ANDRÉ MARIE AMPÈRE.
Few men of the nineteenth century are so interesting as André Marie
Ampère, who is, as we have seen, deservedly spoken of as the founder of
the science of electro-dynamics. Extremely precocious as a boy, so that,
like his immediate predecessor in discovery, Oersted the Dane, his rapid
intellectual development drew down upon him ominous expressions from
those who knew him, he more than fulfilled the highest promise of his
early years. His was no one-sided genius. He was interested in
everything, and his memory was as retentive as his intellect was
comprehensive. He grew up, indeed, to be a young man of the widest
possible interests. Literature never failed to have its attraction for
him, though science was his favorite study and mathematics his hobby.
The mathematical mind is commonly supposed to run in very precise
grooves, yet Ampère was always a speculator, and his speculations were
most suggestive for his contemporaries and subsequent generations.
Indeed, his mathematics, far from being a hindrance to his penetrating
outlook upon the hazier confines of science, rather seemed to help the
penetrations it gave. While he was so great a scientist that Arago, so
little likely to exaggerate his French contemporary's merit, has said of
Ampère's discovery identifying magnetism and electricity, that "the vast
field of physical science perhaps never presented so brilliant a
discovery, conceived, verified, and completed with such rapidity," his
friends knew this great scientist as one of the kindliest and most
genial of men, noted for his simplicity, his persuasive sympathy and his
tender regard for all those with whom he was brought into intimate
relations.
[Illustration: ANDRÉ MARIE AMPÈRE]
The commonly accepted formula for a great scientist, that he is a man
wrapt up in himself and his work, enmeshed so completely in the
scientific speculations that occupy him that he has little or no time
for great humanitarian interests, so that his human sympathies are
likely to atrophy, is entirely contradicted by the life of Ampère. He
was no narrow specialist, and, indeed, it may be said that not a single
one of these great discoverers in electricity whom we are considering in
this volume was of the type that is sometimes accepted as indicative of
scientific genius and originality. After reading their lives, one is
prone to have the feeling that men who lack that wider sympathy which,
in the famous words of the old Latin poet, makes everything human of
interest to them, are not of the mental calibre to make supreme
discoveries, even though they may succeed in creating a large amount of
interest in their scientific speculations in their own generation. It is
the all-round man who does supreme original work of enduring quality.
André Marie Ampère was born at Lyons, January 22d, 1775. His father,
Jean Jacques Ampère, was a small merchant who made a comfortable living
for his family, but no more. His father and mother were both well
informed for their class and time, and were well esteemed by their
neighbors. His mother especially was known for an unalterable sweetness
of character and charitable beneficence which sought out every possible
occasion for its exercise. She was universally beloved by those who knew
her, and the charm of Ampère's manner, which made for him a friend of
every acquaintance, was undoubtedly a manifestation of the same family
strain.
Shortly after the birth of their son, the parents gave up business and
retired on a little property situated in the country not far from Lyons.
It was in this little village, without any school-teacher and with only
home instruction, that the genius of the future savant, who was to be
one of the distinguished scientific men of the nineteenth century, began
to show itself. For Ampère was not only a genius, but, what is so often
thought to be an almost absolute preclusion of any serious achievement
later in life, a precocious genius. The first marvelous faculty that
began to develop in him was an uncontrollable tendency to arithmetical
expression. Before he knew how to make figures, he had invented for
himself a method of doing even rather complicated problems in arithmetic
by the aid of a number of pebbles or peas. During an illness that
overtook him as a child, his mother, anxious because of the possible
evil effects upon his health of mental work, took his pebbles away from
him. He supplied their place, however, during the leisure hours of his
convalescence, when time hung heavy on his child hands, by bread crumbs.
He craved food, but, according to the "starving" medical _régime_ of the
time, he was allowed only a single biscuit in three days. It required no
little self-sacrifice on his part, then, to supply himself with counters
from this scanty supply, and his persistence, in spite of hunger,
evidently indicates that this mathematical tendency was stronger than
his appetite for food. This is all the more surprising, since children
are usually scarcely more than little animals in the matter of eating,
and commonly satisfy their physical cravings without an after-thought of
any kind.
