Science & Education: Essays
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Title: Science & Education: Essays
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE & EDUCATION: ESSAYS ***
Produced by Thomas Berger, Carlo Traverso, Charles Franks
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SCIENCE & EDUCATION
ESSAYS
BY
THOMAS H. HUXLEY
PREFACE
The apology offered in the Preface to the first volume of this series
for the occurrence of repetitions, is even more needful here I am
afraid. But it could hardly be otherwise with speeches and essays, on
the same topic, addressed at intervals, during more than thirty years,
to widely distant and different hearers and readers. The oldest piece,
that "On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences,"
contains some crudities, which I repudiated when the lecture was first
reprinted, more than twenty years ago; but it will be seen that much of
what I have had to say, later on in life, is merely a development of
the propositions enunciated in this early and sadly-imperfect piece of
work.
In view of the recent attempt to disturb the compromise about the
teaching of dogmatic theology, solemnly agreed to by the first School
Board for London, the fifteenth Essay; and, more particularly, the note
n. 3, may be found interesting.
T. H. H.
Hodeslea, Eastbourne, _September 4th, 1893_.
CONTENTS
I JOSEPH PRIESTLEY [1874]
(An Address delivered on the occasion of the presentation of a statue
of Priestley to the town of Birmingham)
II ON THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES [1854]
(An Address delivered in S. Martin's Hall)
III EMANCIPATION--BLACK AND WHITE [1865]
IV A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE TO FIND IT [1868]
(An Address to the South London Working Men's College)
V SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION: NOTES OF AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH [1869]
(Liverpool Philomathic Society)
VI SCIENCE AND CULTURE [1880]
(An Address delivered at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's Science
College, Birmingham)
VII ON SCIENCE AND ART IN RELATION TO EDUCATION [1882]
(An Address to the members of the Liverpool Institution)
VIII UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL [1874]
(Rectorial Address, Aberdeen)
IX ADDRESS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION [1876]
(Delivered at the opening of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)
X ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY [1876]
(A Lecture in connection with the Loan Collection of Scientific
Apparatus, South Kensington Museum)
XI ON ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY [1877]
XII ON MEDICAL EDUCATION [1870]
(An Address to the students of the Faculty of Medicine in University
College, London)
XIII THE STATE AND THE MEDICAL PROFESSION [1884]
XIV THE CONNECTION OF THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES WITH MEDICINE [1881]
(An Address to the International Medical Congress)
XV THE SCHOOL BOARDS: WHAT THEY CAN DO, AND WHAT THEY MAY DO [1870]
XVI TECHNICAL EDUCATION [1877]
XVII ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROMOTION OF
TECHNICAL EDUCATION [1887]
COLLECTED ESSAYS
VOLUME III
I
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY
[1874]
If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have this day raised a statue
had been asked on what part of his busy life's work he set the highest
value, he would undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous
contributions to theology. In season and out of season, he was the
steadfast champion of that hypothesis respecting the Divine nature
which is termed Unitarianism by its friends and Socinianism by its
foes. Regardless of odds, he was ready to do battle with all comers in
that cause; and if no adversaries entered the lists, he would sally
forth to seek them.
To this, his highest ideal of duty, Joseph Priestley sacrificed the
vulgar prizes of life, which, assuredly, were within easy reach of a
man of his singular energy and varied abilities. For this object he put
aside, as of secondary importance, those scientific investigations
which he loved so well, and in which he showed himself so competent to
enlarge the boundaries of natural knowledge and to win fame. In this
cause he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy from the bigoted and the
unthinking, and came within sight of martyrdom; but bore with that
which is much harder to be borne than all these, the unfeigned
astonishment and hardly disguised contempt of a brilliant society,
composed of men whose sympathy and esteem must have been most dear to
him, and to whom it was simply incomprehensible that a philosopher
should seriously occupy himself with any form of Christianity.
It appears to me that the man who, setting before himself such an ideal
of life, acted up to it consistently, is worthy of the deepest respect,
whatever opinion may be entertained as to the real value of the tenets
which he so zealously propagated and defended.
But I am sure that I speak not only for myself, but for all this
assemblage, when I say that our purpose to-day is to do honour, not to
Priestley, the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley, the fearless
defender of rational freedom in thought and in action: to Priestley,
the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place
among "the swift runners who hand over the lamp of life," [1] and
transmit from one generation to another the fire kindled,
in the childhood of the world, at the Promethean altar of Science.
The main incidents of Priestley's life are so well known that I need
dwell upon them at no great length.
Born in 1733, at Fieldhead, near Leeds, and brought up among Calvinists
of the straitest orthodoxy, the boy's striking natural ability led to
his being devoted to the profession of a minister of religion; and, in
1752, he was sent to the Dissenting Academy at Daventry--an institution
which authority left undisturbed, though its existence contravened the
law. The teachers under whose instruction and influence the young man
came at Daventry, carried out to the letter the injunction to "try all
things: hold fast that which is good," and encouraged the discussion of
every imaginable proposition with complete freedom, the leading
professors taking opposite sides; a discipline which, admirable as it
may be from a purely scientific point of view, would seem to be
calculated to make acute, rather than sound, divines. Priestley tells
us, in his "Autobiography," that he generally found himself on the
unorthodox side: and, as he grew older, and his faculties attained
their maturity, this native tendency towards heterodoxy grew with his
growth and strengthened with his strength. He passed from Calvinism to
Arianism; and finally, in middle life, landed in that very broad form
of Unitarianism by which his craving after a credible and consistent
theory of things was satisfied.
On leaving Daventry Priestley became minister of a congregation, first
at Needham Market, and secondly at Nantwich; but whether on account of
his heterodox opinions, or of the stuttering which impeded his
expression of them in the pulpit, little success attended his efforts
in this capacity. In 1761, a career much more suited to his abilities
became open to him. He was appointed "tutor in the languages" in the
Dissenting Academy at Warrington, in which capacity, besides giving
three courses of lectures, he taught Latin, Greek, French, and Italian,
and read lectures on the theory of language and universal grammar, on
oratory, philosophical criticism, and civil law. And it is interesting
to observe that, as a teacher, he encouraged and cherished in those
whom he instructed the freedom which he had enjoyed, in his own student
days, at Daventry. One of his pupils tells us that,
"At the conclusion of his lecture, he always encouraged his
students to express their sentiments relative to the subject of it,
and to urge any objections to what he had delivered, without
reserve. It pleased him when any one commenced such a conversation.
In order to excite the freest discussion, he occasionally invited
the students to drink tea with him, in order to canvass the
subjects of his lectures. I do not recollect that he ever showed
the least displeasure at the strongest objections that were made to
what he delivered, but I distinctly remember the smile of
approbation with which he usually received them: nor did he fail to
point out, in a very encouraging manner, the ingenuity or force of
any remarks that were made, when they merited these characters. His
object, as well as Dr. Aikin's, was to engage the students to
examine and decide for themselves, uninfluenced by the sentiments
of any other persons." [2]
It would be difficult to give a better description of a model teacher
than that conveyed in these words.
From his earliest days, Priestley had shown a strong bent towards the
study of nature; and his brother Timothy tells us that the boy put
spiders into bottles, to see how long they would live in the same
air--a curious anticipation of the investigations of his later years.
