(BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1871.)
The President’s inaugural address, which was going through the press
in London while being spoken in Edinburgh, has already been subject to
an unusual amount of sharp criticism. For my own part I cannot help
regarding it as one of the least satisfactory of all the inaugural
addresses that have yet been delivered at these annual meetings. They
have been of two types, the historical and the controversial; the
former prevailing. In the historical addresses the President has
usually made a comprehensive and instructive survey of the progress
of the whole range of science during the past year, and has dwelt
more particularly on some branch which from its own intrinsic merits
has claimed special attention, or which his own special attainments
have enabled him to treat with the greatest ability and authority. A
few Presidents have, like Dr. Huxley last year, taken up a particular
subject only, and have discussed it more thoroughly than they could
have done had they also attempted a general historical survey.
Every President until 1871 has scrupulously kept in view his judicial
position, and the fact that he is addressing, not merely a few learned
men, but the whole of England, if not the whole civilized world. They
have therefore clearly distinguished between the established and the
debatable conclusions of science, between ascertained facts and mere
hypotheses, have kept this distinction so plainly before their auditors
that even the most uninitiated could scarcely confound the one with the
other.
In Sir William Thomson’s address this desirable rule is recklessly
violated. He tells his unsophisticated audience that Joule was able
“to estimate the average velocity of the ultimate molecules or atoms”
of gases, and thus determined the atomic velocity of hydrogen “at 6225
feet per second at temperature 60 degs. Fahr., and 6055 feet at the
freezing point;” that “Clausius took fully into account the impacts
of molecules upon one another, and the kinetic energy of _relative_
motion of the matter constituting an individual atom;” and that “he
investigated the relation between their diameters, the number in a
given space, and the mean length of path from impact to impact, and
so gave the foundation for estimates of the absolute dimensions of
atoms.” Also that “Loschmidt, in Vienna, had shown, and not much later
Stoney, independently, in England, showed how to reduce from Clausius
and Maxwell’s kinetic theory of gases a superior limit to the number of
atoms in a given measurable space.”
The confiding auditor follows the President through further
disquisitions on the “superlatively grand question, what is the inner
mechanism of an atom?” and a minute and most definite description of
the “regular elastic vibrations” of “the ultimate atom of sodium,” of
the manner in which “any atom of gas, when struck and left to itself,
vibrates with perfect purity its fundamental note or notes,” and how,
“in a highly attenuated gas, each atom is very rarely in collision
with other atoms, and therefore is nearly at all times in a state
of true vibration,” while “in denser gases each atom is frequently
in collision;” besides, a great deal more, in all of which the
existence of these atoms is coolly taken for granted, and treated as a
fundamental established scientific fact.
After hearing all these oracular utterances concerning atoms, the
unsophisticated listener before mentioned will be surprised to learn
that no human being has ever seen an atom of any substance whatever;
that there exists absolutely no direct evidence of the existence of
any such atoms; that all these atoms of which Sir W. Thomson speaks so
confidently and familiarly, and dogmatically, are pure fragments of the
imagination.
He will be still further surprised to learn that the bare belief in the
existence of ultimate atoms as a merely hypothetical probability is
rejected by many of the most eminent of scientific men, and that among
those who have disputed the idea of the atomic constitution of matter,
is the great Faraday himself; that the question of the existence or
non-existence of atoms has recently been rather keenly discussed; and
that even on the question of the permissibility of admitting their
_hypothetical_ existence, scientific opinion is divided; and that such
a confident assumption of their existence as forms the basis of this
part of the President’s address is limited to only a small section of
mutually admiring transcendental mathematicians, Sir W. Thomson being
the most admired among them, as shown by the address of Professor Tait
to Section A.
It would have been perfectly legitimate and most desirable that Sir W.
Thomson should give the fullest and most favorable possible statement
of the particular hypotheses upon which he and his friends have
exercised their unquestionably great mathematical skill; but he should
have stated them as what they are, and for what they are worth, and
have clearly distinguished between such hypotheses and the established
facts of universally admitted science. Instead of doing this, he has
so mixed up the actual discoveries of indisputable facts with these
mere mathematical fancies as to give them both the semblance of equally
authoritative scientific acceptance, and thus, without any intention
to deceive anybody, must have misled nearly all the outside public who
have heard or read his address.
As these letters are mainly intended for those who are too much engaged
in other pursuits to study science systematically, and as most of the
readers of such letters will, as a matter of course, read the inaugural
address of the President of the British Association, I have accepted
the duty of correcting among my own readers the false impression which
this address may create.