Ampère learned to read when but very young, and then began to devour all
the books which came to hand. Usually, the precocious taste for reading
specializes on some particular subject; but everything was grist that
came to the child Ampère's mental mill, and it was all ground up; and,
strangest of all, much of it was assimilated. Travel, history, poetry,
occupied him quite as much as romance; and, amazing as it may appear,
even philosophy was not disdained while he was still under ten years of
age. It seems amusing to read the declaration of the French biographer,
that if this boy of ten had any special predilection in literature, it
was for Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Fénelon, Corneille and Voltaire, yet it
must be taken seriously.
When he was about fifteen, this omnivorous intellectual genius came
across a French encyclopedia in twenty folio volumes. This seemed to him
a veritable Golconda of endless riches of information. Each of the
volumes had its turn. The second was begun as soon as the first was
finished, and the reading of the third followed, and so on, until every
one of the volumes had been completely read. References to other volumes
might be looked up occasionally, but this did not distract him into
taking other portions of the works out of alphabetical order. Surprising
as it must seem, most of this heterogeneous mass of information, far
from being forgotten at once, was deeply engraved on his wonderful
memory. More than once in after-life, when many years had passed, it was
a surprise to his friends to find how much information Ampère had
amassed on some abstruse and unfamiliar subject, and how readily he was
able to pour forth details of information that seemed quite out of his
line. He would then confess that the encyclopedia article on the
subject, read so many years before, was still fresh in his mind, or at
least that its information was so stored away as to be readily
available. We have heard much of Gladstone's memory in more recent
years; but that seems to have been nothing compared to this wonderful
faculty which recalled for Ampère, even as an old man, the unrelated
details of every encyclopedia article that had passed under his eyes
half a century before, when he was a boy of ten to fourteen.
The modest family library soon proved utterly insufficient to occupy the
mind of this young, enthusiastic student; and his father, sympathetic
to his ardent curiosity, took him to Lyons from time to time, where he
might have the opportunity to consult volumes of various kinds that
might catch his fancy. At this time, his old mathematical tendency
reasserted itself. He wished to learn something about the higher
mathematics. He found in a library in Lyons the works of Bernoulli and
of Euler. When the delicate-looking boy, whom the librarian considered
little more than a child, put in his request to the town library for
these serious mathematical works, the old gentleman said to him: "The
works of Bernoulli and Euler! What are you thinking of, my little
friend? These works figure among the most difficult writings that ever
came from the mind of man." "I hope to be able to understand them,"
replied the boy. "I suppose you know," said the librarian, "that they
are written in Latin." This was a disagreeable surprise for young
Ampère. As yet he had not studied Latin. He went home, resolved,
however, to remove this hindrance to his study of the higher
mathematics. At the end of the month, owing to his assiduity, the
obstacle had entirely disappeared; and though he could read only
mathematical Latin and had later to study the language from another
standpoint, in order to understand the classics, he was now able to
pursue the study of mathematics in Latin to his heart's content.
The even tenor of the boy's life, deeply engaged as he was in studies of
every description, was destined to be very seriously disturbed. When he
was but fourteen, in 1789, the Revolution came, with its glorious
promise and then its awful consummation. Ampère's father was seriously
alarmed at the revolutionary course things were taking in France, and
had the fatal inspiration to leave his country home and betake himself
to the city of Lyons. For a time, he occupied a position as magistrate.
After the siege of Lyons, the revolutionary tribunal established there
took up the project of making the Lyonnese patriotic, as they called it,
by properly punishing the citizens for their failure to sympathize at
first with the revolutionary government, and soon a series of horrible
massacres began. New victims were claimed every day, and Ampère's father
was one of those who had to suffer. The real reason for his condemnation
was that he had accepted a position under the old government, though the
pretext stated on the warrant for his arrest was that he was an
aristocrat. This is the only evidence we have that the Ampère family was
in any way connected with the nobility. The day on which he was
sentenced to die, Jean Jacques Ampère wrote to his wife a letter of
sublime simplicity, in which his Christian resignation of spirit, his
lofty courage, yet thoroughly practical commonsense, are manifest. He
warned his wife to say nothing about his fate to their daughter
Josephine, though he hoped that his son would be better able to stand
the blow, and perhaps prove a consolation to his mother.