At Nantwich, where he set up a school, Priestley informs us that he
bought an air pump, an electrical machine, and other instruments, in
the use of which he instructed his scholars. But he does not seem to
have devoted himself seriously to physical science until 1766, when he
had the great good fortune to meet Benjamin Franklin, whose friendship
he ever afterwards enjoyed. Encouraged by Franklin, he wrote a "History
of Electricity," which was published in 1767, and appears to have met
with considerable success.
In the same year, Priestley left Warrington to become the minister of a
congregation at Leeds; and, here, happening to live next door to a
public brewery, as he says,
"I, at first, amused myself with making experiments on the fixed
air which I found ready-made in the process of fermentation. When I
removed from that house I was under the necessity of making fixed
air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have
distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the
subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the
purpose, but of the cheapest kind.
"When I began these experiments I knew very little of _chemistry_,
and had, in a manner, no idea on the subject before I attended a
course of chemical lectures, delivered in the Academy at
Warrington, by Dr. Turner of Liverpool. But I have often thought
that, upon the whole, this circumstance was no disadvantage to me;
as, in this situation, I was led to devise an apparatus and
processes of my own, adapted to my peculiar views; whereas, if I
had been previously accustomed to the usual chemical processes, I
should not have so easily thought of any other, and without new
modes of operation, I should hardly have discovered anything
materially new." [3]
The first outcome of Priestley's chemical work, published in 1772, was
of a very practical character. He discovered the way of impregnating
water with an excess of "fixed air," or carbonic acid, and thereby
producing what we now know as "soda water"--a service to naturally, and
still more to artificially, thirsty souls, which those whose parched
throats and hot heads are cooled by morning draughts of that beverage,
cannot too gratefully acknowledge. In the same year, Priestley
communicated the extensive series of observations which his industry
and ingenuity had accumulated, in the course of four years, to the
Royal Society, under the title of "Observations on Different Kinds of
Air"--a memoir which was justly regarded of so much merit and
importance, that the Society at once conferred upon the author the
highest distinction in their power, by awarding him the Copley Medal.
In 1771 a proposal was made to Priestley to accompany Captain Cook in
his second voyage to the South Seas. He accepted it, and his
congregation agreed to pay an assistant to supply his place during his
absence. But the appointment lay in the hands of the Board of
Longitude, of which certain clergymen were members; and whether these
worthy ecclesiastics feared that Priestley's presence among the ship's
company might expose His Majesty's sloop _Resolution_ to the fate
which aforetime befell a certain ship that went from Joppa to Tarshish;
or whether they were alarmed lest a Socinian should undermine that
piety which, in the days of Commodore Trunnion, so strikingly
characterised sailors, does not appear; but, at any rate, they objected
to Priestley "on account of his religious principles," and appointed
the two Forsters, whose "religious principles," if they had been known
to these well-meaning but not far-sighted persons, would probably have
surprised them.
In 1772 another proposal was made to Priestley. Lord Shelburne,
desiring a "literary companion," had been brought into communication
with Priestley by the good offices of a friend of both, Dr. Price; and
offered him the nominal post of librarian, with a good house and
appointments, and an annuity in case of the termination of the
engagement. Priestley accepted the offer, and remained with Lord
Shelburne for seven years, sometimes residing at Calne, sometimes
travelling abroad with the Earl.
Why the connection terminated has never been exactly known; but it is
certain that Lord Shelburne behaved with the utmost consideration and
kindness towards Priestley; that he fulfilled his engagements to the
letter; and that, at a later period, he expressed a desire that
Priestley should return to his old footing in his house. Probably
enough, the politician, aspiring to the highest offices in the State,
may have found the position of the protector of a man who was being
denounced all over the country as an infidel and an atheist somewhat
embarrassing. In fact, a passage in Priestley's "Autobiography" on the
occasion of the publication of his "Disquisitions relating to Matter
and Spirit," which took place in 1777, indicates pretty clearly the
state of the case:--
"(126) It being probable that this publication would be unpopular,
and might be the means of bringing odium on my patron, several
attempts were made by his friends, though none by himself, to
dissuade me from persisting in it. But being, as I thought, engaged
in the cause of important truth, I proceeded without regard to any
consequences, assuring them that this publication should not be
injurious to his lordship."
It is not unreasonable to suppose that his lordship, as a keen,
practical man of the world, did not derive much satisfaction from this
assurance. The "evident marks of dissatisfaction" which Priestley says
he first perceived in his patron in 1778, may well have arisen from the
peer's not unnatural uneasiness as to what his domesticated, but not
tamed, philosopher might write next, and what storm might thereby he
brought down on his own head; and it speaks very highly for Lord
Shelburne's delicacy that, in the midst of such perplexities, he made
not the least attempt to interfere with Priestley's freedom of action.
In 1780, however, he intimated to Dr. Price that he should be glad to
establish Priestley on his Irish estates: the suggestion was
interpreted, as Lord Shelburne probably intended it should be, and
Priestley left him, the annuity of £150 a year, which had been promised
in view of such a contingency, being punctually paid.
After leaving Calne, Priestley spent some little time in London, and
then, having settled in Birmingham at the desire of his brother-in-law,
he was soon invited to become the minister of a large congregation.
This settlement Priestley considered, at the time, to be "the happiest
event of his life." And well he might think so; for it gave him
competence and leisure; placed him within reach of the best makers of
apparatus of the day; made him a member of that remarkable "Lunar
Society," at whose meetings he could exchange thoughts with such men as
Watt, Wedgwood, Darwin, and Boulton; and threw open to him the pleasant
house of the Galtons of Barr, where these men, and others of less note,
formed a society of exceptional charm and intelligence. [4]
But these halcyon days were ended by a bitter storm. The French
Revolution broke out. An electric shock ran through the nations;
whatever there was of corrupt and retrograde, and, at the same time, a
great deal of what there was of best and noblest, in European society
shuddered at the outburst of long-pent-up social fires. Men's feelings
were excited in a way that we, in this generation, can hardly
comprehend. Party wrath and virulence were expressed in a manner
unparalleled, and it is to be hoped impossible, in our times; and
Priestley and his friends were held up to public scorn, even in
Parliament, as fomenters of sedition. A "Church-and-King" cry was
raised against the Liberal Dissenters; and, in Birmingham, it was
intensified and specially directed towards Priestley by a local
controversy, in which he had engaged with his usual vigour. In 1791,
the celebration of the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille
by a public dinner, with which Priestley had nothing whatever to do,
gave the signal to the loyal and pious mob, who, unchecked, and indeed
to some extent encouraged, by those who were responsible for order, had
the town at their mercy for three days. The chapels and houses of the
leading Dissenters were wrecked, and Priestley and his family had to
fly for their lives, leaving library, apparatus, papers, and all their
possessions, a prey to the flames.
Priestley never returned to Birmingham. He bore the outrages and losses
inflicted upon him with extreme patience and sweetness, [5] and betook
himself to London. But even his scientific colleagues gave him a cold
shoulder; and though he was elected minister of a congregation at
Hackney, he felt his position to be insecure, and finally determined on
emigrating to the United States. He landed in America in 1794; lived
quietly with his sons at Northumberland, in Pennsylvania, where his
posterity still flourish; and, clear-headed and busy to the last, died
on the 6th of February 1804.
