VIEWS ON THE PURSUIT OF SCIENCE AND ON EDUCATION.
Between Faraday and the scientific men of his time there subsisted
many various relations. The influence which he exerted as a lecturer
and as an experimental investigator was unique; but, apart from
such influences, those relations were mainly confined to individual
friendships. With the organisation of science he had relatively very
little to do. We have seen how highly he prized the honour of admission
to the Fellowship of the Royal Society; and it remains to be told of
the gratification with which he accepted the scientific honours which
he received from almost every academy and university in Europe. Yet
he took little part in the work of scientific societies as such. Four
years after his election as F.R.S. he served on the Council, and he
remained on till 1831. He served again in 1833 and 1835. He was not,
however, satisfied with the management of the Royal Society, nor with
the way in which its Fellowship was at that time bestowed on men who
had no real claims on science, but were nominated through influence.
Echoes of this discontent are to be found in various pamphlets of the
day by Moll, Babbage, South, and others. Faraday, who edited Moll’s
pamphlet on the “Decline of Science,” is believed to have had an even
larger share in its production. In 1830 the really scientific men
amongst the Fellows desired to place Sir John Herschel as President;
the less scientific preferred the Duke of Sussex. Faraday took the
unusual step of speaking on the question, advocating the principle
that eminence in science should be the sole qualification for the
Presidency. At the same meeting Herschel moved, and Faraday seconded,
a plan for reforming the Council by nominating a list of fifty Fellows
from whose number the Council should be chosen. They carried their
plan, and Faraday’s name was amongst those so selected to serve. But
the presidential election went in favour of the Duke of Sussex by 119
to 110 votes. After 1835 Faraday never served again on the Council. In
1843 he wrote to Matteucci:--
I think you are aware that I have not attended at the Royal
Society, either meetings or council, for some years. Ill health
is one reason, and another that I do not like the present
constitution of it, and want to restrict it to scientific men.
As these my opinions are not acceptable, I have withdrawn from
any management in it (still sending scientific communications
if I discover anything I think worthy). This, of course,
deprives me of power there.
[Sidenote: REFORM IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY.]
Two months earlier he wrote to Grove, who at that time was carrying out
the long-needed reforms, sympathising, but declining to co-operate:--
Royal Institution,
December 21, 1842.
MY DEAR GROVE,--... As to the Royal Society, you know my
feeling towards it is for what it has been, and I hope may be.
Its present state is not wholesome. You are aware that I am
not on the council, and have not been for years, and have been
to no meeting there for years; but I do hope for better times.
I do not wonder at your feeling--all I meant to express was a
wish that its circumstances and character should improve, and
that it should again become a desirable reunion of _all_ really
scientific men. It has done much, is now doing much, in some
parts of science, as its magnetic observations show, and I hope
will some day become altogether healthy.
Ever, my dear Grove, yours sincerely,
M. FARADAY.
Though he continued down to 1860 to send researches for publication
to the Royal Society, he seldom attended its meetings.[56] He was not
even present in November, 1845, on the occasion of the reading of his
paper on the action of the magnet on light. In 1857 he declined the
Presidency, though urged by the unanimous wish of the Council, as
narrated on p. 225.
Though in the meridian of his active life, he took no part in the
founding of the British Association in 1831, but was at the Oxford
meeting in 1832, being one of the four scientific men (p. 65) selected
to receive the honorary degree of D.C.L. on that occasion. He also
communicated a paper on Electro-chemical Decomposition to the B.A.
meeting at Cambridge in 1833. He acted as president of the Chemical
Section of the Association in 1837 at Liverpool, and in 1846 at
Southampton; and he was chosen as vice-president of the Association
itself in the years 1844, at York (p. 224); 1849, at Birmingham (p.
256); and 1853, at Hull. He delivered evening discourses in 1847,
at Oxford, on Magnetic and Diamagnetic Phenomena; and in 1849, at
Birmingham, on Mr. Gassiot’s Battery. He also contributed to the
proceedings at the meetings at Ipswich in 1851 and at Liverpool in 1854.
His comparative aloofness from scientific organisations arose probably
from the exceedingly individual nature of his own researches--to which
allusion was made on p. 242--rather than from any lack of sympathy.