The news proved almost too much for the young Ampère, and for a time his
reason was despaired of. All his faculties seemed to be shocked for the
moment into insensibility. Biographers tell us that he wandered around,
building little piles of sand, gazing idly at the stars or vacantly into
space, wearing scarcely any of the expression of a rational being. His
friends could harbor only the worst possible expectations for him, and
even his physical health suffered so much that it seemed he would not
long survive. One day, by chance, Rousseau's "Letters on Botany" fell
into his hands. They caught his attention, and he became interested in
their charming narrative style, and as a result, his reason awoke once
more. He began to study botany in the field, and soon acquired a taste
for the reading of Linnæus. At the same time, classic poetry, especially
such as contained descriptions of nature, once more appealed to him, and
so he took up his classical studies. He varied the reading of the poets
with dissections of flowers, and yet succeeded in following both sets of
studies so attentively that, forty years afterward, he was still
perfectly capable of taking up the technical description of the plants
that he had then studied, and while acting as a university inspector, he
composed 150 Latin verses during his horseback rides from one inspection
district to another, without ever having to consult a gradus or a
dictionary for the quantities, yet without making a single mistake. His
memory for subjects once learned, was almost literally infallible.
Something of his love for nature can be appreciated from an incident of
his early manhood, which is not without its amusing side. Ampère was
very near-sighted, and had been able to read books all his life only by
holding them very close to his eyes. This makes it all the more
difficult to understand how he succeeded in reading so much. His
near-sightedness was so marked that he had no idea of beauties of
scenery beyond him, and was often rather put out at the enthusiastic
description of scenes through which he passed _en diligence_, when his
fellow-travelers spoke of the beauties of the scenes around them.
Ampère, like most people who do not share, or at least appreciate, the
enthusiasm of others for beautiful things around them, was in this
mood, mainly because he was not able to see them in the way that others
did, and, therefore, could not have the same pleasure in them. This lack
in himself was unconscious, of course, as in all other cases, and, far
from lessening, rather emphasized the tendency to be impatient with
others, and rather made him more ready to think how foolish they were to
go into ecstasies over something that to him was so insignificant.
One day, while Ampère was making the journey along the Saone into Lyons,
it happened that there sat beside him on the stage-coach a young man who
suffered from near-sightedness very nearly in the same degree as Ampère
himself, but whose myopia had been corrected by means of properly
fitting glasses. These glasses were just exactly what Ampère needed in
order to correct his vision completely. The young fellows became
interested in each other, and, during the course of their conversation,
his companion suggested to Ampère, seeing how near-sighted he was, that
he should try his glasses. He put them on, and at once nature presented
herself to him under an entirely different aspect. The vision was so
unexpected, that the description which he had so often heard from his
fellow-travelers, but could not appreciate, now recurred to him, and he
could not help exclaiming in raptures, "Oh! what a smiling country! What
picturesque, graceful hills! How the rich, warm tones are harmoniously
blended in the wonderful union of sky and mountain vista!" All of these
now spoke emphatically to his delicate sensibility, and a new world was
literally revealed to him. Ampère was so overcome by this unexpected
sight, which gave him so much pleasure, that he burst into tears from
depth of emotion, and could not satisfy himself with looking at all the
beauties of nature that had been hidden from him for so long. Ever
after, natural scenery was one of the greatest pleasures that he had in
life, and the beauties of nature, near or distant, meant more to him
than any other gratification of the senses.
In spite of the fact that Ampère had devoted considerable attention to
acoustics as a young man, and had studied the ways in which the waves of
air by which sounds are formed and propagated, he had absolutely no ear
for music, and was as tone-deaf as he had been blind before his
discovery with regard to the glasses. Musical notes constituted a
mathematical problem for Ampère, but nothing more. This continued to be
the case until about thirty years of age. Then, one day, he attended a
musical soirée, at which the principal portions of the program were
taken from Glück. It is easy to understand that this master of harmony
possessed no charms for a tone-deaf young man. He became uneasy during
the course of the musical program, and his uneasiness became manifest to
others. After the selections of the German composer were finished,
however, some simple but charming melodies were unexpectedly introduced,
and Ampère suddenly found himself transported into a new world. If we
are to believe his biographers, once more his emotion was expressed by
an abundance of tears, which Ampère seems to have had at command and to
have been quite as ready to give way to in public as any of Homer's
heroes of the olden time. Blind until he was nearly twenty, he used to
say of himself, he had been deaf until he was thirty. In spite of his
failure to respond in youth, once it had been awakened to appreciation,
his soul vibrated profoundly to all the beauties of color and sound,
and, later in life, they gave rise in him to depths of emotion which
calmer individuals of less delicate sensibilities could scarcely
understand, much less sympathize with.
