I said, that Superstition was the child of Fear, and Fear the child
of Ignorance; and you might expect me to say antithetically, that
Science was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of
Knowledge.
But these genealogies--like most metaphors--do not fit exactly, as
you may see for yourselves.
If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of
fear; the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread
Nature, the less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her
awful secrets? It is dangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them,
as in the Egyptian temple of old--"I am Isis, and my veil no mortal
yet hath lifted." And why should they try or wish to lift it? If
she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is
enough that she does not destroy them. So as ignorance bred fear,
fear breeds fresh and willing ignorance.
And courage? We may say, and truly, that courage is the child of
knowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of
courage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have
told you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special
illumination, of reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words
their purpose of keeping the masses ignorant, that they might be
their slaves. Reverence? I will yield to none in reverence for
reverence. I will all but agree with the wise man who said that
reverence is the root of all virtues. But which child reverences
his father most? He who comes joyfully and trustfully to meet him,
that he may learn his father's mind, and do his will; or he who at
his father's coming runs away and hides, lest he should be beaten
for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence, a reverence
of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms of reverence.
That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not overlook
or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because it
is a fact it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must
be a fact of God; a message from God; a voice of God, as Bacon has
it, revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands
in solemn awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a
snipe's pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in
certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep
and wide secret underlying them, which is worth years of thought to
solve. That is reverence; a reverence which is growing, thank God,
more and more common; which will produce, as it grows more common
still, fruit which generations yet unborn shall bless.
But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in
pious awe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes,
putting on the sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel
of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very
pitiable when unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as
pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a
man comes up to Nature as to a parrot or a monkey, with this
prevailing thought in his head--Will it bite me?--will he not be
pretty certain to make up his mind that it may bite him, and had
therefore best be left alone? It is only the man of courage--few
and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite, in the
hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off a
gun. And it is only the man of courage--few and far between--who
will stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill
him for aught he knows--for her teeth, though clumsy, are very
strong--in order that he may tame her and break her in to his use by
the very same method by which that admirable inductive philosopher,
Mr. Rarey, used to break in his horses; first, by not being afraid
of them; and next, by trying to find out what they were thinking of.
But after all, as with animals, so with Nature; cowardice is
dangerous. The surest method of getting bitten by an animal is to
be afraid of it; and the surest method of being injured by Nature is
to be afraid of it. Only as far as we understand Nature are we safe
from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind not to pry into
the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for their
own life and well-being, or for their children after them.
But how few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of
Nature. How few have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by
finding out what she is thinking of. The mass are glad to have the
results of science, as they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they
are tamed; but for want of courage or of wit, they had rather leave
the taming process to someone else. And therefore we may say that
what knowledge of Nature we have--and we have very little--we owe to
the courage of those men--and they have been very few--who have been
inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or, what is better, act as
if they were saying--"I find something in me which I do not find in
you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to understand you,
though you may not understand me; that I may become your master, and
not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know; or die in the
search."
It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and
very few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature,
and looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe
what we call Physical Science.
There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each four
races--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.
First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively
from an historical, and not a religious point of view.
These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly
civilised, but sunk in the superstitions of nature-worship. They
invaded and mingled with tribes whose superstitions were even more
debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they
escaped. Their own masses were for centuries given up to nature-
worship. Now, among those Jews arose men--a very few--sages--
prophets--call them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and
philosophers--who assumed towards nature an attitude utterly
different from the rest of their countrymen and the rest of the then
world; who denounced superstition and the dread of nature as the
parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for themselves said
boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a
permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They
found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed
a law which could not be broken; that all things continued to that
day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature
totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful,
and yet reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to
prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and
meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were
slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like
Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on
the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part,
they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the
hills were carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters
raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the tempest.
The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my
belief that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a
school of inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of
mind, have achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on
the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has
ever succeeded in perpetuating a school of inductive physical
science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same
view of Nature, which they have--as an historic fact--slowly but
thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.
Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were
not the Jews; but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their
pupils the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what
success had they? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries
concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as
they were, still prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For
a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first
distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the
earliest astronomical calculation. But they seem to have been
crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries. They stopped short.
