe and
the water we drink are compounds of gaseous elements.
But, in 1754, a young Scotch physician, Dr. Black, made the first
clearing in this tangled backwood of knowledge. And it gives one a
wonderful impression of the juvenility of scientific chemistry to think
that Lord Brougham, whom so many of us recollect, attended Black's
lectures when he was a student in Edinburgh. Black's researches gave
the world the novel and startling conception of a gas that was a
permanently elastic fluid like air, but that differed from common air
in being much heavier, very poisonous, and in having the properties of
an acid, capable of neutralising the strongest alkalies; and it took
the world some time to become accustomed to the notion.
A dozen years later, one of the most sagacious and accurate
investigators who has adorned this, or any other, country, Henry
Cavendish, published a memoir in the "Philosophical Transactions," in
which he deals not only with the "fixed air" (now called carbonic acid
or carbonic anhydride) of Black, but with "inflammable air," or what we
now term hydrogen.
By the rigorous application of weight and measure to all his processes,
Cavendish implied the belief subsequently formulated by Lavoisier,
that, in chemical processes, matter is neither created nor destroyed,
and indicated the path along which all future explorers must travel.
Nor did he himself halt until this path led him, in 1784, to the
brilliant and fundamental discovery that water is composed of two gases
united in fixed and constant proportions.
It is a trying ordeal for any man to be compared with Black and
Cavendish, and Priestley cannot be said to stand on their level.
Nevertheless his achievements are not only great in themselves, but
truly wonderful, if we consider the disadvantages under which he
laboured. Without the careful scientific training of Black, without the
leisure and appliances secured by the wealth of Cavendish, he scaled
the walls of science as so many Englishmen have done before and since
his day; and trusting to mother wit to supply the place of training,
and to ingenuity to create apparatus out of washing tubs, he discovered
more new gases than all his predecessors put together had done. He laid
the foundations of gas analysis; he discovered the complementary
actions of animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the
atmosphere; and, finally, he crowned his work, this day one hundred
years ago, by the discovery of that "pure dephlogisticated air" to
which the French chemists subsequently gave the name of oxygen. Its
importance, as the constituent of the atmosphere which disappears in
the processes of respiration and combustion, and is restored by green
plants growing in sunshine, was proved somewhat later. For these
brilliant discoveries, the Royal Society elected Priestley a fellow and
gave him their medal, while the Academies of Paris and St. Petersburg
conferred their membership upon him. Edinburgh had made him an honorary
doctor of laws at an early period of his career; but, I need hardly
add, that a man of Priestley's opinions received no recognition from
the universities of his own country.
That Priestley's contributions to the knowledge of chemical fact were
of the greatest importance, and that they richly deserve all the praise
that has been awarded to them, is unquestionable; but it must, at the
same time, be admitted that he had no comprehension of the deeper
significance of his work; and, so far from contributing anything to the
theory of the facts which he discovered, or assisting in their rational
explanation, his influence to the end of his life was warmly exerted in
favour of error. From first to last, he was a stiff adherent of the
phlogiston doctrine which was prevalent when his studies commenced;
and, by a curious irony of fate, the man who by the discovery of what
he called "dephlogisticated air" furnished the essential datum for the
true theory of combustion, of respiration, and of the composition of
water, to the end of his days fought against the inevitable corollaries
from his own labours. His last scientific work, published in 1800,
bears the title, "The Doctrine of Phlogiston established, and that of
the Composition of Water refuted."
When Priestley commenced his studies, the current belief was, that
atmospheric air, freed from accidental impurities, is a simple
elementary substance, indestructible and unalterable, as water was
supposed to be. When a combustible burned, or when an animal breathed
in air, it was supposed that a substance, "phlogiston," the matter of
heat and light, passed from the burning or breathing body into it, and
destroyed its powers of supporting life and combustion. Thus, air
contained in a vessel in which a lighted candle had gone out, or a
living animal had breathed until it could breathe no longer, was called
"phlogisticated." The same result was supposed to be brought about by
the addition of what Priestley called "nitrous gas" to common air.