He had no jealousy of co-operation in science. To Tyndall, then at
Marburg, he wrote in 1850 rejoicing at the circumstance that the work
on the magnetic properties of crystals was being taken up by others.
“It is wonderful,” he says, “how much good results from different
persons working at the same matter. Each one gives views and ideas new
to the rest. When science is a republic, then it gains; and though I am
no republican in other matters, I am in that.” Other causes there were,
doubtless, tending to his isolation, amongst them an old jealousy, now
long dead, against the Royal Institution on the part of some of the
Fellows of the Royal Society. Above all, probably, was his detestation
of controversy.
[Sidenote: PRIORITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.]
[Sidenote: PRIORITY IN PUBLICATION.]
Priority in scientific discovery was a matter which deeply concerned
one whose life was devoted to scientific pioneering. To any question
as to scientific priority between himself and other workers he was
keenly sensitive. This was, indeed, natural in one who had voluntarily
relinquished fortune, and retired from lucrative professional work,
in the sole and single aim of advancing natural knowledge. His
single-minded and sensitive nature made him particularly scrupulous
in all such matters, and his early experiences must have added to the
almost excessive keenness of his perceptions. Having had in 1823,
when still merely assistant to Davy, to bear the double burden of a
serious misunderstanding with Dr. Wollaston as to the originality of
his discovery of the electro-magnetic rotations, and of a serious
estrangement from his master arising out of the liquid chlorine
discovery--an estrangement which threatened to cause his election to
the Royal Society to be indefinitely postponed--he was in later life
especially precise in dating and publishing his own researches. In
1831 there arose, concerning his great discovery of magneto-electric
induction, a curious misunderstanding. His discovery was, as we have
seen, made in September and October. He collected his results and
arranged them in the splendid memoir--the first in the series of
“Experimental Researches in Electricity”--which was read at the Royal
Society on November 24th. The _résumé_ of his work, which he wrote
five days later to Phillips, is given on pages 114–117. A fortnight
later he wrote a shorter and hasty letter in the same way to his
friend, M. Hachette of Paris--a letter which Faraday subsequently
well termed “unfortunate,” in view of the consequences that followed.
M. Hachette, a week later, communicated Faraday’s letter to the
Académie des Sciences on December 26th. It was published in _Le
Temps_ of December 28th. At that date the complete memoir read to
the Royal Society was not yet printed or circulated. The consequence
was that two Italian physicists, MM. Nobili and Antinori, seeing the
brief letter, and “considering that the subject was given to the
philosophical world for general pursuit,” immediately began researches
on magneto-electric induction in ignorance of Faraday’s full work.
Their results they embodied in a paper, in which they claimed to
have “verified, extended, and, perhaps, rectified the results of the
English philosopher,” accusing him of errors both in experiment and
theory, and even of a breach of good faith as to what he had said
about Arago’s rotations. This paper they dated January 31st, 1832;
but it was published in the belated number of the _Antologia_ for
November, 1831, where its appearance at an apparently earlier date
than Faraday’s original paper in the _Philosophical Transactions_ made
many Continental readers suppose that the researches of Nobili and
Antinori preceded those of Faraday. In June, 1832, Faraday published
in the _Philosophical Magazine_ a translation of Nobili’s memoir, with
his own annotations; and later in the year he wrote to Gay Lussac a
long letter on the errors of Nobili and Antinori. He showed how, in
spite of his efforts to clear up the misunderstanding, in spite of
his having sent several months previously to MM. Nobili and Antinori
copies of his original papers, no correction or retractation had
been made by them; and he concluded by a dignified protest that none
might say he had been too hasty to write that which might have been
avoided. It may be taken that the rule now recognised as to priority
of scientific publication--namely, that it dates from the day when the
discoverer communicates it formally to any of the recognised learned
societies--was virtually established by Faraday’s example. It will
be remembered that writing to De la Rive in 1845, to tell him of his
diamagnetic discoveries, he begged him to keep the matter secret,
adding: “I ought (in order to preserve the respect due to the Royal
Society) not to write a description to any one until the paper has
been received or even read there.” To younger men he inculcated the
necessity of proper and prompt publication of their researches if they
would reap the benefit of their work. To Sir William Crookes, then a
rising young chemist, he said: “Work, Finish, Publish.” Writing in 1853
to Professor Matteucci, who had been annoyed with him for allowing
Du Bois Reymond, with whom Matteucci had had some controversy about
priority, to dedicate his book to him, Faraday says: “Who has not to
put up in his day with insinuations and misrepresentations in the
accounts of his proceedings given by others, bearing for the time the
present injustice, which is often unintentional, and often originates
in hasty temper, and committing his fame and character to the judgment
of the men of his own and future time?”... “I see that that moves
you which would move me most--namely, the imputation of a want of
good faith--and I cordially sympathise with any one who is so charged
unjustly. Such cases have seemed to me almost the only ones for which
it is worth while entering into controversy.”... “These polemics of the
scientific world are very unfortunate things; they form the great stain
to which the beautiful edifice of scientific truth is subject. _Are
they inevitable?_”
Controversy whether in religion or science was to him alike detestable.