They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature. They sank into
planet-worship. They invented, it would seem, that fantastic
pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus
on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians
and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth
nothing but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages
who dared face Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the
superstitious mob as irreverent impious atheists. The wisest of
them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that charge; and
finally, they failed. School after school, in Greece and Rome,
struggled to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory of the
universe which was founded on something like experience, reason,
common sense. They were not allowed to prosecute their attempt.
The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so
manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their
heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last
effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was
Neoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise
for, and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading
superstitions of the Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor
Hypatia herself, and all her school--they may have had themselves no
bodily fear of Nature; for they were noble souls. Yet they spent
their time in justifying those who had; in apologising for the
superstitions of the very mob which they despised: just as--it
sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days are like to end in
doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe in
anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:
as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human
being. And so died the science of the old world, in a true second
childhood, just where it began.
The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the
Greeks and Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our
race, under the teaching of both, to bring science into act and
fact.
Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a
personally courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men
than the forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or
Teuton, Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race,
with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to
act on them. Their laws, their society, their commerce, their
colonisation, their migrations by land and sea, proved that they
were such. They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances, or--as I
should rather put it--by that divine Providence which determined
their times, and the bounds of their habitation. They came in as
the heritors of the decaying civilisation of Greece and Rome; they
colonised territories which gave to man special fair play, but no
more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers of
Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means
of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from
those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the
hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child
beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable
as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the
Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its
very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They
saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before
it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me,
standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they
are winning at last.
But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the
unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and
sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry
till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor
and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind:
but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where
hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse,
the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the early
legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them
all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own
superstitions they added those of the Rome which they conquered.
They dreaded the Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's
Canidia, still performed horrid rites in graveyards and dark places
of the earth. They dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved
on old Greek gems. They dreaded the very Roman cities they had
destroyed. They were the work of enchanters. Like the ruins of St.
Albans here in England, they were all full of devils, guarding the
treasures which the Romans had hidden. The Caesars became to them
magical man-gods. The poet Virgil became the prince of
necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they were
to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the
old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and
Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and
often came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and
interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon,
Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found
themselves in prison. All the medieval sages--even Albertus Magnus-
-were stigmatised as magicians. One wonders that more of them did
not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his
coarse common sense, took--vain and sensual--to drinking the
laudanum which he himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless
boon to men; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of all his wisdom.
For the "Romani nominis umbra," the shadow of the mighty race whom
they had conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries. And
their dread of the great heathens was really a dread of Nature, and
of the powers thereof. For when the authority of great names has
reigned unquestioned for many centuries, those names become, to the
human mind, integral and necessary parts of Nature itself. They
are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its laws, its canons,
its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become regarded as
actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and are
feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said
is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of
reverent wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great
part of the Middle Ages, for instance, it was impossible for an
educated man to think of nature itself, without thinking first of
what Aristotle had said of her. Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and
when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on
violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the
universities of Europe--as there certainly were in the days of the
immortal "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum"--who were ready, in spite of
all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of
outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and
its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of letters in
the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so strong was
the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds of men
had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but
toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not
without a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's "Faerie Queen"
bear witness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century.
After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by--it has been
notably assisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its
causes I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I
hold, with theological questions, that they cannot be discussed
here. I will only point out to you these facts: that, from the
latter part of the seventeenth century, the noblest heads and the
noblest hearts of Europe concentrated themselves more and more on
the brave and patient investigation of physical facts, as the source
of priceless future blessings to mankind; that the eighteenth
century which it has been the fashion of late to depreciate, did
more for the welfare of mankind, in every conceivable direction,
than the whole fifteen centuries before it; that it did this good
work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness
towards facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated
with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler,
Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else
they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature
was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that
we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in
the gradual emancipation of the human intellect. The connection may
not, of course, be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere
coincidence. I believe it to be a cause; one of course of very many
causes: but still an integral cause. At least the coincidence is
too remarkable a fact not to be worthy of investigation.