Such were the conditions under which Joseph Priestley did the work
which lay before him, and then, as the Norse Sagas say, went out of the
story. The work itself was of the most varied kind. No human interest
was without its attraction for Priestley, and few men have ever had so
many irons in the fire at once; but, though he may have burned his
fingers a little, very few who have tried that operation have burned
their fingers so little. He made admirable discoveries in science; his
philosophical treatises are still well worth reading; his political
works are full of insight and replete with the spirit of freedom; and
while all these sparks flew off from his anvil, the controversial
hammer rained a hail of blows on orthodox priest and bishop. While thus
engaged, the kindly, cheerful doctor felt no more wrath or
uncharitableness towards his opponents than a smith does towards his
iron. But if the iron could only speak!--and the priests and bishops
took the point of view of the iron.
No doubt what Priestley's friends repeatedly urged upon him--that he
would have escaped the heavier trials of his life and done more for the
advancement of knowledge, if he had confined himself to his scientific
pursuits and let his fellow-men go their way--was true. But it seems to
have been Priestley's feeling that he was a man and a citizen before he
was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are
at least as imperative as those of the latter. Moreover, there are men
(and I think Priestley was one of them) to whom the satisfaction of
throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends
the discovery of a new truth; who feel better satisfied with the
government of the world, when they have been helping Providence by
knocking an imposture on the head; and who care even more for freedom
of thought than for mere advance of knowledge. These men are the
Carnots who organise victory for truth, and they are, at least, as
important as the generals who visibly fight her battles in the field.
Priestley's reputation as a man of science rests upon his numerous and
important contributions to the chemistry of gaseous bodies; and to form
a just estimate of the value of his work--of the extent to which it
advanced the knowledge of fact and the development of sound theoretical
views--we must reflect what chemistry was in the first half of the
eighteenth century.
The vast science which now passes under that name had no existence.
Air, water, and fire were still counted among the elemental bodies; and
though Van Helmont, a century before, had distinguished different
kinds of air as _gas ventosum_ and _gas sylvestre_, and Boyle and Hales
had experimentally defined the physical properties of air, and
discriminated some of the various kinds of aëriform bodies, no one
suspected the existence of the numerous totally distinct gaseous
elements which are now known, or dreamed that the air we breathe and
the water we drink are compounds of gaseous elements.
But, in 1754, a young Scotch physician, Dr. Black, made the first
clearing in this tangled backwood of knowledge. And it gives one a
wonderful impression of the juvenility of scientific chemistry to think
that Lord Brougham, whom so many of us recollect, attended Black's
lectures when he was a student in Edinburgh. Black's researches gave
the world the novel and startling conception of a gas that was a
permanently elastic fluid like air, but that differed from common air
in being much heavier, very poisonous, and in having the properties of
an acid, capable of neutralising the strongest alkalies; and it took
the world some time to become accustomed to the notion.
A dozen years later, one of the most sagacious and accurate
investigators who has adorned this, or any other, country, Henry
Cavendish, published a memoir in the "Philosophical Transactions," in
which he deals not only with the "fixed air" (now called carbonic acid
or carbonic anhydride) of Black, but with "inflammable air," or what we
now term hydrogen.
By the rigorous application of weight and measure to all his processes,
Cavendish implied the belief subsequently formulated by Lavoisier,
that, in chemical processes, matter is neither created nor destroyed,
and indicated the path along which all future explorers must travel.
Nor did he himself halt until this path led him, in 1784, to the
brilliant and fundamental discovery that water is composed of two gases
united in fixed and constant proportions.
It is a trying ordeal for any man to be compared with Black and
Cavendish, and Priestley cannot be said to stand on their level.
Nevertheless his achievements are not only great in themselves, but
truly wonderful, if we consider the disadvantages under which he
laboured. Without the careful scientific training of Black, without the
leisure and appliances secured by the wealth of Cavendish, he scaled
the walls of science as so many Englishmen have done before and since
his day; and trusting to mother wit to supply the place of training,
and to ingenuity to create apparatus out of washing tubs, he discovered
more new gases than all his predecessors put together had done. He laid
the foundations of gas analysis; he discovered the complementary
actions of animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the
atmosphere; and, finally, he crowned his work, this day one hundred
years ago, by the discovery of that "pure dephlogisticated air" to
which the French chemists subsequently gave the name of oxygen. Its
importance, as the constituent of the atmosphere which disappears in
the processes of respiration and combustion, and is restored by green
plants growing in sunshine, was proved somewhat later. For these
brilliant discoveries, the Royal Society elected Priestley a fellow and
gave him their medal, while the Academies of Paris and St. Petersburg
conferred their membership upon him. Edinburgh had made him an honorary
doctor of laws at an early period of his career; but, I need hardly
add, that a man of Priestley's opinions received no recognition from
the universities of his own country.
That Priestley's contributions to the knowledge of chemical fact were
of the greatest importance, and that they richly deserve all the praise
that has been awarded to them, is unquestionable; but it must, at the
same time, be admitted that he had no comprehension of the deeper
significance of his work; and, so far from contributing anything to the
theory of the facts which he discovered, or assisting in their rational
explanation, his influence to the end of his life was warmly exerted in
favour of error. From first to last, he was a stiff adherent of the
phlogiston doctrine which was prevalent when his studies commenced;
and, by a curious irony of fate, the man who by the discovery of what
he called "dephlogisticated air" furnished the essential datum for the
true theory of combustion, of respiration, and of the composition of
water, to the end of his days fought against the inevitable corollaries
from his own labours. His last scientific work, published in 1800,
bears the title, "The Doctrine of Phlogiston established, and that of
the Composition of Water refuted."
When Priestley commenced his studies, the current belief was, that
atmospheric air, freed from accidental impurities, is a simple
elementary substance, indestructible and unalterable, as water was
supposed to be. When a combustible burned, or when an animal breathed
in air, it was supposed that a substance, "phlogiston," the matter of
heat and light, passed from the burning or breathing body into it, and
destroyed its powers of supporting life and combustion. Thus, air
contained in a vessel in which a lighted candle had gone out, or a
living animal had breathed until it could breathe no longer, was called
"phlogisticated." The same result was supposed to be brought about by
the addition of what Priestley called "nitrous gas" to common air.
In the course of his researches, Priestley found that the quantity of
common air which can thus become "phlogisticated," amounts to about
one-fifth the volume of the whole quantity submitted to experiment.
Hence it appeared that common air consists, to the extent of
four-fifths of its volume, of air which is already "phlogisticated";
while the other fifth is free from phlogiston, or "dephlogisticated."
On the other hand, Priestley found that air "phlogisticated" by
combustion or respiration could be "dephlogisticated," or have the
properties of pure common air restored to it, by the action of green
plants in sunshine. The question, therefore, would naturally arise--as
common air can be wholly phlogisticated by combustion, and converted
into a substance which will no longer support combustion, is it
possible to get air that shall be less phlogisticated than common air,
and consequently support combustion better than common air does?
Now, Priestley says that, in 1774, the possibility of obtaining air
less phlogisticated than common air had not occurred to him. [6] But in
pursuing his experiments on the evolution of air from various bodies by
means of heat, it happened that, on the 1st of August 1774, he threw
the heat of the sun, by means of a large burning glass which he had
recently obtained, upon a substance which was then called _mercurius
calcinatus per se_, and which is commonly known as red precipitate.
"I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled
from it very readily. Having got about three or four times as much
as the bulk of my materials, I admitted water to it, and found that
it was not imbibed by it. But what surprised me more than I can
well express, was that a candle burned in this air with a
remarkably vigorous flame, very much like that enlarged flame with
which a candle burns in nitrous air, exposed to iron or lime of
sulphur; but as I had got nothing like this remarkable appearance
from any kind of air besides this particular modification of
nitrous air, and I knew no nitrous acid was used in the preparation
of _mercurius calcinatus_, I was utterly at a loss how to
account for it.