He took no part in politics. A letter to Tyndall (see “Faraday as a
Discoverer,” p. 39), written after the latter had told him of a rather
heated discussion at the British Association meeting in 1855, speaks of
his own efforts at forbearance. He says:--
These great meetings, of which I think very well altogether,
advance science chiefly by bringing scientific men together
and making them to know and be friends with each other; and I
am sorry when that is not the effect in every part of their
course.... The real truth never fails ultimately to appear....
It is better to be blind to the results of partisanship, and
quick to see good will. One has more happiness in oneself in
endeavouring to follow the things that make for peace. You can
hardly imagine how often I have been heated in private when
opposed, as I have thought unjustly and superciliously, and yet
I have striven, and succeeded I hope, in keeping down replies
of the like kind. And I know I have never lost by it.
[Sidenote: HATRED OF CONTROVERSY.]
During the years when he was examining the apparatus of rival inventors
for lighthouse illumination, he could calmly hear them described as
Mr. So-and-So’s electric lights, all the while knowing that it was
his own discovery of magneto-electric induction which had made the
mechanical production of electric light possible. Yet he fired up if
anyone dared to revive the priority dispute between Davy and Stephenson
as to the invention of the safety lamp. “Disgraceful subject,” was
his own comment. In his dispute with Snow Harris as to the design of
lightning rods, in which, as it is now known, Snow Harris was right;
in his dispute with Airy over the curved lines of force; in his minor
difficulties over Hare’s pile and Becquerel’s magnetic observations,
none could either assert his own position with more simple dignity, nor
admit with greater frankness the rights of his rival.
To Hare he wrote:--
You must excuse me, however, for several reasons from answering
it [Hare’s letter] at any length; the first is my distaste for
controversy, which is so great that I would on no account our
correspondence should acquire that character. I have often
seen it do great harm, and yet remember few cases in natural
knowledge where it has helped much either to pull down error or
advance truth. Criticism, on the other hand, is of much value.
When we reflect how large a part of his experimental researches was
devoted to establishing the relations between the various forces of
nature, we cannot but think that Faraday must have regarded with
somewhat mixed feelings the publication in 1846 of Sir William Grove’s
volume on the Correlation of Forces. He had, in June, 1834, given a
course of lectures on the mutual relation of chemical and electrical
phenomena, and had dealt therein with the conversion of chemical and
electrical power into heat, and had speculated on the inclusion of
gravitation in these mutual relations. In 1853 Faraday marked the old
lecture notes of these lectures with his initials, and endorsed them
with the words “Correlation of Physical Forces.” Probably none rejoiced
more than he that Grove had undertaken the work of popularising the
notion which for a score of years had been familiar to himself. Yet
he was keen to resent an unjust reflection, as is shown by his letter
to Richard Phillips, republished in Vol. II. of the “Experimental
Researches,” p. 229, respecting Dr. John Davy’s Life of Sir Humphry.
Faraday has himself left on record (p. 10) that when he wrote to Davy
asking to be taken into his employment, his motive was his desire “to
escape from trade, which I thought vicious and selfish, and to enter
into the service of Science, which, I imagined, made its pursuers
amiable and liberal.” Davy had smiled at this boyish notion, and had
told him that the experience of a few years would correct his ideas.