Between his two supreme experiences in vision and sound, there had come
to Ampère another and even profounder emotion. He tells the story
himself, in words that probably express his feelings better than any
possible description of his biographer could do, and that show us how
wonderfully sensitive his soul was to emotion of all kinds. He had just
completed his twenty-first year when he fell head over heels in love.
Though he wrote very little, as a rule, he has left us a rather detailed
description in diaries, evidently kept for the purpose, of the state of
his feelings at this time. These bear the title, "_Amorum_," the story
of his love. On the first page these words occur: "One day as I was
taking an evening walk, just after the setting of the sun, making my way
along a little brook," then there is a hiatus, and he was evidently
quite unable to express all that he felt. It seems that he was gathering
botanical specimens, wearing an excellent set of spectacles ever since
his adventure on the stage-coach had shown him the need of them, when he
suddenly perceived at some distance two young and charming girls who
were gathering flowers in the field. He looked at one of them, and he
knew that his fate was sealed. Up to that time, as he says, the idea of
marriage had never occurred to him. One might think that the idea would
occur very gently at first, then grow little by little; but that was not
Ampère's way. He wanted to marry her that very day. He did not know her
name; he did not know her family; he had never even heard her voice, but
he knew that she was the destined one.
Fortunately for the young lady and himself, she had very sensible
parents. They demanded how he would be able to support a wife. Ampère
was quite willing to do anything that they should suggest. His father
had left enough to support the family, but not enough to enable him to
support a wife in an independent home; and until he had some occupation,
the parents of his bride-to-be refused to listen to his representations.
For a time, he consented to be a salesman in a silk store in Lyons, in
order to have some occupation which might eventually give him enough
money to enable him to marry. Fortunately, however, he was diverted from
a commercial vocation which might thus have absorbed a great scientist,
and arrangements were made which permitted him to continue his
intellectual life, yet have the woman of his choice. She was destined to
make life happier far for him than is the usual lot of man, and he was
ever ready to acknowledge how much she meant for his happiness.
With literature, poetry, love and settling down in life to occupy him,
it is hard to think of Ampère as a young man doing great work in
science, but he did; and his work deservedly attracted attention even
from his very early years. It was in pure mathematics, perhaps, above
all other branches, that Ampère attracted the attention of his
generation. Ordinary questions he did not care for. Problems which the
fruitless efforts of twenty centuries had pronounced insoluble attracted
him at once. Even the squaring of the circle claimed his attention for a
while, though he got well beyond it even before his boyhood passed away.
There is a manuscript note from the Secretary of the Academy of Lyons,
which shows that on July 8th, 1788, Ampère, then not quite thirteen
years of age, addressed to that learned body a paper on the "Squaring of
the Circle." Later, during the same year, he submitted an analogous
memoir, entitled, "The Rectification of an Arc of a Circle, less than a
Semi-circumference."
Arago says that he was tempted to suppress this story of Ampère's
coquetting with so dangerous a problem, for Ampère rather flattered
himself that he had almost solved it. It was only after Arago recalled
how many geniuses in mathematics had occupied themselves with this same
problem, that he saw his way clearly not to share the scruples of those
who might think this incident a reflection on Ampère's mathematical
genius. After all, Anaxagoras, Hippocrates, Archimedes and Apollonius,
among the ancients, and among the moderns, Willebrod Snell, Huyghens,
Gregory, Wallis, and finally Newton, the mathematician of the heavens,
occupied themselves seriously with this very problem. Arago even notes
that some men, by their speculations on the squaring of the circle, were
led to distinguished discoveries, and mentions the name of Father
Grégoire de Saint-Vincent, the distinguished Flemish mathematician of
the Society of Jesus, to whom, as a direct result of his studies in
attempted circle-squaring, we owe the discovery of the properties of
hyperbolic space, limited by the curve and its asymptotes, as well as
the expansion of log (1 + _x_) in ascending powers of _x_. Montucla, the
historian of mathematics, writing of Père Saint-Vincent, said that, "No
one ever squared the circle with so much ability or with so much
success." There was, however, a fallacy in his magnificent work which
was pointed out by the celebrated Huyghens.
Shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ampère, as one of
his French biographers rather characteristically declares, redeemed
whatever of mathematical sinning there might have been, in indulging in
fond dalliance with the squaring of the circle, by a series of
mathematical papers, each of which was in itself a distinct advance on
previous knowledge, and at the same time, definite evidence of his
mathematical ability. The first paper, published in 1801, was a
contribution to solid geometry, bearing the title, "On Oblique
Polyhedrons." His next paper, written in 1803, though not published
until 1808, was a treatise on the advantages to be derived in the theory
of curves from due consideration of the osculating parabola. Another
treatise, written about the same time, had for title, "Investigations on
the Application of the General Formulæ of the Calculus of Variations to
Problems in Mechanics." This concerned problems which had interested
and, in most cases, proved too hard of solution even for such men as
Galileo, Jacques Bernoulli, Leibnitz, Huyghens and Jean Bernoulli.
Arago's expression with regard to this work is: "The treatise of Ampère
contains, in fact, new and very remarkable properties of the _catenary_
(la chainette) and its development." He adds: "There is no small merit
in discovering hiatuses in subjects explored by such men as Leibnitz,
Huyghens and the two Bernoullis. I must not forget to add that the
analysis of our associate unites elegance with simplicity."
It is not surprising, after such marks of mathematical genius, that
Ampère was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the École
Polytechnique, where he came to be looked upon as one of the most
distinguished of French mathematicians. In 1813, he became a candidate
for the position left vacant by the death of the famous Lagrange; and at
this time, presented to the Academy general considerations on the
integration of partial differential equations of the first and the
second order. After his election to the Academy, Ampère continued to
present important papers at its various sessions. Among these, three are
especially noteworthy: one was a demonstration of Père Mariotte's law
(known to English students as Boyle's law); another bore the title,
"Demonstration of a new Theory from which can be deduced all the Laws of
Refraction, ordinary and extraordinary"; a third was a memoir on the
"Determination of the curved surfaces of Luminous Waves in a medium
whose Elasticity differs in each of the three dimensions."
In his eulogy of Ampère, which, together with his article in the
"Dictionnaire Universelle de Biographie," we have followed rather
closely, Arago calls particular attention to the fact that in Paris,
Ampère moved in two intellectual circles quite widely separated in their
interests and sympathies. Among the first group, were the members of the
old "Institute" and professors and examiners of the École Polytechnique
and professors of the Collège de France. In the other, were the men
whose names have since become widely known as students of psychology, of
whom Cabanis may be taken as the representative. Ampère had as great a
passion for psychology, and was as ready to devote himself to fathoming
and analyzing the mysteries of the mind, as he was to work out a problem
in advanced mathematics, or throw light on difficult questions in the
physical sciences. These two sets of interests are seldom united in the
same man, though occasionally they are found. At the end of the
nineteenth century, we had the spectacle of very distinguished men of
science in physics, and even in biology--Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver
Lodge, Professor Charles Richet, Professor Lombroso and even Mr. Alfred
Russell Wallace--interested in psychic and spiritualistic manifestations
of many kinds as well as in natural science; and, inasmuch as they did
so, they would have found Ampère a brother spirit. Ampère indeed dived
rather deeply into what would be called, somewhat slightingly, perhaps,
in our generation, metaphysical speculation. At one time, he
contemplated the publication of a book which was to be called "An
Introduction to Philosophy." He had made elaborate theories with regard
to many metaphysical questions, and had written articles on "The Theory
of Relations," "The History of Existence," "Subjective and Objective
Knowledge" and "Absolute Morality." Arago calls attention to the fact
that Napoleon's famous anathema against ideology, far from discouraging
Ampère, rather seemed to stimulate him in his studies, and he declared
that it would surely contribute to the propagation of this kind of
speculation, rather than to its suppression. It was simply another case
of Napoleon overreaching himself, though this was in the domain of ideas
and not in the realm of politics, where his fate was to reach him some
time later.
How deeply interested Ampère became in metaphysics will perhaps be best
appreciated from the fact that, for progress in metaphysics, exercise in
disputation is needed, and had been the custom in the old medieval
universities. Ampère once made an arrangement to travel from Paris to
Lyons and stay there for some time, provided a definite promise was made
that at least four afternoons a week should be devoted to discussions
on ideology. The journey to Lyons, a distance of two hundred and fifty
miles, was no easy undertaking in those days. The Paris, Lyons and
Mediterranean Express now whirls one down to the capital of the silk
district in a night; but in Ampère's time, it took many days, and the
journey was by no means without inconveniences, which were likely to be
so troublesome that a prolonged rest was needed after it was over.