In the course of his researches, Priestley found that the quantity of
common air which can thus become "phlogisticated," amounts to about
one-fifth the volume of the whole quantity submitted to experiment.
Hence it appeared that common air consists, to the extent of
four-fifths of its volume, of air which is already "phlogisticated";
while the other fifth is free from phlogiston, or "dephlogisticated."
On the other hand, Priestley found that air "phlogisticated" by
combustion or respiration could be "dephlogisticated," or have the
properties of pure common air restored to it, by the action of green
plants in sunshine. The question, therefore, would naturally arise--as
common air can be wholly phlogisticated by combustion, and converted
into a substance which will no longer support combustion, is it
possible to get air that shall be less phlogisticated than common air,
and consequently support combustion better than common air does?
Now, Priestley says that, in 1774, the possibility of obtaining air
less phlogisticated than common air had not occurred to him. [6] But in
pursuing his experiments on the evolution of air from various bodies by
means of heat, it happened that, on the 1st of August 1774, he threw
the heat of the sun, by means of a large burning glass which he had
recently obtained, upon a substance which was then called _mercurius
calcinatus per se_, and which is commonly known as red precipitate.
"I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled
from it very readily. Having got about three or four times as much
as the bulk of my materials, I admitted water to it, and found that
it was not imbibed by it. But what surprised me more than I can
well express, was that a candle burned in this air with a
remarkably vigorous flame, very much like that enlarged flame with
which a candle burns in nitrous air, exposed to iron or lime of
sulphur; but as I had got nothing like this remarkable appearance
from any kind of air besides this particular modification of
nitrous air, and I knew no nitrous acid was used in the preparation
of _mercurius calcinatus_, I was utterly at a loss how to
account for it.
"In this case also, though I did not give sufficient attention to
the circumstance at that time, the flame of the candle, besides
being larger, burned with more splendour and heat than in that
species of nitrous air; and a piece of red-hot wood sparkled in it,
exactly like paper dipped in a solution of nitre, and it consumed
very fast--an experiment which I had never thought of trying with
nitrous air." [7]
Priestley obtained the same sort of air from red lead, but, as he says
himself, he remained in ignorance of the properties of this new kind of
air for seven months, or until March 1775, when he found that the new
air behaved with "nitrous gas" in the same way as the dephlogisticated
part of common air does; [8] but that, instead of being diminished to
four-fifths, it almost completely vanished, and, therefore, showed
itself to be "between five and six times as good as the best common air
I have ever met with." [9] As this new air thus appeared to be
completely free from phlogiston, Priestley called it "dephlogisticated
air."
What was the nature of this air? Priestley found that the same kind of
air was to be obtained by moistening with the spirit of nitre (which he
terms nitrous acid) any kind of earth that is free from phlogiston, and
applying heat; and consequently he says: "There remained no doubt on my
mind but that the atmospherical air, or the thing that we breathe,
consists of the nitrous acid and earth, with so much phlogiston as is
necessary to its elasticity, and likewise so much more as is required
to bring it from its state of perfect purity to the mean condition in
which we find it." [10]
Priestley's view, in fact, is that atmospheric air is a kind of
saltpetre, in which the potash is replaced by some unknown earth.
And in speculating on the manner in which saltpetre is formed,
he enunciates the hypothesis, "that nitre is, formed by a real
_decomposition of the air itself_, the _bases_ that are presented to
it having, in such circumstances, a nearer affinity with the spirit
of nitre than that kind of earth with which it is united in the
atmosphere." [11]
It would have been hard for the most ingenious person to have wandered
farther from the truth than Priestley does in this hypothesis; and,
though Lavoisier undoubtedly treated Priestley very ill, and pretended
to have discovered dephlogisticated air, or oxygen, as he called it,
independently, we can almost forgive him when we reflect how different
were the ideas which the great French chemist attached to the body
which Priestley discovered.
They are like two navigators of whom the first sees a new country, but
takes clouds for mountains and mirage for lowlands; while the second
determines its length and breadth, and lays down on a chart its exact
place, so that, thenceforth, it serves as a guide to his successors,
and becomes a secure outpost whence new explorations may be pushed.