Years afterwards he spoke of this matter to Mrs. Andrew Crosse in an
interview which she has recorded:--
After viewing the ample appliances for experimental research,
and feeling much impressed by the scientific atmosphere of the
place, I turned and said, “Mr. Faraday, you must be very happy
in your position and with your pursuits, which elevate you
entirely out of the meaner aspects and lower aims of common
life.”
He shook his head, and with that wonderful mobility of
countenance which was characteristic, his expression of
joyousness changed to one of profound sadness, and he replied:
“When I quitted business and took to science as a career, I
thought I had left behind me all the petty meannesses and small
jealousies which hinder man in his moral progress; but I found
myself raised into another sphere, only to find poor human
nature just the same everywhere--subject to the same weaknesses
and the same self-seeking, however exalted the intellect.”
These were his words as well as I can recollect; and, looking
at that good and great man, I thought I had never seen a
countenance which so impressed me with the characteristic of
perfect unworldliness.
[Sidenote: HONOURS AND TITLES.]
Probably few men have ever been recipients of so many scientific
honours as Faraday. Beginning in the year 1823 with his election as a
corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences of Paris, and as an
honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the list of
his diplomas and distinctions--some ninety-seven in number--ended in
1864 with his election as Associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences of
Naples. It included honours from almost every academy and university
of Europe. These honours Faraday valued very highly; and whilst he
consigned his various gold medals to a mere wooden box, his diplomas
were kept with the utmost care in a special diploma book, in which they
were mounted and indexed. To Mr. Spring Rice, who in 1838 asked him for
a list of his titles, he replied, enclosing the list, and adding this
remark: “One title, namely that of F.R.S., was sought and paid for;
all the rest are spontaneous offerings of kindness and goodwill from
the bodies named.” Years afterwards he was asked by Lord Wrottesley
to advise the Government as to how the position of science or of the
cultivators of science in England might be improved. The letter is so
characteristic that it cannot be spared:--
Royal Institution: March 10, 1854.
MY LORD,--I feel unfit to give a deliberate opinion on the
course it might be advisable for the Government to pursue
if it were anxious to improve the position of science and
its cultivators in our country. My course of life, and the
circumstances which make it a happy one for me, are not those
of persons who conform to the usages and habits of society.
Through the kindness of all, from my Sovereign downwards,
I have that which supplies all my need; and in respect of
honours, I have, as a scientific man, received from foreign
countries and sovereigns those which, belonging to very limited
and select classes, surpass in my opinion anything that it is
in the power of my own to bestow.
I cannot say that I have not valued such distinctions; on the
contrary, I esteem them very highly, but I do not think I have
ever worked for or sought after them. Even were such to be now
created here, the time is past when these would possess any
attraction for me....
Without thinking of the effect it might have upon distinguished
men of science, or upon the minds of those who, stimulated
to exertion, might become distinguished, I do think that a
government should, _for its own sake_, honour the men who do
honour and service to the country. I refer now to honours only,
not to beneficial rewards. Of such honours, I think, there
are none. Knighthoods and baronetcies are sometimes conferred
with such intentions, but I think them utterly unfit for that
purpose. Instead of conferring distinction, they confound the
man who is one of twenty, or perhaps fifty, with hundreds of
others. They depress rather than exalt him, for they tend to
lower the especial distinction of mind to the commonplace
of society. An intelligent country ought to recognise the
scientific men amongst its people as a class. If honours are
conferred upon eminence in any class, as that of the law or
the army, they should be in this also. The aristocracy of
the class should have other distinctions than those of lowly
and high-born, rich and poor, yet they should be such as to
be worthy of those whom the sovereign and the country should
delight to honour; and, being rendered very desirable, and even
enviable, in the eyes of the aristocracy by birth, should be
unattainable except to that of science. Thus much, I think,
the Government and the country ought to do, for their own sake
and the good of science, more than for the sake of the men who
might be thought worthy of such distinction. The latter have
attained to their fit place, whether the community at large
recognise it or not....
I have the honour to be, my lord, your very faithful servant,
M. FARADAY.
[Sidenote: HOW SCIENCE CAN BE HONOURED.]