"In this case also, though I did not give sufficient attention to
the circumstance at that time, the flame of the candle, besides
being larger, burned with more splendour and heat than in that
species of nitrous air; and a piece of red-hot wood sparkled in it,
exactly like paper dipped in a solution of nitre, and it consumed
very fast--an experiment which I had never thought of trying with
nitrous air." [7]
Priestley obtained the same sort of air from red lead, but, as he says
himself, he remained in ignorance of the properties of this new kind of
air for seven months, or until March 1775, when he found that the new
air behaved with "nitrous gas" in the same way as the dephlogisticated
part of common air does; [8] but that, instead of being diminished to
four-fifths, it almost completely vanished, and, therefore, showed
itself to be "between five and six times as good as the best common air
I have ever met with." [9] As this new air thus appeared to be
completely free from phlogiston, Priestley called it "dephlogisticated
air."
What was the nature of this air? Priestley found that the same kind of
air was to be obtained by moistening with the spirit of nitre (which he
terms nitrous acid) any kind of earth that is free from phlogiston, and
applying heat; and consequently he says: "There remained no doubt on my
mind but that the atmospherical air, or the thing that we breathe,
consists of the nitrous acid and earth, with so much phlogiston as is
necessary to its elasticity, and likewise so much more as is required
to bring it from its state of perfect purity to the mean condition in
which we find it." [10]
Priestley's view, in fact, is that atmospheric air is a kind of
saltpetre, in which the potash is replaced by some unknown earth.
And in speculating on the manner in which saltpetre is formed,
he enunciates the hypothesis, "that nitre is, formed by a real
_decomposition of the air itself_, the _bases_ that are presented to
it having, in such circumstances, a nearer affinity with the spirit
of nitre than that kind of earth with which it is united in the
atmosphere." [11]
It would have been hard for the most ingenious person to have wandered
farther from the truth than Priestley does in this hypothesis; and,
though Lavoisier undoubtedly treated Priestley very ill, and pretended
to have discovered dephlogisticated air, or oxygen, as he called it,
independently, we can almost forgive him when we reflect how different
were the ideas which the great French chemist attached to the body
which Priestley discovered.
They are like two navigators of whom the first sees a new country, but
takes clouds for mountains and mirage for lowlands; while the second
determines its length and breadth, and lays down on a chart its exact
place, so that, thenceforth, it serves as a guide to his successors,
and becomes a secure outpost whence new explorations may be pushed.
Nevertheless, as Priestley himself somewhere remarks, the first object
of physical science is to ascertain facts, and the service which he
rendered to chemistry by the definite establishment of a large number
of new and fundamentally important facts, is such as to entitle him to
a very high place among the fathers of chemical science.
It is difficult to say whether Priestley's philosophical, political,
or theological views were most responsible for the bitter hatred which
was borne to him by a large body of his country-men, [12] and which
found its expression in the malignant insinuations in which Burke, to
his everlasting shame, indulged in the House of Commons.
Without containing much that will be new to the readers of Hobbs,
Spinoza, Collins, Hume, and Hartley, and, indeed, while making no
pretensions to originality, Priestley's "Disquisitions relating to
Matter and Spirit," and his "Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
Illustrated," are among the most powerful, clear, and unflinching
expositions of materialism and necessarianism which exist in the
English language, and are still well worth reading.
Priestley denied the freedom of the will in the sense of its
self-determination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct from the
body; and as a natural consequence, he denied the natural immortality
of man.
In relation to these matters English opinion, a century ago, was very
much what it is now.
A man may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that
implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very
shocking, having a note of Calvanistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a
materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite
of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable
to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man,
respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbour of a cash-box,
as an actual or potential sensualist, the more virtuous in outward
seeming, the more certainly loaded with secret "grave personal sins."
Nevertheless, it is as certain as anything can be, that Joseph
Priestley was no gloomy fanatic, but as cheerful and kindly a soul as
ever breathed, the idol of children; a man who was hated only by those
who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in
personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best
testimony to whose worth is the generous and tender warmth with which
his many friends vied with one another in rendering him substantial
help, in all the crises of his career.
The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his
performance of every duty, his transparent sincerity, the
unostentatious and deep-seated piety which breathes through all his
correspondence, are in themselves a sufficient refutation of the
hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such
opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do
as good service as the brazen image that was set upon a pole before the
Israelites, if those who have been bitten by the fiery serpents of
sectarian hatred, which still haunt this wilderness of a world, are
made whole by looking upon the image of a heretic who was yet a saint.
Though Priestley did not believe in the natural immortality of man, he
held with an almost naïve realism that man would be raised from the
dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be
immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this
doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's,
have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican
Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known
"Essays"; [13] and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop of Kingston in Jamaica,
the first edition of whose remarkable book "On the Future States,"
dedicated to Archbishop Whately, was published in 1843 and the second
in 1857. According to Bishop Courtenay,
"The death of the body will cause a cessation of all the activity
of the mind by way of natural consequence; to continue for ever
UNLESS the Creator should interfere."
And again:--
"The natural end of human existence is the 'first death, the
dreamless slumber of the grave, wherein man lies spell-bound, soul
and body, under the dominion of sin and death--that whatever modes
of conscious existence, whatever future states of 'life' or of
'torment' beyond Hades are reserved for man, are results of our
blessed Lord's victory over sin and death; that the resurrection of
the dead must be preliminary to their entrance into either of the
future states, and that the nature and even existence of these
states, and even the mere fact that there is a futurity of
consciousness, can be known _only_ through God's revelation of
Himself in the Person and the Gospel of His Son."--P. 389.
And now hear Priestley:--
"Man, according to this system (of materialism), is no more than we
now see of him. His being commences at the time of his conception,
or perhaps at an earlier period. The corporeal and mental faculties,
in being in the same substance, grow, ripen, and decay together; and
whenever the system is dissolved it continues in a state of
dissolution till it shall please that Almighty Being who called it
into existence to restore it to life again."--"Matter and Spirit,"
p. 49.
And again:--
"The doctrine of the Scripture is, that God made man of the dust of
the ground, and by simply animating this organised matter, made man
that living percipient and intelligent being that he is. According
to Revelation, _death_ is a state of rest and insensibility,
and our only though sure hope of a future life is founded on the
doctrine of the resurrection of the whole man at some distant
period; this assurance being sufficiently confirmed to us both by
the evident tokens of a Divine commission attending the persons who
delivered the doctrine, and especially by the actual resurrection of
Jesus Christ, which is more authentically attested than any other
fact in history."--_Ibid_., p. 247.
We all know that "a saint in crape is twice a saint in lawn;" but it is
not yet admitted that the views which are consistent with such
saintliness in lawn, become diabolical when held by a mere dissenter.
[14]
I am not here either to defend or to attack Priestley's philosophical
views, and I cannot say that I am personally disposed to attach much
value to episcopal authority in philosophical questions; but it seems
right to call attention to the fact, that those of Priestley's opinions
which have brought most odium upon him have been openly promulgated,
without challenge, by persons occupying the highest positions in the
State Church.