Ampère seems quite to have exhausted the interest of his friends in
Lyons, who found his metaphysical speculations too high for them, though
they themselves were specializing in the subject and would be glad to
tempt him into discussions of the exact sciences; but in lyrical strain
he apostrophizes psychological studies: "How can I abandon the country,
the flowers and running waters for the arid streets of the city! How
give up streams and groves for deserts scorched by the rays of a
mathematical sun, which, diffusing over all surrounding objects the most
brilliant light, withers and dries them down to the very roots! How much
more agreeable to wander under flitting shades, where truth seems to
flee before us to incite us to pursue, than walk in straight paths where
the eye embraces all at a glance!"
Had Ampère been less successful as a mathematician or an investigator of
physical science, these expressions would seem little short of
ridiculous. As it is, they provide food for thought. Ampère seemed to
realize that, for the intellectual man, the only satisfaction was not in
successful research so much as in application of mind to what promised
results. As in everything else, it was the chase, and not the capture,
that counted. Seldom has this idea been applied to intellectual things
with so much force as it seems to have appealed to Ampère, and one is
reminded of Malebranche's famous expression, "If I had truth in my hand,
I would be tempted to let it go for the pleasure of recapturing it."
The principal source of Ampère's fame, however, for future generations,
was to be in his researches in the science of electro-dynamics. The name
of this science will ever be inseparably linked with that of Ampère, its
founder. It was for that reason, of course, that the International
Congress of Electricians decided to give his name to the unit of current
strength, so that it has now become a household word, and will continue
so for ages to come. In spite of the resemblances, much more than
superficial, between magnetism and electricity, the identification of
these two with each other seemed as yet very distant. It is curiously
interesting, however, to note that Ampère himself, in a program of his
course, printed in 1802, announced that the "professor will demonstrate
that electrical and magnetic phenomena must be attributed to two
different fluids which act independently of each other." Ampère's fame
was to be founded on the direct contradiction of this proposition, which
he proposed and triumphantly defended by a marvelous series of
experimental illustrations eighteen years later. In the meantime, the
discovery of another distinguished scientist, doing his work many
hundreds of miles away, was to prove the stimulus to Ampère's
constructive imagination, so as to enable him to fill out many obscure
points of knowledge with regard to magnetism and electricity.
This suggestive discovery was that of Oersted, the sketch of whose life
and work immediately precedes this. Oersted demonstrated that a current
of electricity will affect a magnetic needle. This epoch-making
discovery reached Paris by way of Switzerland. The experiment was
repeated before the French Academy of Sciences by a member of the
Academy of Geneva, on September 11th, 1820. The date has some importance
in the history of science, for just seven days later, on the 18th of
September, Ampère presented, at the session of the Academy of Sciences,
a still more important fact, to which he had been led by the
consideration of Oersted's discovery while testing it by way of control
experiment. This brilliant discovery of Ampère, Arago summed up in these
words: "Two parallel conducting wires attract each other when the
current traverses them in the same direction. On the contrary, they
repel each other when the current flows in opposite directions. The
phenomenon described by Oersted was called, very appropriately,
electromagnetic, whilst the phenomena described by Ampère, in which the
magnet played no part, received at his suggestion the general name of
electro-dynamics, which has since been applied to them."
At first it was said that these phenomena were nothing more than
manifestations of the ordinary attractive and repelling power of the two
forms of electricity which had been so carefully studied, especially in
France, during the eighteenth century. Ampère at once disposed of any
such idea as this, however, by pointing out that bodies similarly
electrified repel each other, whilst those that are in opposite
electrical states attract each other. In the case of conductors
conveying currents, there is attraction when these are in the same
direction, and repulsion when they flow in the opposite direction. This
reasoning absolutely precluded all possibility of further doubt in the
matter, and this particular form of objection to Ampère's discoveries
was dropped at once.
Having satisfactorily disposed of other objections, Ampère was content
neither to rest quietly in his discovery nor merely to develop various
experimental phases of it which would be extremely interesting and
popularly attractive, but which at the same time might mean very little
for science. With his mathematical mind, Ampère resolved to work out a
mathematical theory which would embrace not only all the phenomena of
magnetism then known, but also the complete theory of the science of
electro-dynamics. Needless to say, such a problem was extremely
difficult. Arago has compared it to Newton's solution of the problem of
gravitation by mathematics. Considering the comparatively small amount
of data that Ampère had at his command, this problem might very well be
compared to that which Leverrier took up with so much success, when he
set about discovering by calculation only the planet Neptune, as yet
unknown, which was disturbing the movements of Uranus.