To Professor Andrews he wrote in 1843 in a similar strain:--
I have always felt that there is something degrading in
offering rewards for intellectual exertion, and that societies
or academies, or even kings and emperors, should mingle in the
matter does not remove the degradation, for the feeling which
is hurt is a point above their condition, and belongs to the
respect which a man owes to himself.... Still, I think rewards
and honours _good_ if properly distributed; but they should be
given for what a man has done, and not offered for what he is
to do.
When a friend wrote to him on hearing a rumour that he had himself been
knighted, his reply, published years after in the _London Review_, was:
“I am happy that I am not a Sir, and do not intend (if it depends upon
me) to become one. By the Prussian knighthood[57] I do feel honoured;
in the other I should not.”
On one occasion he commented rather sarcastically upon the British
Government and its stinginess as compared with those of all other
civilised countries in its aids to scientific progress. This complaint
is equally justified to-day. To many it may be news that England pays
to its Astronomer Royal--who must obviously be a person of very high
scientific qualifications--a salary less than those paid to the five
assistant under-secretaries in the Colonial and Foreign Offices; less
than that paid to the sergeants-at-arms in the Houses of Parliament;
less than that paid to the person appointed Director of Clothing in the
War Office. Enlightened England!
Faraday did not deem the pursuit of science to be necessarily
incompatible with what he termed “professional business”--that
is, expert work. Until the day when he abandoned all professional
engagements, so as to devote himself to researches, he had been
receiving a considerable and growing income from this source. But
he objected to the indignities to which this work exposed him from
lawyers, who would not understand that he took no partisan view. He
could not endure the browbeating of cross-examining counsel. The late
Lord Cardwell was witness to a gentle but crushing reproof which he
once administered to a barrister who attempted to bully him. A writer
in the _British Quarterly Review_ attributes to a specific case his
determination to cease expert work.
He gave evidence once in a judicial case, when the scientific
testimony, starting from given premises, was so diverse that
the presiding judge, in summing up launched something like a
reproach at the scientific witnesses. “Science has not shone
this day,” was his lordship’s remark. From that time forth
no one ever saw Faraday as a scientific witness before a law
tribunal.
[Sidenote: UNIVERSITY DEGREES IN SCIENCE.]
Amongst the honours received by Faraday there was one of which,
in 1838, he said that he felt it equal to any other he had
received--namely, that of Member of the Senate of the University of
London, to which position he was nominated in 1836 by the Crown. For
twenty-seven years he remained a senator, and when, in 1859, the
project for creating degrees in science was on foot, he was one of
the committee who drew up a report and scheme of examination for the
Senate. To the Rev. John Barlow he wrote on this matter:--
The Senate of the University accepted and approved of the
report of the Committee for Scientific Degrees, so that that
will go forward (if the Government approve), and will come into
work next year. It seems to give much satisfaction to all who
have seen it, though the subject is beset with difficulties;
for when the depth and breadth of science came to be
considered, and an estimate was made of how much a man ought to
know to obtain a right to a degree in it, the amount in words
seemed to be so enormous as to make me hesitate in demanding it
from the student; and though in the D.S. one could divide the
matter and claim eminence in one branch of science, rather than
good general knowledge in all, still in the B.S., which is a
progressive degree, a more extended though a more superficial
acquaintance seemed to be required. In fact, the matter is
so new, and there is so little that can serve as a previous
experience in the founding and arranging these degrees, that
one must leave the whole endeavour to shape itself as the
practice and experience accumulates.
When, in 1863, his feebleness impelled him to resign this position, he
wrote to Dr. Carpenter:--
The position of a senator is one that should not be held by
an inactive man to the exclusion of an active one. It has
rejoiced my heart to see the progress of the University, and
of education under its influence and power; and that delight I
hope to have so long as life shall be spared to me.
He had little sympathy with either text-book science or with mere
examinations. “I have far more confidence,” he wrote, “in the one man
who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely
talk about it. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst
it sets error right, gives an absolute advancement in knowledge.”