I must confess that what interests me most about Priestley's
materialism, is the evidence that he saw dimly the seed of destruction
which such materialism carries within its own bosom. In the course of
his reading for his "History of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light,
and Colours," he had come upon the speculations of Boscovich and
Michell, and had been led to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that
our knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its properties; and that of
its substance--if it have a substance--we know nothing. And this led to
the further admission that, so far as we can know, there may be no
difference between the substance of matter and the substance of spirit
("Disquisitions," p. 16). A step farther would have shown Priestley
that his materialism was, essentially, very little different from the
Idealism of his contemporary, the Bishop of Cloyne.
As Priestley's philosophy is mainly a clear statement of the views of
the deeper thinkers of his day, so are his political conceptions based
upon those of Locke. Locke's aphorism that "the end of government is
the good of mankind," is thus expanded by Priestley:--
"It must necessarily be understood, therefore, whether it be
expressed or not, that all people live in society for their mutual
advantage; so that the good and happiness of the members, that is,
of the majority of the members, of any state, is the great standard
by which everything relating to that state must finally be
determined." [15]
The little sentence here interpolated, "that is, of the majority of the
members of any state," appears to be that passage which suggested to
Bentham, according to his own acknowledgment, the famous "greatest
happiness" formula, which by substituting "happiness" for "good," has
converted a noble into an ignoble principle. But I do not call to mind
that there is any utterance in Locke quite so outspoken as the
following passage in the "Essay on the First Principles of
Government." After laying down as "a fundamental maxim in all
Governments," the proposition that "kings, senators, and nobles" are
"the servants of the public," Priestley goes on to say:--
"But in the largest states, if the abuses of the government should
at any time be great and manifest; if the servants of the people,
forgetting their masters and their masters' interest, should pursue
a separate one of their own; if, instead of considering that they
are made for the people, they should consider the people as made
for them; if the oppressions and violation of right should be
great, flagrant, and universally resented; if the tyrannical
governors should have no friends but a few sycophants, who had long
preyed upon the vitals of their fellow-citizens, and who might be
expected to desert a government whenever their interests should be
detached from it: if, in consequence of these circumstances, it
should become manifest that the risk which would be run in
attempting a revolution would be trifling, and the evils which
might be apprehended from it were far less than those which
were actually suffered and which were daily increasing; in the name
of God, I ask, what principles are those which ought to restrain an
injured and insulted people from asserting their natural rights,
and from changing or even punishing their governors--that is, their
servants--who had abused their trust, or from altering the whole
form of their government, if it appeared to be of a structure so
liable to abuse?"
As a Dissenter, subject to the operation of the Corporation and Test
Acts, and as a Unitarian excluded from the benefit of the Toleration
Act, it is not surprising to find that Priestley had very definite
opinions about Ecclesiastical Establishments; the only wonder is that
these opinions were so moderate as the following passages show them to
have been:--
"Ecclesiastical authority may have been necessary in the infant
state of society, and, for the same reason, it may perhaps continue
to be, in some degree, necessary as long as society is imperfect;
and therefore may not be entirely abolished till civil governments
have arrived at a much greater degree of perfection. If, therefore,
I were asked whether I should approve of the immediate dissolution
of all the ecclesiastical establishments in Europe, I should
answer, No.... Let experiment be first made of _alterations_,
or, which is the same thing, of _better establishments_ than
the present. Let them be reformed in many essential articles, and
then not thrown aside entirely till it be found by experience that
no good can be made of them."
Priestley goes on to suggest four such reforms of a capital nature:--
"1. Let the Articles of Faith to be subscribed by candidates for
the ministry be greatly reduced. In the formulary of the Church of
England, might not thirty-eight out of the thirty-nine be very well
spared? It is a reproach to any Christian establishment if every
man cannot claim the benefit of it who can say that he believes
in the religion of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New
Testament. You say the terms are so general that even Deists would
quibble and insinuate themselves. I answer that all the articles
which are subscribed at present by no means exclude Deists who will
prevaricate; and upon this scheme you would at least exclude fewer
honest men." [16]
The second reform suggested is the equalisation, in proportion to work
done, of the stipends of the clergy; the third, the exclusion of the
Bishops from Parliament; and the fourth, complete toleration, so that
every man may enjoy the rights of a citizen, and be qualified to serve
his country, whether he belong to the Established Church or not.
Opinions such as those I have quoted, respecting the duties and the
responsibilities of governors, are the commonplaces of modern
Liberalism; and Priestley's views on Ecclesiastical Establishments
would, I fear, meet with but a cool reception, as altogether too
conservative, from a large proportion of the lineal descendants of the
people who taught their children to cry "Damn Priestley;" and with that
love for the practical application of science which is the source of
the greatness of Birmingham, tried to set fire to the doctor's house
with sparks from his own electrical machine; thereby giving the man
they called an incendiary and raiser of sedition against Church and
King, an appropriately experimental illustration of the nature of arson
and riot.
If I have succeeded in putting before you the main features of
Priestley's work, its value will become apparent when we compare the
condition of the English nation, as he knew it, with its present state.
The fact that France has been for eighty-five years trying, without
much success, to right herself after the great storm of the Revolution,
is not unfrequently cited among us as an indication of some inherent
incapacity for self-government among the French people. I think,
however, that Englishmen who argue thus, forget that, from the meeting
of the Long Parliament in 1640, to the last Stuart rebellion in 1745,
is a hundred and five years, and that, in the middle of the last
century, we had but just safely freed ourselves from our Bourbons and
all that they represented. The corruption of our state was as bad as
that of the Second Empire. Bribery was the instrument of government,
and peculation its reward. Four-fifths of the seats in the House of
Commons were more or less openly dealt with as property. A minister had
to consider the state of the vote market, and the sovereign secured a
sufficiency of "king's friends" by payments allotted with retail,
rather than royal, sagacity.
Barefaced and brutal immorality and intemperance pervaded the land,
from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established
Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who
dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the
Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley,
being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to
ruinous fines and long imprisonment. [17] In those days the guns that
were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law
was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet
whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments,
and ruined by still more absurd help, on the part of government.
Birmingham, though already the centre of a considerable industry, was a
mere village as compared with its present extent. People who travelled
went about armed, by reason of the abundance of highwaymen and the
paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage coaches had not reached
Birmingham, and it took three days to get to London. Even canals were a
recent and much opposed invention.
Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical conception of the
physical universe: Hartley, putting a modern face upon ancient
materialism, had extended that mechanical conception to psychology;
Linnaeus and Haller were beginning to introduce method and order into
the chaotic accumulation of biological facts. But those parts of
physical science which deal with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and
above all, chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly be said to have
had an existence. No one knew that two of the old elemental bodies, air
and water, are compounds, and that a third, fire, is not a substance
but a motion. The great industries that have grown out of the
applications of modern scientific discoveries had no existence, and the
man who should have foretold their coming into being in the days of his
son, would have been regarded as a mad enthusiast.
In common with many other excellent persons, Priestley believed that
man is capable of reaching, and will eventually attain, perfection. If
the temperature of space presented no obstacle, I should be glad to
entertain the same idea; but judging from the past progress of our
species, I am afraid that the globe will have cooled down so far,
before the advent of this natural millennium, that we shall be, at
best, perfected Esquimaux. For all practical purposes, however, it is
enough that man may visibly improve his condition in the course of a
century or so. And, if the picture of the state of things in
Priestley's time, which I have just drawn, have any pretence to
accuracy, I think it must be admitted that there has been a
considerable change for the better.