Nevertheless, as Priestley himself somewhere remarks, the first object
of physical science is to ascertain facts, and the service which he
rendered to chemistry by the definite establishment of a large number
of new and fundamentally important facts, is such as to entitle him to
a very high place among the fathers of chemical science.
It is difficult to say whether Priestley's philosophical, political,
or theological views were most responsible for the bitter hatred which
was borne to him by a large body of his country-men, [12] and which
found its expression in the malignant insinuations in which Burke, to
his everlasting shame, indulged in the House of Commons.
Without containing much that will be new to the readers of Hobbs,
Spinoza, Collins, Hume, and Hartley, and, indeed, while making no
pretensions to originality, Priestley's "Disquisitions relating to
Matter and Spirit," and his "Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
Illustrated," are among the most powerful, clear, and unflinching
expositions of materialism and necessarianism which exist in the
English language, and are still well worth reading.
Priestley denied the freedom of the will in the sense of its
self-determination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct from the
body; and as a natural consequence, he denied the natural immortality
of man.
In relation to these matters English opinion, a century ago, was very
much what it is now.
A man may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that
implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very
shocking, having a note of Calvanistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a
materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite
of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable
to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man,
respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbour of a cash-box,
as an actual or potential sensualist, the more virtuous in outward
seeming, the more certainly loaded with secret "grave personal sins."
Nevertheless, it is as certain as anything can be, that Joseph
Priestley was no gloomy fanatic, but as cheerful and kindly a soul as
ever breathed, the idol of children; a man who was hated only by those
who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in
personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best
testimony to whose worth is the generous and tender warmth with which
his many friends vied with one another in rendering him substantial
help, in all the crises of his career.
The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his
performance of every duty, his transparent sincerity, the
unostentatious and deep-seated piety which breathes through all his
correspondence, are in themselves a sufficient refutation of the
hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such
opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do
as good service as the brazen image that was set upon a pole before the
Israelites, if those who have been bitten by the fiery serpents of
sectarian hatred, which still haunt this wilderness of a world, are
made whole by looking upon the image of a heretic who was yet a saint.
Though Priestley did not believe in the natural immortality of man, he
held with an almost naïve realism that man would be raised from the
dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be
immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this
doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's,
have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican
Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known
"Essays"; [13] and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop of Kingston in Jamaica,
the first edition of whose remarkable book "On the Future States,"
dedicated to Archbishop Whately, was published in 1843 and the second
in 1857. According to Bishop Courtenay,
"The death of the body will cause a cessation of all the activity
of the mind by way of natural consequence; to continue for ever
UNLESS the Creator should interfere."
And again:--
"The natural end of human existence is the 'first death, the
dreamless slumber of the grave, wherein man lies spell-bound, soul
and body, under the dominion of sin and death--that whatever modes
of conscious existence, whatever future states of 'life' or of
'torment' beyond Hades are reserved for man, are results of our
blessed Lord's victory over sin and death; that the resurrection of
the dead must be preliminary to their entrance into either of the
future states, and that the nature and even existence of these
states, and even the mere fact that there is a futurity of
consciousness, can be known _only_ through God's revelation of
Himself in the Person and the Gospel of His Son."--P. 389.
And now hear Priestley:--
"Man, according to this system (of materialism), is no more than we
now see of him. His being commences at the time of his conception,
or perhaps at an earlier period. The corporeal and mental faculties,
in being in the same substance, grow, ripen, and decay together; and
whenever the system is dissolved it continues in a state of
dissolution till it shall please that Almighty Being who called it
into existence to restore it to life again."--"Matter and Spirit,"
p. 49.
And again:--
"The doctrine of the Scripture is, that God made man of the dust of
the ground, and by simply animating this organised matter, made man
that living percipient and intelligent being that he is. According
to Revelation, _death_ is a state of rest and insensibility,
and our only though sure hope of a future life is founded on the
doctrine of the resurrection of the whole man at some distant
period; this assurance being sufficiently confirmed to us both by
the evident tokens of a Divine commission attending the persons who
delivered the doctrine, and especially by the actual resurrection of
Jesus Christ, which is more authentically attested than any other
fact in history."--_Ibid_., p. 247.