In another place he wrote:--“Let the imagination go, guarding it
by judgment and principles, but holding it in and directing it by
experiment.” For book-learned chemistry and mere chemical theory, apart
from experimental facts, he had an undisguised contempt. Writing to
General Portlock on the subject of chemical education, he stated that
he had been one of the Senate of the University of London appointed to
consider especially the best method of examination. They had decided
on examination by papers, accompanied by _vivâ voce_. “We think,” he
added, “that no numerical value can be attached to the questions,
because everything depends on _how they are answered_.” Then, referring
to the teaching at Woolwich, he says, “My instructions always have
been to look to the note-books for the result.” “Lectures alone cannot
be expected to give more than a general idea of this most extensive
branch of science, and it would be too much to expect that young men
who at the utmost hear only fifty lectures on chemistry should be
able to answer with much effect, in writing, to questions set down on
paper, when we know by experience that daily work for eight hours in
_practical laboratories_ for _three months_ does not go very far to
confer such ability.”
[Sidenote: SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITIES.]
He had, at an earlier date, declined to be appointed as examiner in the
University. He had previously declined the professorship of chemistry
in University College; and he had also declined the chemical chair in
the University of Edinburgh. This was not, however, from any want of
sympathy with university work, or failure to appreciate the ideal of a
university as a seat of learning. Writing to Tyndall, in 1851, about
another university--that at Toronto--he said: “I trust it is a place
where a man of science and a true philosopher is required, and where,
in return, such a man would be nourished and cherished in proportion to
his desire to advance natural knowledge.”
At the same time he had an exceeding repugnance to the custom of
expecting candidates for professorial chairs to produce “testimonials”
of their qualifications. When his intimate friend Richard Phillips was
a candidate for the very chair which Faraday refused at University
College, Faraday declined on principle to give a testimonial. “I should
indeed have thought,” he added, “his character had been known to
be such that it would rather have been degraded than established by
certificates.”
Similarly, in 1851, he told Tyndall, then an applicant for the Chair of
Physics at Toronto, that he had in every case refused for many years
past to give any on the application of candidates. “Nevertheless,” he
added, “I wish to say that when I am asked about a candidate by those
who have the choice or appointment, I never refuse to answer.”
[Sidenote: SCIENCE IN EDUCATION.]
On general education, Faraday’s ideas were much in advance of his
time. From the epoch when as a young man he lectured to the City
Philosophical Society on the means of obtaining knowledge and on mental
inertia, down to the close of his career, he consistently advocated
the cultivation of the experimental method and the use of science as
a means of training the faculties. A concise account of his views is
to be found in the lecture he gave in 1854 before the Prince Consort
on “Mental Education,” a lecture which prescribes the self-educating
discipline of scientific study and experiment as a means of correcting
deficiency of judgment. It included a powerful plea for suspense of
judgment and for the cultivation of the faculty of proportionate
judgment. In 1862 he was examined at some length by the Royal
Commissioners upon Public Schools. With them he pleaded strongly for
the introduction of science into the school curricula; and when asked
at what age it might be serviceable to introduce science-teaching,
replied: “I think one can hardly tell that until after experience for
some few years. All I can say is this that at my juvenile lectures at
Christmas time I have never found a child too young to understand
intelligently what I told him; they came to me afterwards with
questions which proved their capability.”
One passage from the close of a lecture given in 1858 deserves to be
recorded for its fine appreciation of “the kind of education which
science offers to man”:--
It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise
the _small_ beginnings--they precede of necessity _all great
things_.... It teaches a continual comparison of the _small
and great_, and that under differences almost approaching
the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in
principle as the great does the small; and thus the mind
becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles
carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment,
to discover and obey _law_, and by it to be bold in applying
to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us,
first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known
to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to
science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a
fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have
obtained from the men of the past. Bacon in his instruction
tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the
ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her
own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces.
All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of
physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful,
beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of
nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not
that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every
sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under _law_, and that
the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human
mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a
point of view that the mental education afforded by science is
rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and
utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power
through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.
[Sidenote: ON MATHEMATICS.]
A peculiar interest attaches to Faraday’s attitude towards the study
of mathematics. He who had never had any schooling beyond the common
school of his parish had not advanced beyond the simplest algebra in
his mastery over symbolic reasoning. Several times in his “Experimental
Researches” he deplores what he termed “my imperfect mathematical
knowledge.” Of Poisson’s theory of magnetism he said: “I am quite unfit
to form a judgment.” Dr. Scoffern repeats a pleasantry of Faraday’s
having on a certain occasion boasted that he had once in the course of
his life performed a mathematical operation--when he turned the handle
of Babbage’s calculating machine. Certain it is that he went through
the whole of his magnificent researches without once using even a sine
or a cosine, or anything more recondite than the simple rule-of-three.