I need not advert to the well-worn topic of material advancement, in a
place in which the very stones testify to that progress--in the town of
Watt and of Boulton. I will only remark, in passing, that material
advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky
Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten
thousand a year, has its application to nations; and it is futile to
expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and
gross. But as regards other than material welfare, although perfection
is not yet in sight--even from the mast-head--it is surely true that
things are much better than they were.
Take the upper and middle classes as a whole, and it may be said that
open immorality and gross intemperance have vanished. Four and six
bottle men are as extinct as the dodo. Women of good repute do not
gamble, and talk modelled upon Dean Swift's "Art of Polite
Conversation" would be tolerated in no decent kitchen.
Members of the legislature are not to be bought; and constituents are
awakening to the fact that votes must not be sold--even for such
trifles as rabbits and tea and cake. Political power has passed into
the hands of the masses of the people. Those whom Priestley calls their
servants have recognised their position, and have requested the master
to be so good as to go to school and fit himself for the administration
of his property. In ordinary life, no civil disability attaches to any
one on theological grounds, and high offices of the state are open to
Papist, Jew, and Secularist.
Whatever men's opinions as to the policy of Establishment, no one can
hesitate to admit that the clergy of the Church are men of pure life
and conversation, zealous in the discharge of their duties; and at
present, apparently, more bent on prosecuting one another than on
meddling with Dissenters. Theology itself has broadened so much, that
Anglican divines put forward doctrines more liberal than those of
Priestley; and, in our state-supported churches, one listener may hear
a sermon to which Bossuet might have given his approbation, while
another may hear a discourse in which Socrates would find nothing new.
But great as these changes may be, they sink into insignificance beside
the progress of physical science, whether we consider the improvement
of methods of investigation, or the increase in bulk of solid
knowledge. Consider that the labours of Laplace, of Young, of Davy, and
of Faraday; of Cuvier, of Lamarck, and of Robert Brown; of Von Baer,
and of Schwann; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been carried on since
Priestley discovered oxygen; and consider that they are now things of
the past, concealed by the industry of those who have built upon them,
as the first founders of a coral reef are hidden beneath the life's
work of their successors; consider that the methods of physical science
are slowly spreading into all investigations, and that proofs as valid
as those required by her canons of investigation are being demanded of
all doctrines which ask for men's assent; and you will have a faint
image of the astounding difference in this respect between the
nineteenth century and the eighteenth.
If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all these vast changes, I think
there can be but one reply. They mean that reason has asserted and
exercised her primacy over all provinces of human activity: that
ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place; that
the good of the governed has been finally recognised as the end of
government, and the complete responsibility of governors to the people
as its means; and that the dependence of natural phenomena in general
on the laws of action of what we call matter has become an axiom.
But it was to bring these things about, and to enforce the recognition
of these truths, that Joseph Priestley laboured. If the nineteenth
century is other and better than the eighteenth, it is, in great
measure, to him, and to such men as he, that we owe the change. If the
twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be
because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps.
Such men are not those whom their own generation delights to honour;
such men, in fact, rarely trouble themselves about honour, but ask, in
another spirit than Falstaff's, "What is honour? Who hath it? He that
died o' Wednesday." But whether Priestley's lot be theirs, and a future
generation, in justice and in gratitude, set up their statues; or
whether their names and fame are blotted out from remembrance, their
work will live as long as time endures. To all eternity, the sum of
truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all
eternity, falsehood and injustice will be the weaker because they have
lived.
* * * * *
Footnotes:
[1] "Quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt."--LUCR. _De Rerum Nat_. ii.
78.
[2] _Life and Correspondence of Dr. Priestley_, by J. T. Rutt. Vol. I.
p. 50.
[3] _Autobiography_, §§ 100, 101.
[4] See _The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck_. Mrs.
Schimmelpenninck (_née_ Galton) remembered Priestley very well,
and her description of him is worth quotation:--"A man of admirable
simplicity, gentleness and kindness of heart, united with great
acuteness of intellect. I can never forget the impression produced on
me by the serene expression of his countenance. He, indeed, seemed
present with God by recollection, and with man by cheerfulness. I
remember that, in the assembly of these distinguished men, amongst whom
Mr. Boulton, by his noble manner, his fine countenance (which much
resembled that of Louis XIV.), and princely munificence, stood
pre-eminently as the great Mecaenas; even as a child, I used to feel,
when Dr. Priestley entered after him, that the glory of the one was
terrestrial, that of the other celestial; and utterly far as I am
removed from a belief in the sufficiency of Dr. Priestley's theological
creed, I cannot but here record this evidence of the eternal power of
any portion of the truth held in its vitality."
[5] Even Mrs. Priestley, who might be forgiven for regarding the
destroyers of her household gods with some asperity, contents herself,
in writing to Mrs. Barbauld, with the sarcasm that the Birmingham
people "will scarcely find so many respectable characters, a second
time, to make a bonfire of."
[6] _Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air_, vol.
ii. p. 31.
[7] _Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air_, vol.
ii. pp. 34, 35.
[8] _Ibid_. vol. i. p. 40.
[9] _Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air_, vol. ii.
p. 48.
[10] _Ibid_. p. 55.
[11] _Ibid_. p. 60. The italics are Priestley's own.
[12] "In all the newspapers and most of the periodical publications I
was represented as an unbeliever in Revelation, and no better than an
atheist."--_Autobiography_, Rutt, vol i. p. 124. "On the walls of
houses, etc., and especially where I usually went, were to be seen, in
large characters, 'MADAN FOR EVER; DAMN PRIESTLEY; NO PRESBYTERIANISM;
DAMN THE PRESBYTERIANS,' etc., etc.; and, at one time, I was followed
by a number of boys, who left their play, repeating what they had seen
on the walls, and shouting out, '_Damn Priestley; damn him, damn
him, for ever, for ever,_' etc., etc. This was no doubt a lesson
which they had been taught by their parents, and what they, I fear, had
learned from their superiors."--_Appeal to the Public on the Subject
of the Riots at Birmingham_.
[13] First Series. _On Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian
Religion_. Essay I. "Revelation of a Future State."
[14] Not only is Priestley at one with Bishop Courtenay in this matter,
but with Hartley and Bonnet, both of them stout champions of
Christianity. Moreover, Archbishop Whately's essay is little better
than an expansion of the first paragraph of Hume's famous essay on the
Immortality of the Soul:--"By the mere light of reason it seems
difficult to prove the immortality of the soul; the arguments for it
are commonly derived either from metaphysical topics, or moral, or
physical. But it is in reality the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that
has brought _life and immortality to light_." It is impossible to
imagine that a man of Whately's tastes and acquirements had not read
Hume or Hartley, though he refers to neither.
[15] _Essay on the First Principles of Government_, Second edition,
1771.
[16] "Utility of Establishments," in _Essay on First Principles of
Government_, 1771.
[17] In 1732 Doddridge was cited for teaching without the Bishop's
leave, at Northampton.
II
ON THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES
[1854]
The subject to which I have to beg your attention during the ensuing
hour is "The Relation of Physiological Science to other branches of
Knowledge."
Had circumstances permitted of the delivery, in their strict logical
order, of that series of discourses of which the present lecture is a
member, I should have preceded my friend and colleague Mr. Henfrey, who
addressed you on Monday last; but while, for the sake of that order, I
must beg you to suppose that this discussion of the Educational
bearings of Biology in general _does_ precede that of Special
Zoology and Botany, I am rejoiced to be able to take advantage
of the light thus already thrown upon the tendency and methods of
Physiological Science.