It might be thought that these discoveries of Ampère would be welcomed
with great enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, however, new discoveries
that are really novel always have, as almost their surest index, the
fact that contemporaries refuse to accept them. The more versed a man is
in the science in which the discovery comes, the more likely is he to
delay his acceptance of the novelty. This is not so surprising, since,
as a rule, new discoveries are nearly always very simple expressions of
great truths that seem obvious once they are accepted, yet have never
been thought of. They mean, therefore, that men who consider themselves
distinguished in a particular science have missed some easily
discoverable phenomenon or its full significance, and so, to accept a
new discovery in their department of learning men must confess their own
lack of foresight.
It may be pointed out that the same thing happened with regard to Ohm,
only it was much more serious. Years of Ohm's life were wasted because
of the refusal of his contemporaries to accept his "law" at his
valuation. Arago, in his life of Ampère, recalls that when Fresnel
discovered the transverse character of waves of light, his observations
created the same doubts and uncertainty in the same individuals who a
few years later refused to accept Ampère's conclusions. Arago puts it,
that as he was ambitious of a high place in the world of ideas, he
should have expected to find his adversaries precisely those already
occupying the highest places.
Ampère never looked on himself as a mere specialist in physical science,
however, and it is extremely interesting to know that he dared to take
sides in a discussion between Cuvier and Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, with
regard to the unity of structure in organized beings. While the purely
physical scientists mostly sat mute during the discussion, Ampère took
an active share in it, and ventured to subject himself to what perhaps,
above all things, a Frenchman dreads, the ridicule of his colleagues.
Arago thought that he held his own very well in this discussion, which
involved some of the ideas that were afterwards to be the subject of
profound study and prolonged investigation later in the nineteenth
century, because of the announcement of the theory of evolution.
After his discoveries in electricity Ampère came to be acknowledged as
one of the greatest of living scientists, and was honored as such by
most of the distinguished scientific societies of Europe. His work was
not confined to electricity alone, however, and late in life he prepared
what has been well called a remarkable work on the classification of the
sciences. This showed that, far from being a mere electrical specialist
or even a profound thinker in physics, he understood better probably
than any man of his time the interrelations of the sciences to one
another. He was a broad-minded, profound thinker in the highest sense of
the words, and in many things seems to have had almost an intuition of
the intimate processes of nature; a sharer in secrets as yet unrevealed,
though he was at the same time an untiring experimenter, eminently
successful, as is so evident in his electrical researches, in arranging
experiments so as to compel answers to the questions which he put to
nature.
In the midst of all this preoccupation of mind with science and all the
scientific problems that were working in men's minds in his time, from
the constitution of matter to the nature of life, above all engaged in
experimental work, he was a deeply religious man in his opinions and
practices. He had indeed the simple piety of a child. During the awful
period of the French Revolution, he had some doubts with regard to
religious truths; but once these were dispelled, he became one of the
most faithful practical Catholics of his generation. He seldom passed a
day without finding his way into a church, and his favorite form of
prayer was the rosary.
Frederick Ozanam tells the story of how he himself, overtaken by
misgivings with regard to faith, and roaming almost aimlessly through
the streets of Paris trying to think out solutions for his doubts, and
the problems that would so insistently present themselves respecting the
intellectual foundations of Christianity, finally wandered one day into
a church, and found Ampère there in an obscure corner, telling his
beads. Ozanam himself was moved to do the same thing, for Ampère was
then looked upon as one of the greatest living scientists of France.
Under the magic touch of an example like this and the quiet influence of
prayer, Ozanam's doubts vanished, never to return.
Saint-Beuve, whose testimony in a matter like this would surely be
unsuspected of any tendency to make Ampère more Catholic than he was, in
his introduction to Ampère's essay on the Philosophy of the Sciences
(Paris, 1843), says:
"The religious struggles and doubts of his earlier life had ceased. What
disturbed him now lay in less exalted regions. Years ago, his interior
conflicts, his instinctive yearning for the Eternal, and a lively
correspondence with his old friend, Father Barrett, combined with the
general tendency of the time of the Restoration, had led him back to
that faith and devotion which he expressed so strikingly in 1803....