He expressed the same kind of regret at his unfamiliarity with the
German language--“the language of science and knowledge,” as he
termed it in writing to Du Bois Reymond--which prevented him from
reading the works of Professor “Ohms.” Nevertheless he valued the
mathematical powers of others, and counselled Tyndall to work out his
experimental results, “so that the mathematicians may be able to take
it up.” Yet he never relaxed his preference for proceeding along the
lines of experimental investigation. His curious phrase (p. 239) as
to his pique respecting mathematics is very significant, as is also
his note of jubilation in his letter to Phillips (p. 117) at finding
that pure experiment can successfully rival mathematics in unravelling
the mysteries which had eluded the efforts of Poisson and Arago.
He himself attributed to his defective memory his want of hold upon
symbolic reasoning. To Tyndall he wrote in 1851, when thanking him for
a copy of one of his scientific memoirs:--
Such papers as yours make me feel more than ever the loss of
memory I have sustained, for there is no reading them, or at
least retaining the argument, under such deficiency.
Mathematical formulæ more than anything require quickness and
surety in receiving and retaining the true value of the symbols
used; and when one has to look back at every moment to the
beginning of a paper, to see what H or A or B mean, there is
no making way. Still, though I cannot hold the whole train of
reasoning in my mind at once, I am able fully to appreciate
the value of the results you arrive at, and it appears to me
that they are exceedingly well established and of very great
consequence. These elementary laws of action are of so much
consequence in the development of the nature of a power which,
like magnetism, is as yet new to us.
Again to Clerk Maxwell, in 1857, he wrote:--
There is one thing I would be glad to ask you. When a
mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and
results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be
expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely
as in mathematical formulæ? If so, would it not be a great boon
to such as we to express them so--translating them out of their
hieroglyphics that we also might work upon them by experiment?
I think it must be so, because I have always found that you
could convey to me a perfectly clear idea of your conclusions,
which, though they may give me no full understanding of the
steps of your process, gave me the results neither above nor
below the truth, and so clear in character that I can think and
work from them.
If this be possible, would it not be a good thing if
mathematicians, writing on these subjects, were to give us
their results in this popular useful working state as well as
in that which is their own and proper to them?
The achievement of Faraday in finding for the expression of
electromagnetic laws means which, though not symbolic, were simple,
accurate, and in advance of the mathematics of his time, has been
alluded to on page 217. Liebig, in his discourse on “Induction and
Deduction,” refers to Faraday thus:--
I have heard mathematical physicists deplore that Faraday’s
records of his labours were difficult to read and understand,
that they often resembled rather abstracts from a diary. But
the fault was theirs, not Faraday’s. To physicists who have
approached physics by the road of chemistry, Faraday’s memoirs
sound like an admirably beautiful music.
[Sidenote: MAXWELL AND VON HELMHOLTZ.]
Von Helmholtz, in his Faraday lecture of 1881, has also touched on this
aspect.
Now that the mathematical interpretation of Faraday’s
conceptions regarding the nature of electric and magnetic
forces has been given by Clerk Maxwell, we see how great a
degree of exactness and precision was really hidden behind the
words which to Faraday’s contemporaries appeared either vague
or obscure; and it is in the highest degree astonishing to
see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical
deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical
analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of
instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula.
Two other passages from Von Helmholtz are worthy of being added:--
And now, with a quite wonderful sagacity and intellectual
precision, Faraday performed in his brain the work of a great
mathematician without using a single mathematical formula.
He saw with his mind’s eye that magnetised and dielectric
bodies ought to have a tendency to contract in the direction
of the lines of force, and to dilate in all directions
perpendicular to the former, and that by these systems of
tensions and pressures in the space which surrounds electrified
bodies, magnets, or wires conducting electric currents, all
the phenomena of electrostatic, magnetic, electromagnetic
attraction, repulsion, and induction could be explained,
without recurring at all to forces acting directly at a
distance. This was the part of his path where so few could
follow him; perhaps a Clerk Maxwell, a second man of the same
power and independence of intellect, was needed to reconstruct
in the normal methods of science the great building the plan of
which Faraday had conceived in his mind, and attempted to make
visible to his contemporaries.