I said, just now--The emancipation of the human intellect. I did
not say--Of science or of the scientific intellect; and for this
reason:
That the emancipation of science is the emancipation of the common
mind of all men. All men can partake of the gains of free
scientific thought, not merely by enjoying its physical results, but
by becoming more scientific men themselves.
Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by defining
superstition, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist,
science. For the word "science" defines itself. It means simply
knowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an
approximation as can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object,
its classification, its causes, its effects; or in plain English,
what it is, how it came where it is, and what can be done with it.
And scientific method, likewise, needs no definition; for it is
simply the exercise of common sense. It is not a peculiar, unique,
professional, or mysterious process of the understanding: but the
same which all men employ, from the cradle to the grave, in forming
correct conclusions.
Every one who knows the philosophic writings of Mr. John Stuart
Mill, will be familiar with this opinion. But to those who have no
leisure to study him, I should recommend the reading of Professor
Huxley's third lecture on the origin of species.
In that he shows, with great logical skill, as well as with some
humour, how the man who, on rising in the morning finds the parlour-
window open, the spoons and teapot gone, the mark of a dirty hand on
the window-sill, and that of a hob-nailed boot outside, and comes to
the conclusion that someone has broken open the window, and stolen
the plate, arrives at that hypothesis--for it is nothing more--by a
long and complex train of inductions and deductions of just the same
kind as those which, according to the Baconian philosophy, are to be
used for investigating the deepest secrets of Nature.
This is true, even of those sciences which involve long mathematical
calculations. In fact, the stating of the problem to be solved is
the most important element in the calculation; and that is so
thoroughly a labour of common sense that an utterly uneducated mart
may, and often does, state an abstruse problem clearly and
correctly; seeing what ought to be proved, and perhaps how to prove
it, though he may be unable to work the problem out for want of
mathematical knowledge.
But that mathematical knowledge is not--as all Cambridge men are
surely aware--the result of any special gift. It is merely the
development of those conceptions of form and number which every
human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make
himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous
attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.
There are sciences, again, which do not involve mathematical
calculation; for instance, botany, zoology, geology, which are just
now passing from their old stage of classificatory sciences into the
rank of organic ones. These are, without doubt, altogether within
the scope of the merest common sense. Any man or woman of average
intellect, if they will but observe and think for themselves,
freely, boldly, patiently, accurately, may judge for themselves of
the conclusions of these sciences, may add to these conclusions
fresh and important discoveries; and if I am asked for a proof of
what I assert, I point to "Rain and Rivers," written by no professed
scientific man, but by a colonel in the Guards, known to fame only
as one of the most perfect horsemen in the world.
Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. A man--I do not say a
geologist, but simply a man, squire or ploughman--sees a small
valley, say one of the side-glens which open into the larger valleys
in the Windsor forest district. He wishes to ascertain its age.
He has, at first sight, a very simple measure--that of denudation.
He sees that the glen is now being eaten out by a little stream, the
product of innumerable springs which arise along its sides, and
which are fed entirely by the rain on the moors above. He finds, on
observation, that this stream brings down some ten cubic yards of
sand and gravel, on an average, every year. The actual quantity of
earth which has been removed to make the glen may be several million
cubic yards. Here is an easy sum in arithmetic. At the rate of ten
cubic yards a-year, the stream has taken several hundred thousand
years to make the glen.
You will observe that this result is obtained by mere common sense.
He has a right to assume that the stream originally began the glen,
because he finds it in the act of enlarging it; just as much right
as he has to assume, if he find a hole in his pocket, and his last
coin in the act of falling through it, that the rest of his money
has fallen through the same hole. It is a sufficient cause, and the
simplest. A number of observations as to the present rate of
denudation, and a sum which any railroad contractor can do in his
head, to determine the solid contents of the valley, are all that
are needed. The method is that of science: but it is also that of
simple common sense. You will remember, therefore, that this is no
mere theory or hypothesis, but a pretty fair and simple conclusion
from palpable facts; that the probability lies with the belief that
the glen is some hundreds of thousands of years old; that it is not
the observer's business to prove it further, but other persons' to
disprove it, if they can.
But does the matter end here? No. And, for certain reasons, it is
good that it should not end here.