We all know that "a saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn;" but it is
not yet admitted that the views which are consistent with such
saintliness in lawn, become diabolical when held by a mere dissenter.
[14]
I am not here either to defend or to attack Priestley's philosophical
views, and I cannot say that I am personally disposed to attach much
value to episcopal authority in philosophical questions; but it seems
right to call attention to the fact, that those of Priestley's opinions
which have brought most odium upon him have been openly promulgated,
without challenge, by persons occupying the highest positions in the
State Church.
I must confess that what interests me most about Priestley's
materialism, is the evidence that he saw dimly the seed of destruction
which such materialism carries within its own bosom. In the course of
his reading for his "History of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light,
and Colours," he had come upon the speculations of Boscovich and
Michell, and had been led to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that
our knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its properties; and that of
its substance--if it have a substance--we know nothing. And this led to
the further admission that, so far as we can know, there may be no
difference between the substance of matter and the substance of spirit
("Disquisitions," p. 16). A step farther would have shown Priestley
that his materialism was, essentially, very little different from the
Idealism of his contemporary, the Bishop of Cloyne.
As Priestley's philosophy is mainly a clear statement of the views of
the deeper thinkers of his day, so are his political conceptions based
upon those of Locke. Locke's aphorism that "the end of government is
the good of mankind," is thus expanded by Priestley:--
"It must necessarily be understood, therefore, whether it be
expressed or not, that all people live in society for their mutual
advantage; so that the good and happiness of the members, that is,
of the majority of the members, of any state, is the great standard
by which everything relating to that state must finally be
determined." [15]
The little sentence here interpolated, "that is, of the majority of the
members of any state," appears to be that passage which suggested to
Bentham, according to his own acknowledgment, the famous "greatest
happiness" formula, which by substituting "happiness" for "good," has
converted a noble into an ignoble principle. But I do not call to mind
that there is any utterance in Locke quite so outspoken as the
following passage in the "Essay on the First Principles of
Government." After laying down as "a fundamental maxim in all
Governments," the proposition that "kings, senators, and nobles" are
"the servants of the public," Priestley goes on to say:--
"But in the largest states, if the abuses of the government should
at any time be great and manifest; if the servants of the people,
forgetting their masters and their masters' interest, should pursue
a separate one of their own; if, instead of considering that they
are made for the people, they should consider the people as made
for them; if the oppressions and violation of right should be
great, flagrant, and universally resented; if the tyrannical
governors should have no friends but a few sycophants, who had long
preyed upon the vitals of their fellow-citizens, and who might be
expected to desert a government whenever their interests should be
detached from it: if, in consequence of these circumstances, it
should become manifest that the risk which would be run in
attempting a revolution would be trifling, and the evils which
might be apprehended from it were far less than those which
were actually suffered and which were daily increasing; in the name
of God, I ask, what principles are those which ought to restrain an
injured and insulted people from asserting their natural rights,
and from changing or even punishing their governors--that is, their
servants--who had abused their trust, or from altering the whole
form of their government, if it appeared to be of a structure so
liable to abuse?"
As a Dissenter, subject to the operation of the Corporation and Test
Acts, and as a Unitarian excluded from the benefit of the Toleration
Act, it is not surprising to find that Priestley had very definite
opinions about Ecclesiastical Establishments; the only wonder is that
these opinions were so moderate as the following passages show them to
have been:--
"Ecclesiastical authority may have been necessary in the infant
state of society, and, for the same reason, it may perhaps continue
to be, in some degree, necessary as long as society is imperfect;
and therefore may not be entirely abolished till civil governments
have arrived at a much greater degree of perfection. If, therefore,
I were asked whether I should approve of the immediate dissolution
of all the ecclesiastical establishments in Europe, I should
answer, No.... Let experiment be first made of _alterations_,
or, which is the same thing, of _better establishments_ than
the present. Let them be reformed in many essential articles, and
then not thrown aside entirely till it be found by experience that
no good can be made of them."