Nobody can deny that this new theory of electricity and
magnetism, originated by Faraday and developed by Maxwell, is
in itself well consistent, in perfect and exact harmony with
all the known facts of experience, and does not contradict any
one of the general axioms of dynamics, which have been hitherto
considered as the fundamental truths of all natural science,
because they have been found valid, without any exception, in
all known processes of nature.
And, after dealing with the phenomena discussed by Faraday, Von
Helmholtz adds these pregnant words:--
Nevertheless, the fundamental conceptions by which Faraday
was led to these much-admired discoveries have not received
an equal amount of consideration. They were very divergent
from the trodden path of scientific theory, and appeared
rather startling to his contemporaries. His principal aim was
to express in his new conceptions only facts, with the least
possible use of hypothetical substances and forces. This was
really an advance in general scientific method, destined to
purify science from the last remnants of metaphysics. Faraday
was not the first, and not the only man, who had worked in
this direction, but perhaps nobody else at his time did it so
radically.
Clerk Maxwell said of him:
The way in which Faraday made use of his lines of force in
co-ordinating the phenomena of electric induction shows him to
have been a mathematician of high order, and one from whom the
mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile
methods.
It is fitting to include in this review of Faraday’s place in relation
to the mathematical side of physics some words of Lord Kelvin, taken
from his preface to the English edition of Hertz’s “Electric Waves”:--
Faraday, with his curved lines of electric force, and
his dielectric efficiency of air and of liquid and solid
insulators, resuscitated the idea of a medium through which,
and not only through which but _by_ which, forces of attraction
or repulsion, seemingly acting at a distance, are transmitted.
The long struggle of the first half of the eighteenth century
was not merely on the question of a medium to serve for
gravific mechanism, but on the correctness of the Newtonian
law of gravitation as a matter of fact, however explained. The
corresponding controversy in the nineteenth century was very
short, and it soon became obvious that Faraday’s idea of the
transmission of electric force by a medium not only did not
violate Coulomb’s law of relation between force and distance,
but that, if real, it must give a thorough explanation of that
law. Nevertheless, after Faraday’s discovery of the different
specific inductive capacities of different insulators, twenty
years passed before it was generally accepted in Continental
Europe. But before his death, in 1867, he had succeeded in
inspiring the rising generation of the scientific world
with something approaching to faith that electric force is
transmitted by a medium called ether, of which, as had been
believed by the whole scientific world for forty years, light
and radiant heat are transverse vibrations. Faraday himself
did not rest with this theory of electricity alone. The very
last time I saw him at work at the Royal Institution was in
an underground cellar, which he had chosen for freedom from
disturbance, and he was arranging experiments to test the
time of propagation of magnetic force from an electromagnet
through a distance of many yards of air to a fine steel needle,
polished to reflect light; but no result came from those
experiments. About the same time, or soon after, certainly not
long before the end of his working time, he was engaged (I
believe at the Shot Tower, near Waterloo Bridge, on the Surrey
side) in efforts to discover relations between gravity and
magnetism, which also led to no result.
[Sidenote: KELVIN’S APPRECIATION.]
Lord Kelvin, who was himself the first to perceive that Faraday’s ideas
were not inconsistent with mathematical expression, and to direct Clerk
Maxwell and others to this view, had, in 1854, delighted the old man
by bringing mathematical support to the conception of lines of force.
In 1857 he sent to Faraday a copy of one of his papers, and received
in acknowledgment a letter of warm encouragement, which, however, does
not appear to have been preserved. Lord Kelvin’s reply is its own best
commentary:--
Such expressions from you would be more than a sufficient
reward for anything I could ever contemplate doing in science.
I feel strongly how little I have done to deserve them, but
they will encourage me with a stronger motive than I have
ever had before to go on endeavouring to see in the direction
you have pointed, which I long ago learned to believe is the
direction in which we must look for a deeper insight into
nature.