During the years which followed, up to the time of his death, we were
filled with wonder and admiration at the way in which, without effort,
he united religion and science; faith and confidence in the intellectual
possibilities of man with adoring submission to the revealed word of
God."
Ozanam, to whose thoroughly practical Christianity while he was
professor of Foreign Literatures at the University of Paris we owe the
foundation of the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul, which so long
anticipated the "settlement work" of the modern time and have done so
much for the poor in large cities ever since, was very close to Ampère,
lived with him indeed for a while, said that, no matter where
conversations with him began, they always led up to God. The great
French scientist and philosopher used to take his broad forehead between
his hands after he had been discussing some specially deep question of
science or philosophy and say: "How great is God, Ozanam! How great is
God and how little is our knowledge!" Of course this has been the
expression of most profound thinkers at all times. St. Augustine's
famous vision of the angel standing by the sea emptying it out with a
teaspoon, which has been rendered so living for most of us by
Botticelli's great picture, is but an earlier example of the same thing.
One of Ampère's greatest contemporaries, Laplace, re-echoed the same
sentiment, perhaps in less striking terms, when he declared that what we
know is but little, while what we do not know is infinite.
For anyone who desires to study the beautiful Christian simplicity of a
truly great soul, there is no better human document than the "Journal
and Correspondence of Ampère," published some years after his death. He
himself wrote out the love story of his life; and it is perhaps one of
the most charming of narratives, certainly the most delightful
autobiographic story of this kind that has ever been told. It is human
to the very core, and it shows a wonderfully sympathetic character in a
great man, whose work was destined a few years later to revolutionize
physics and to found the practical science of electro-dynamics.
When Ampère's death was impending, it was suggested that a chapter of
the "Imitation of Christ" should be read to him; but he said, no!
declaring that he preferred to be left alone for a while, as he knew
the "Imitation" by heart and would repeat those chapters in which he
found most consolation. With the profoundest sentiments of piety and
confidence in Providence, he passed away June 10th, 1836, at Marseilles.
With all his solid piety, this man was not so distant from ordinary
worldly affairs as not to take a lively interest in all that was
happening around him and, above all, all that concerned the welfare of
men. He was especially enthusiastic for the freedom of the South
American Republics, eagerly following the course of Bolivar and Canaris,
and rejoicing at the success of their efforts. South American patriots
visiting Paris found a warm welcome at his hands, and also introductions
that made life pleasant for them at the French capital. His house was
always open to them, and no service that he performed for them seemed
too much.
Ampère was beloved by his family and his friends; he was perhaps the
best liked man among his circle of acquaintances in Paris because of the
charming geniality of his character and his manifold interests. He was
kind, above all, to rising young men in the intellectual world around
him, and was looked up to by many of them as almost a second father. His
charity towards the poor was proverbial, and this side of his
personality and career deserves to be studied quite as much as what he
was able to accomplish for science. The beauty of his character was
rooted deeply in the religion that he professed, and in our day, when it
has come to be the custom for so many to think that science and faith
are inalterably opposed, the lesson of this life, so deeply imbued with
both of these great human interests, deserves to be studied. Ozanam, who
knew him best, has brought out this extremely interesting union of
intellectual qualities, in a passage that serves very well to sum up the
meaning of Ampère's life.
"In addition to his scientific achievements," says Ozanam, "this
brilliant genius has other claims upon our admiration and affection. He
was our brother in the faith. It was religion which guided the labors of
his mind and illuminated his contemplations; he judged all things,
science itself, by the exalted standard of religion.... This venerable
head which was crowned by achievements and honors, bowed without reserve
before the mysteries of faith, down even below the line which the Church
has marked for us. He prayed before the same altars before which
Descartes and Pascal had knelt; beside the poor widow and the small
child who may have been less humble in mind than he was. Nobody observed
the regulations of the Church more conscientiously, regulations which
are so hard on nature and yet so sweet in the habit. Above all things,
however, it is beautiful to see what sublime things Christianity wrought
in his great soul; this admirable simplicity, the unassumingness of a
mind that recognized everything except its own genius; this high
rectitude in matters of science, now so rare, seeking nothing but the
truth and never rewards and distinction; the pleasant and ungrudging
amiability; and lastly, the kindness with which he met everyone,
especially young people. I can say that those who know only the
intelligence of the man, know only the less perfect part. If he thought
much, he loved more."