Priestley goes on to suggest four such reforms of a capital nature:--
"1. Let the Articles of Faith to be subscribed by candidates for
the ministry be greatly reduced. In the formulary of the Church of
England, might not thirty-eight out of the thirty-nine be very well
spared? It is a reproach to any Christian establishment if every
man cannot claim the benefit of it who can say that he believes
in the religion of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New
Testament. You say the terms are so general that even Deists would
quibble and insinuate themselves. I answer that all the articles
which are subscribed at present by no means exclude Deists who will
prevaricate; and upon this scheme you would at least exclude fewer
honest men." [16]
The second reform suggested is the equalisation, in proportion to work
done, of the stipends of the clergy; the third, the exclusion of the
Bishops from Parliament; and the fourth, complete toleration, so that
every man may enjoy the rights of a citizen, and be qualified to serve
his country, whether he belong to the Established Church or not.
Opinions such as those I have quoted, respecting the duties and the
responsibilities of governors, are the commonplaces of modern
Liberalism; and Priestley's views on Ecclesiastical Establishments
would, I fear, meet with but a cool reception, as altogether too
conservative, from a large proportion of the lineal descendants of the
people who taught their children to cry "Damn Priestley;" and with that
love for the practical application of science which is the source of
the greatness of Birmingham, tried to set fire to the doctor's house
with sparks from his own electrical machine; thereby giving the man
they called an incendiary and raiser of sedition against Church and
King, an appropriately experimental illustration of the nature of arson
and riot.
If I have succeeded in putting before you the main features of
Priestley's work, its value will become apparent when we compare the
condition of the English nation, as he knew it, with its present state.
The fact that France has been for eighty-five years trying, without
much success, to right herself after the great storm of the Revolution,
is not unfrequently cited among us as an indication of some inherent
incapacity for self-government among the French people. I think,
however, that Englishmen who argue thus, forget that, from the meeting
of the Long Parliament in 1640, to the last Stuart rebellion in 1745,
is a hundred and five years, and that, in the middle of the last
century, we had but just safely freed ourselves from our Bourbons and
all that they represented. The corruption of our state was as bad as
that of the Second Empire. Bribery was the instrument of government,
and peculation its reward. Four-fifths of the seats in the House of
Commons were more or less openly dealt with as property. A minister had
to consider the state of the vote market, and the sovereign secured a
sufficiency of "king's friends" by payments allotted with retail,
rather than royal, sagacity.
Barefaced and brutal immorality and intemperance pervaded the land,
from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established
Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who
dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the
Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley,
being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to
ruinous fines and long imprisonment. [17] In those days the guns that
were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law
was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet
whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments,
and ruined by still more absurd help, on the part of government.
Birmingham, though already the centre of a considerable industry, was a
mere village as compared with its present extent. People who travelled
went about armed, by reason of the abundance of highwaymen and the
paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage coaches had not reached
Birmingham, and it took three days to get to London. Even canals were a
recent and much opposed invention.
Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical conception of the
physical universe: Hartley, putting a modern face upon ancient
materialism, had extended that mechanical conception to psychology;
Linnaeus and Haller were beginning to introduce method and order into
the chaotic accumulation of biological facts. But those parts of
physical science which deal with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and
above all, chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly be said to have
had an existence. No one knew that two of the old elemental bodies, air
and water, are compounds, and that a third, fire, is not a substance
but a motion. The great industries that have grown out of the
applications of modern scientific discoveries had no existence, and the
man who should have foretold their coming into being in the days of his
son, would have been regarded as a mad enthusiast.
In common with many other excellent persons, Priestley believed that
man is capable of reaching, and will eventually attain, perfection. If
the temperature of space presented no obstacle, I should be glad to
entertain the same idea; but judging from the past progress of our
species, I am afraid that the globe will have cooled down so far,
before the advent of this natural millennium, that we shall be, at
best, perfected Esquimaux. For all practical purposes, however, it is
enough that man may visibly improve his condition in the course of a
century or so. And, if the picture of the state of things in
Priestley's time, which I have just drawn, have any pretence to
accuracy, I think it must be admitted that there has been a
considerable change for the better.