Regarding Physiological Science, then, in its widest sense--as the
equivalent of _Biology_--the Science of Individual Life--we have to
consider in succession:
1. Its position and scope as a branch of knowledge.
2. Its value as a means of mental discipline.
3. Its worth as practical information.
And lastly,
4. At what period it may best be made a branch of Education.
Our conclusions on the first of these heads must depend, of course,
upon the nature of the subject-matter of Biology; and I think a few
preliminary considerations will place before you in a clear light the
vast difference which exists between the living bodies with which
Physiological science is concerned, and the remainder of the
universe;--between the phaenomena of Number and Space, of Physical and
of Chemical force, on the one hand, and those of Life on the other.
The mathematician, the physicist, and the chemist contemplate things in
a condition of rest; they look upon a state of equilibrium as that to
which all bodies normally tend.
The mathematician does not suppose that a quantity will alter, or that
a given point in space will change its direction with regard to another
point, spontaneously. And it is the same with the physicist. When
Newton saw the apple fall, he concluded at once that the act of falling
was not the result of any power inherent in the apple, but that it was
the result of the action of something else on the apple. In a similar
manner, all physical force is regarded as the disturbance of an
equilibrium to which things tended before its exertion,--to which they
will tend again after its cessation.
The chemist equally regards chemical change in a body as the effect of
the action of something external to the body changed. A chemical
compound once formed would persist for ever, if no alteration took
place in surrounding conditions.
But to the student of Life the aspect of Nature is reversed. Here,
incessant, and, so far as we know, spontaneous change is the rule, rest
the exception--the anomaly to be accounted for. Living things have no
inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
Permit me, however, to give more force and clearness to these somewhat
abstract considerations by an illustration or two.
Imagine a vessel full of water, at the ordinary temperature, in an
atmosphere saturated with vapour. The _quantity_ and the _figure_ of that
water will not change, so far as we know, for ever.
Suppose a lump of gold be thrown into the vessel--motion and
disturbance of figure exactly proportional to the momentum of the gold
will take place. But after a time the effects of this disturbance will
subside--equilibrium will be restored, and the water will return to its
passive state.
Expose the water to cold--it will solidify--and in so doing its
particles will arrange themselves in definite crystalline shapes. But
once formed, these crystals change no further.
Again, substitute for the lump of gold some substance capable of
entering into chemical relations with the water:--say, a mass of that
substance which is called "protein"--the substance of flesh:--a very
considerable disturbance of equilibrium will take place--all sorts of
chemical compositions and decompositions will occur; but in the end, as
before, the result will be the resumption of a condition of rest.
Instead of such a mass of _dead_ protein, however, take a particle of
_living_ protein--one of those minute microscopic living things which
throng our pools, and are known as Infusoria--such a creature, for
instance, as an Euglena, and place it in our vessel of water. It is
a round mass provided with a long filament, and except in this
peculiarity of shape, presents no appreciable physical or chemical
difference whereby it might be distinguished from the particle of dead
protein.
But the difference in the phaenomena to which it will give rise is
immense: in the first place it will develop a vast quantity of physical
force--cleaving the water in all directions with considerable rapidity
by means of the vibrations of the long filament or cilium.
Nor is the amount of chemical energy which the little creature
possesses less striking. It is a perfect laboratory in itself, and it
will act and react upon the water and the matters contained therein;
converting them into new compounds resembling its own substance, and at
the same time giving up portions of its own substance which have become
effete.
Furthermore, the Euglena will increase in size; but this increase is by
no means unlimited, as the increase of a crystal might be. After it has
grown to a certain extent it divides, and each portion assumes the form
of the original, and proceeds to repeat the process of growth and
division.
Nor is this all. For after a series of such divisions and subdivisions,
these minute points assume a totally new form, lose their long
tails--round themselves, and secrete a sort of envelope or box, in
which they remain shut up for a time, eventually to resume, directly or
indirectly, their primitive mode of existence.
Now, so far as we know, there is no natural limit to the existence of
the Euglena, or of any other living germ. A living species once
launched into existence tends to live for ever.
Consider how widely different this living particle is from the dead
atoms with which the physicist and chemist have to do!
The particle of gold falls to the bottom and rests--the particle of
dead protein decomposes and disappears--it also rests: but the
_living_ protein mass neither tends to exhaustion of its forces nor
to any permanency of form, but is essentially distinguished as a
disturber of equilibrium so far as force is concerned,--as undergoing
continual metamorphosis and change, in point of form.
Tendency to equilibrium of force and to permanency of form, then, are
the characters of that portion of the universe which does not live--the
domain of the chemist and physicist.
Tendency to disturb existing equilibrium--to take on forms which
succeed one another in definite cycles--is the character of the living
world.
What is the cause of this wonderful difference between the dead
particle and the living particle of matter appearing in other respects
identical? that difference to which we give the name of Life?
I, for one, cannot tell you. It may be that, by and by, philosophers
will discover some higher laws of which the facts of life are
particular cases--very possibly they will find out some bond between
physico-chemical phaenomena on the one hand, and vital phaenomena on
the other. At present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think
we shall exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us at least,
this successive assumption of different states--(external conditions
remaining the same)--this _spontaneity of action_--if I may use a term
which implies more than I would be answerable for--which constitutes
so vast and plain a practical distinction between living bodies and
those which do not live, is an ultimate fact; indicating as such, the
existence of a broad line of demarcation between the subject-matter
of Biological and that of all other sciences.
For I would have it understood that this simple Euglena is the type of
_all_ living things, so far as the distinction between these and
inert matter is concerned. That cycle of changes, which is constituted
by perhaps not more than two or three steps in the Euglena, is as
clearly manifested in the multitudinous stages through which the germ
of an oak or of a man passes. Whatever forms the Living Being may take
on, whether simple or complex, _production, growth, reproduction,_ are
the phaenomena which distinguish it from that which does not live.
If this be true, it is clear that the student, in passing from the
physico-chemical to the physiological sciences, enters upon a totally
new order of facts; and it will next be for us to consider how far
these new facts involve _new_ methods, or require a modification of
those with which he is already acquainted. Now a great deal is said
about the peculiarity of the scientific method in general, and of the
different methods which are pursued in the different sciences. The
Mathematics are said to have one special method; Physics another,
Biology a third, and so forth. For my own part, I must confess that I
do not understand this phraseology.
So far as I can arrive at any clear comprehension of the matter,
Science is not, as many would seem to suppose, a modification of the
black art, suited to the tastes of the nineteenth century, and
flourishing mainly in consequence of the decay of the Inquisition.
Science is, I believe, nothing but _trained and organised common
sense_, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from
a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only
so far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in
which a savage wields his club. The primary power is the same in each
case, and perhaps the untutored savage has the more brawny arm of
the two. The _real_ advantage lies in the point and polish of the
swordsman's weapon; in the trained eye quick to spy out the weakness of
the adversary; in the ready hand prompt to follow it on the instant.
But, after all, the sword exercise is only the hewing and poking of the
clubman developed and perfected.
So, the vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical
faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are practised
by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A
detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his
shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored
the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor
does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a
stain of a peculiar kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has
upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way, in kind, from that by
which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet.
The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the
methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, use carelessly;
and the man of business must as much avail himself of the scientific
method--must be as truly a man of science--as the veriest bookworm of
us all; though I have no doubt that the man of business will find
himself out to be a philosopher with as much surprise as M. Jourdain
exhibited vhen he discovered that he had been all his life talking
prose. If, however, there be no real difference between the methods of
science and those of common life, it would seem, on the face of the
matter, highly improbable that there should be any difference between
the methods of the different sciences; nevertheless, it is constantly
taken for granted that there is a very wide difference between the
Physiological and other sciences in point of method.