As a set-off to the authoritative utterances of Sir W. Thomson on the
subject of atoms, I quote the following from an Italian philosopher,
who, during the present year, is holding in Italy a position very
similar to that of the annual President of our British Association.
Professor Cannizzaro has been elected by a society of Italian chemists
to act as this year’s director of a Chronicle of the Progress of
Chemical Science in Italy and abroad. In this capacity he has published
an inaugural treatise on the history of modern chemical theory, in the
course of which he thus speaks of the over-confident atomic theorists:
“They often speak on molecular subjects with as much dogmatic assurance
as though they had actually realized the ingenious fiction of
Laplace—had constructed a microscope by which they could detect the
molecules, and observe the number, forms, and arrangements of their
constituent atoms, and even determine the direction and intensity of
their mutual actions. Many of these things, offered at what they are
worth—that is, as hypotheses more or less probable, or as simple
artifices of the intellect—may serve, and really have served, to
collocate facts and incite to further investigations which, one day or
other, may lead to a true chemical theory; but, when perverted by being
stated as truths already demonstrated, they falsify the intellectual
education of the students of inductive science, and bring reproach on
the modern progress of chemistry.”
I translate the above from the first page of the first number of the
“Gazetta Chimica Italiana,” published at Palermo in January last. Had
these words been written in Edinburgh on the evening of the 2d of
August, in direct application to Sir William Thomson’s address, they
could not have described more pointedly and truly the prevailing vice
of this production. If space permitted, I could go further back and
quote the words of Lord Bacon, from the great text-book of inductive
philosophy, wherein he denounces the worship of all such intellectual
idols as our modern mathematical dreamers have created, and which they
so fervently adore.
An able writer in the _Daily News_ of last Friday is very severe upon
the biological portion of the President’s address, which contains a
really original hypothesis. Sir W. Thomson having stated that he is
“ready to adopt as an article of scientific faith, true through all
space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from
nothing but life,” asks the question, “How then did life originate
on the earth?” and tells us that “if a probable solution consistent
with the ordinary course of nature can be found, we must not invoke an
abnormal act of creative power.”
He assumes, with that perfect confidence in mathematical hypotheses
which is characteristic of the school of theorists which he leads,
that “tracing the physical history of the earth backwards, on strictly
dynamical principles, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe, on
which no life could exist;” and then, to account for the beginning
of life on our earth as it cooled down, he creates another imaginary
world, which he brings in collision with a second similar creation, and
thereby shatters it to fragments. He further imagines that one of these
imaginary broken-up worlds was already stocked with the sort of life
which he says can only proceed from life, and that from such a world
thus stocked and thus smashed “many great and small fragments carrying
seed and living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered
through space;” and that, “if at the present instant no such life
existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what
we blindly call _natural_ causes, lead to its becoming covered with
vegetation.”
The conclusion of this paragraph is instructively characteristic of
the philosophy of Sir William Thomson and his admirers. He says that
“the hypothesis that life originated on this earth through moss-grown
fragments of another world may seem _wild and visionary_; all I
maintain is that it is _not unscientific_.”
I have italicized the phrases which, put together, express the
philosophy of this school of modern manufacturers of mathematical
hypotheses. It matters not to them how “wild and visionary,” how
utterly gratuitous any assumption may be, it is not unscientific
provided it can be invested in formulæ, and worked out mathematically.
These transcendental mathematicians are struggling to carry philosophy
back to the era of Duns Scotus, when the greatest triumph of learning
was to sophisticate so profoundly an obvious absurdity that no ordinary
intellect could refute it.
Fortunately for the progress of humanity, there are other learned men
who firmly maintain that the business of science is the discovery and
teaching of simple sober truth.
The writer of the _Daily News_ article above referred to very
charitably suggests that Sir W. Thomson may be “poking fun at some of
his colleagues,” and compares the moss-grown meteorite hypothesis with
the Hindoo parable which explains the stability of the earth by stating
that it stands on the back of a monster tortoise, that the tortoise
rests upon the back of a gigantic elephant, which stands upon the shell
of a still bigger tortoise, resting on the back of another still more
gigantic elephant, and so on. Sir W. Thomson, of course, requires to
smash two more worlds in order to provide a moss-grown fragment for
starting the life upon the world which was broken up for our benefit,
and so on backwards _ad infinitum_.