The observer, if he be a cautious man, begins to see if he can
disprove his own conclusions; moreover, being human, he is probably
somewhat awed, if not appalled, by his own conclusion. Hundreds of
thousands of years spent in making that little glen! Common sense
would say that the longer it took to make, the less wonder there was
in its being made at last: but the instinctive human feeling is the
opposite. There is in men, and there remains in them, even after
they are civilised, and all other forms of the dread of Nature have
died out in them, a dread of size, of vast space, of vast time; that
latter, mind, being always imagined as space, as we confess when we
speak instinctively of a space of time. They will not understand
that size is merely a relative, not an absolute term; that if we
were a thousand times larger than we are, the universe would be a
thousand times smaller than it is; that if we could think a thousand
times faster than we do, time would be a thousand times longer than
it is; that there is One in whom we live, and move, and have our
being, to whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as one day. I believe this dread of size to be merely, like all
other superstitions, a result of bodily fear; a development of the
instinct which makes a little dog run away from a big dog. Be that
as it may, every observer has it; and so the man's conclusion seems
to him strange, doubtful: he will reconsider it.
Moreover, if he be an experienced man, he is well aware that first
guesses, first hypotheses, are not always the right ones; and if he
be a modest man, he will consider the fact that many thousands of
thoughtful men in all ages, and many thousands still, would say,
that the glen can only be a few thousand, or possibly a few hundred,
years old. And he will feel bound to consider their opinion; as far
as it is, like his own, drawn from facts, but no further.
So he casts about for all other methods by which the glen may have
been produced, to see if any one of them will account for it in a
shorter time.
1. Was it made by an earthquake? No; for the strata on both sides
are identical, at the same level, and in the same plane.
2. Or by a mighty current? If so, the flood must have run in at
the upper end, before it ran out at the lower. But nothing has run
in at the upper end. All round above are the undisturbed gravel-
beds of the horizontal moor, without channel or depression.
3. Or by water draining off a vast flat as it was upheaved out of
the sea? That is a likely guess. The valley at its upper end
spreads out like the fingers of a hand, as the gullies in tide-muds
do.
But that hypothesis will not stand. There is no vast unbroken flat
behind the glen. Right and left of it are other similar glens,
parted from it by long narrow ridges: these also must be explained
on the same hypothesis; but they cannot. For there could not have
been surface-drainage to make them all, or a tenth of them. There
are no other possible hypotheses; and so he must fall back on the
original theory--the rain, the springs, the brook; they have done it
all, even as they are doing it this day.
But is not that still a hasty assumption? May not their denuding
power have been far greater in old times than now?
Why should it? Because there was more rain then than now? That he
must put out of court; there is no evidence of it whatsoever.
Because the land was more friable originally? Well, there is a
great deal to be said for that. The experience of every countryman
tells him that bare or fallow land is more easily washed away than
land under vegetation. And no doubt, when these gravels and sands
rose from the sea, they were barren for hundreds of years. He has
some measure of the time required, because he can tell roughly how
long it takes for sands and shingles left by the sea to become
covered with vegetation. But he must allow that the friability of
the land must have been originally much greater than now, for
hundreds of years.
But again, does that fact really cut off any great space of time
from his hundreds of thousands of years? For when the land first
rose from the sea, that glen was not there. Some slight bay or bend
in the shore determined its site. That stream was not there. It
was split up into a million little springs, oozing side by side from
the shore, and having each a very minute denuding power, which kept
continually increasing by combination as the glen ate its way
inwards, and the rainfall drained by all these little springs was
collected into the one central stream. So that when the ground
being bare was most liable to be denuded, the water was least able
to do it; and as the denuding power of the water increased, the
land, being covered with vegetation, became more and more able to
resist it. All this he has seen, going on at the present day in the
similar gullies worn in the soft strata of the South Hampshire
coast; especially round Bournemouth.
So the two disturbing elements in the calculation may be fairly set
off against each other, as making a difference of only a few
thousands or tens of thousands of years either way; and the age of
the glen may fairly be, if not a million years, yet such a length of
years as mankind still speak of with bated breath, as if forsooth it
would do them some harm.
I trust that every scientific man in this room will agree with me,
that the imaginary squire or ploughman would have been conducting
his investigation strictly according to the laws of the Baconian
philosophy. You will remark, meanwhile, that he has not used a
single scientific term, or referred to a single scientific
investigation; and has observed nothing and thought nothing, which
might not have been observed and thought by any one who chose to use
his common sense, and not to be afraid.
But because he has come round, after all this further investigation,
to something very like his first conclusion, was all that further
investigation useless? No--a thousand times, no. It is this very
verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and
destroys the unsound. It is this struggle with all sorts of
superstitions which makes science strong and sure, and her march
irresistible, winning ground slowly, but never receding from it. It
is this buffeting of adversity which compels her not to rest
dangerously upon the shallow sand of first guesses, and single
observations; but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and
interlaced, into the solid ground of actual facts.
It is very necessary to insist on this point. For there have been
men in all past ages--I do not say whether there are any such now,
but I am inclined to think that there will be hereafter--men who
have tried to represent scientific method as something difficult,
mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the unscientific
mass; and this not for the purpose of exalting science, but rather
of discrediting her. For as long as the masses, educated or
uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific method is, they will
look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on necromancers, as
a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of mighty
secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them great
harm. Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these
persons to instal themselves as the critics of science, though not
scientific men themselves: and--as Shakespeare has it--to talk of
Robin Hood, though they never shot in his bow. Thus they become
mediators to the masses between the scientific and the unscientific
worlds. They tell them--You are not to trust the conclusions of men
of science at first hand. You are not fit judges of their facts or
of their methods. It is we who will, by a cautious eclecticism,
choose out for you such of their conclusions as are safe for you;
and them we will advise you to believe. To the scientific man, on
the other hand, as often as anything is discovered unpleasing to
them, they will say, imperiously and e cathedra--Your new theory
contradicts the established facts of science. For they will know
well that whatever the men of science think of their assertion, the
masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers are by
their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what
they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional
conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang
were the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did
fresh facts require one.
This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition
that it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely
is to tell the masses--Scientific method is no peculiar mystery,
requiring a peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense,
combined with uncommon courage, which includes uncommon honesty and
uncommon patience; and if you will be brave, honest, patient, and
rational, you will need no mystagogues to tell you what in science
to believe and what not to believe; for you will be just as good
judges of scientific facts and theories as those who assume the
right of guiding your convictions. You are men and women: and more
than that you need not be.
And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify
most thoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr.
Thomas Carlyle.
As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject.
For aught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or
chemistry, of comparative anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware
of, he may know a great deal about them all, and, like a wise man,
hold his tongue, and give the world merely the results in the form
of general thought. But this I know: that his writings are
instinct with the very spirit of science; that he has taught men,
more than any living man, the meaning and end of science; that he
has taught men moral and intellectual courage; to face facts boldly,
while they confess the divineness of facts; not to be afraid of
Nature, and not to worship Nature; to believe that man can know
truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can he live
worthily on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other man
in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity
of spirit. That he would have made a distinguished scientific man,
we may be as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we
see a fine old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a
first-class hunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in
harness. Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be
true, devout, and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say--Read
what you will: but at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to
me--and I doubt not to him--whether you will agree with his special
conclusions: but his premises and his method are irrefragable; for
they stand on the "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam"--on fact and
common sense.
And Mr. Carlyle's writings, if I am correct in my estimate of them,
will afford a very sufficient answer to those who think that the
scientific habit of mind tends to irreverence.
Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by
those who confound reverence with fear. For from blind fear of the
unknown, science does certainly deliver man. She does by man as he
does by an unbroken colt. The colt sees by the road side some quite
new object--a cast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not. What a
fearful monster! What unknown terrific powers may it not possess!
And the colt shies across the road, runs up the bank, rears on end;
putting itself thereby, as many a man does, in real danger. What
cure is there? But one: experience. So science takes us, as we
should take the colt, gently by the halter; and makes us simply
smell at the new monster; till after a few trembling sniffs, we
discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a kettle.
Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find the
colt's character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus
disabused. He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for
the man who is breaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence
for the kettle; and becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful
member of society, as does the man when disabused of his
superstitions.
From which follows one result. That if science proposes--as she
does--to make men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs
excite unpleasant feelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly,
ignorant, and slavish. And that too many such persons have existed
in all ages is but too notorious. There have been from all time,
goetai, quacks, powwow men, rain-makers, and necromancers of various
sorts, who having for their own purposes set forth partial, ill-
grounded, fantastic, and frightful interpretations of nature, have
no love for those who search after a true, exact, brave, and hopeful
one. And therefore it is to be feared, or hoped, that science and
superstition will to the world's end remain irreconcilable and
internecine foes.
Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the
last fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been
selling fair breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff,
asserting her powers so often, poor old soul, that she has got to
half believe them herself--conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing
her customers watch the Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather
reports in The Times. Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker's
African friend, Katchiba, the rain-making chief, who possessed a
whole houseful of thunder and lightning--though he did not, he
confessed, keep it in a bottle as they do in England--if Sir Samuel
had had the means, and the will, of giving to Katchiba's Negros a
course of lectures on electricity, with appropriate experiments, and
a real bottle full of real lightning among the foremost.
It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been
open to the rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to
buy his real secret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it
for his own ends. The former method--that of killing the man of
science--was found more easy in ancient times; the latter in these
modern ones. And there have been always those who, too good-natured
to kill the scientific man, have patronised knowledge, not for its
own sake, but for the use which may be made of it; who would like to
keep a tame man of science, as they would a tame poet, or a tame
parrot; who say--Let us have science by all means, but not too much
of it. It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to the world, like
medicine, in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific man,
will of course freely discover what you choose. Only do not talk
too loudly about it: leave that to us. We understand the world,
and are meant to guide and govern it. So discover freely: and
meanwhile hand over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and
edify the populace with so much of them as we think safe, while we
keep our position thereby, and in many cases make much money by your
science. Do that, and we will patronise you, applaud you, ask you
to our houses; and you shall be clothed in purple and fine linen,
and fare sumptuously with us every day. I know not whether these
latter are not the worst enemies which science has. They are often
such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-meaning persons. They
desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise: only not too
wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they are doing.
They would recoil with horror if they were told they were so many
Iscariots, betraying Truth with a kiss.
But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and blandishments.
In old times she endured being imprisoned and slain. She came to
life again. Perhaps it was the will of Him in whom all things live,
that she should live. Perhaps it was His spirit which gave her
life.
She can endure, too, being starved. Her votaries have not as yet
cared much for purple and fine linen, and sumptuous fare. There are
a very few among them who, joining brilliant talents to solid
learning, have risen to deserved popularity, to titles, and to
wealth. But even their labours, it seems to me, are never rewarded
in any proportion to the time and the intellect spent on them, nor
to the benefits which they bring to mankind; while the great
majority, unpaid and unknown, toil on, and have to find in science
her own reward. Better, perhaps, that it should be so. Better for
science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go where she
will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out at so
much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who
guide the many. And so, I verily believe, the majority of
scientific men think. There are those among them who have obeyed
very faithfully St. Paul's precept: "No man that warreth entangleth
himself with the affairs of this life." For they have discovered
that they are engaged in a war--a veritable war--against the rulers
of darkness, against ignorance and its twin children, fear and
cruelty. Of that war they see neither the end nor even the plan.
But they are ready to go on; ready, with Socrates, "to follow reason
whithersoever it leads;" and content, meanwhile, like good soldiers
in a campaign, if they can keep tolerably in a line, and use their
weapons, and see a few yards ahead of them through the smoke and the
woods. They will come out somewhere at last; they know not where
nor when: but they will come out at last, into the daylight and the
open field; and be told then--perhaps to their own astonishment--as
many a gallant soldier has been told, that by simply walking
straight on, and doing the duty which lay nearest them, they have
helped to win a great battle, and slay great giants, earning the
thanks of their country and of mankind.
And, meanwhile, if they get their shilling a-day of fighting-pay,
they are content. I had almost said, they ought to be content. For
science is, I verily believe, like virtue, its own exceeding great
reward. I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of
the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his
life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her
sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed
not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact;
but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with
each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots
through some old Chaos of scattered observations.
Is not that a joy, a prize, which wealth cannot give, nor poverty
take away? What it may lead to, he knows not. Of what use it may
become, he knows not. But this he knows, that somewhere it must
lead; of some use it will be. For it is a truth; and having found a
truth, he has exorcised one more of the ghosts which haunt humanity.
He has left one object less for man to fear; one object more for man
to use. Yes, the scientific man may have this comfort, that
whatever he has done, he has done good; that he is following a
mistress who has never yet conferred aught but benefits on the human
race.
What physical science may do hereafter I know not; but as yet she
has done this:
She has enormously increased the wealth of the human race; and has
therefore given employment, food, existence, to millions who,
without science, would either have starved or have never been born.
She has shown that the dictum of the early political economists,
that population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of
subsistence, is no law of humanity, but merely a tendency of the
barbaric and ignorant man, which can be counteracted by increasing
manifold by scientific means his powers of producing food. She has
taught men, during the last few years, to foresee and elude the most
destructive storms; and there is no reason for doubting, and many
reasons for hoping, that she will gradually teach men to elude other
terrific forces of nature, too powerful and too seemingly capricious
for them to conquer. She has discovered innumerable remedies and
alleviations for pains and disease. She has thrown such light on
the causes of epidemics, that we are able to say now that the
presence of cholera--and probably of all zymotic diseases--in any
place, is usually a sin and a shame, for which the owners and
authorities of that place ought to be punishable by law, as
destroyers of their fellow-men; while for the weak, for those who,
in the barbarous and semi-barbarous state--and out of that last we
are only just emerging--how much has she done; an earnest of much
more which she will do? She has delivered the insane--I may say by
the scientific insight of one man, more worthy of titles and
pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn them--I mean the great
and good Pinel--from hopeless misery and torture into comparative
peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure. For
children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents read
and perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers
on physical education. We should not then see the children, even of
the rich, done to death piecemeal by improper food, improper
clothes, neglect of ventilation and the commonest measures for
preserving health. We should not see their intellects stunted by
Procrustean attempts to teach them all the same accomplishments, to
the neglect, most often, of any sound practical training of their
faculties. We should not see slight indigestion, or temporary
rushes of blood to the head, condemned and punished as sins against
Him who took up little children in His arms and blessed them.
But we may have hope. When we compare education now with what it
was even forty years ago, much more with the stupid brutality of the
monastic system, we may hail for children, as well as for grown
people, the advent of the reign of common sense.
And for woman--What might I not say on that point? But most of it
would be fitly discussed only among physicians and biologists: here
I will say only this: Science has exterminated, at least among
civilised nations, witch-manias. Women--at least white women--are
no longer tortured or burnt alive from man's blind fear of the
unknown. If science had done no more than that, she would deserve
the perpetual thanks and the perpetual trust, not only of the women
whom she has preserved from agony, but the men whom she has
preserved from crime.
These benefits have already accrued to civilised men, because they
have lately allowed a very few of their number peaceably to imitate
Mr. Rarey, and find out what nature--or rather, to speak at once
reverently and accurately, He who made nature--is thinking of, and
obey the "voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam." This science has
done, while yet in her infancy. What she will do in her maturity,
who dare predict? At least, in the face of such facts as these,
those who bid us fear, or restrain, or mutilate science, bid us
commit an act of folly, as well as of ingratitude, which can only
harm ourselves. For science has as yet done nothing but good. Will
any one tell me what harm it has ever done? When any one will show
me a single result of science, of the knowledge of and use of
physical facts, which has not tended directly to the benefit of
mankind, moral and spiritual, as well as physical and economic--then
I shall be tempted to believe that Solomon was wrong when he said
that the one thing to be sought after on earth, more precious than
all treasure, she who has length of days in her right hand, and in
her left hand riches and honour, whose ways are ways of pleasantness
and all her paths are peace, who is a tree of life to all who lay
hold on her, and makes happy every one who retains her, is--as you
will see if you will yourselves consult the passage--that very
Wisdom--by which God has founded the earth; and that very
Understanding--by which He has established the heavens.