In the first place it is said--and I take this point first, because the
imputation is too frequently admitted by Physiologists themselves--that
Biology differs from the Physico-chemical and Mathematical sciences in
being "inexact."
Now, this phrase "inexact" must refer either to the _methods_ or to
the _results_ of Physiological science.
It cannot be correct to apply it to the methods; for, as I hope to show
you by and by, these are identical in all sciences, and whatever is
true of Physiological method is true of Physical and Mathematical
method.
Is it then the _results_ of Biological science which are "inexact"?
I think not. If I say that respiration is performed by the
lungs; that digestion is effected in the stomach; that the eye is the
organ of sight; that the jaws of a vertebrated animal never open
sideways, but always up and down; while those of an annulose animal
always open sideways, and never up and down--I am enumerating
propositions which are as exact as anything in Euclid. How then has
this notion of the inexactness of Biological science come about? I
believe from two causes: first, because in consequence of the great
complexity of the science and the multitude of interfering conditions,
we are very often only enabled to predict approximately what will occur
under given circumstances; and secondly, because, on account of the
comparative youth of the Physiological sciences, a great many of their
laws are still imperfectly worked out. But, in an educational point of
view, it is most important to distinguish between the essence of a
science and the accidents which surround it; and essentially, the
methods and results of Physiology are as exact as those of Physics or
Mathematics.
It is said that the Physiological method is especially _comparative_;
[1] and this dictum also finds favour in the eyes of many.
I should be sorry to suggest that the speculators on scientific
classification have been misled by the accident of the name of one
leading branch of Biology--_Comparative Anatomy_; but I would ask
whether _comparison_, and that classification which is the result of
comparison, are not the essence of every science whatsoever? How is it
possible to discover a relation of cause and effect of _any_ kind
without comparing a series of cases together in which the supposed
cause and effect occur singly, or combined? So far from comparison
being in any way peculiar to Biological science, it is, I think, the
essence of every science.
A speculative philosopher again tells us that the Biological
sciences are distinguished by being sciences of observation and not
of experiment! [2] Of all the strange assertions into which speculation
without practical acquaintance with a subject may lead even an able
man, I think this is the very strangest. Physiology not an experimental
science? Why, there is not a function of a single organ in the body
which has not been determined wholly and solely by experiment? How did
Harvey determine the nature of the circulation, except by experiment?
How did Sir Charles Bell determine the functions of the roots of the
spinal nerves, save by experiment? How do we know the use of a nerve at
all, except by experiment? Nay, how do you know even that your eye is
your seeing apparatus, unless you make the experiment of shutting it;
or that your ear is your hearing apparatus, unless you close it up and
thereby discover that you become deaf?
It would really be much more true to say that Physiology is _the_
experimental science _par excellence_ of all sciences; that in which
there is least to be learnt by mere observation, and that which
affords the greatest field for the exercise of those faculties which
characterise the experimental philosopher. I confess, if any one were
to ask me for a model application of the logic of experiment, I should
know no better work to put into his hands than Bernard's late
Researches on the Functions of the Liver. [3]
Not to give this lecture a too controversial tone, however, I must
only advert to one more doctrine, held by a thinker of our own age
and country, whose opinions are worthy of all respect. It is, that
the Biological sciences differ from all others, inasmuch as in _them_
classification takes place by type and not by definition. [4]
It is said, in short, that a natural-history class is not capable of
being defined--that the class Rosaceae, for instance, or the class of
Fishes, is not accurately and absolutely definable, inasmuch as its
members will present exceptions to every possible definition; and that
the members of the class are united together only by the circumstance
that they are all more like some imaginary average rose or average
fish, than they resemble anything else.
But here, as before, I think the distinction has arisen entirely from
confusing a transitory imperfection with an essential character. So
long as our information concerning them is imperfect, we class all
objects together according to resemblances which we _feel_, but
cannot _define_; we group them round _types_, in short. Thus
if you ask an ordinary person what kinds of animals there are, he will
probably say, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, &c. Ask him to
define a beast from a reptile, and he cannot do it; but he says, things
like a cow or a horse are beasts, and things like a frog or a lizard
are reptiles. You see _he does_ class by type, and not by definition.
But how does this classification differ from that of the
scientific Zoologist? How does the meaning of the scientific class-name
of "Mammalia" differ from the unscientific of "Beasts"?
Why, exactly because the former depends on a definition, the latter on
a type. The class Mammalia is scientifically defined as "all animals
which have a vertebrated skeleton and suckle their young." Here is no
reference to type, but a definition rigorous enough for a geometrician.
And such is the character which every scientific naturalist recognises
as that to which his classes must aspire--knowing, as he does, that
classification by type is simply an acknowledgment of ignorance and a
temporary device.
So much in the way of negative argument as against the reputed
differences between Biological and other methods. No such differences,
I believe, really exist. The subject-matter of Biological science is
different from that of other sciences, but the methods of all are
identical; and these methods are--
1. _Observation_ of facts--including under this head that _artificial
observation_ which is called _experiment_.
2. That process of tying up similar facts into bundles, ticketed and
ready for use, which is called _Comparison_ and _Classification_,--the
results of the process, the ticketed bundles, being named _General
propositions_.
3. _Deduction_, which takes us from the general proposition to facts
again--teaches us, if I may so say, to anticipate from the ticket
what is inside the bundle. And finally--
4. _Verification_, which is the process of ascertaining whether, in
point of fact, our anticipation is a correct one.
Such are the methods of all science whatsoever; but perhaps you will
permit me to give you an illustration of their employment in the
science of Life; and I will take as a special case the establishment of
the doctrine of the _Circulation of the Blood_.
In this case, _simple observation_ yields us a knowledge of the
existence of the blood from some accidental haemorrhage, we will say;
we may even grant that it informs us of the localisation of this blood
in particular vessels, the heart, &c., from some accidental cut or the
like. It teaches also the existence of a pulse in various parts of the
body, and acquaints us with the structure of the heart and vessels.
Here, however, _simple observation_ stops, and we must have recourse
to _experiment_.
You tie a vein, and you find that the blood accumulates on the side of
the ligature opposite the heart. You tie an artery, and you find that
the blood accumulates on the side near the heart. Open the chest, and
you see the heart contracting with great force. Make openings into its
principal cavities, and you will find that all the blood flows out, and
no more pressure is exerted on either side of the arterial or venous
ligature.
Now all these facts, taken together, constitute the evidence that the
blood is propelled by the heart through the arteries, and returns by
the veins--that, in short, the blood circulates.
Suppose our experiments and observations have been made on horses, then
we group and ticket them into a general proposition, thus:--_all
horses have a circulation of their blood_.
Henceforward a horse is a sort of indication or label, telling us where
we shall find a peculiar series of phaenomena called the circulation of
the blood.
Here is our _general proposition_, then.
How, and when, are we justified in making our next step--a _deduction_
from it?
Suppose our physiologist, whose experience is limited to horses, meets
with a zebra for the first time,--will he suppose that this
generalisation holds good for zebras also?
That depends very much on his turn of mind. But we will suppose him to
be a bold man. He will say, "The zebra is certainly not a horse, but it
is very like one,--so like, that it must be the 'ticket' or mark of a
blood-circulation also; and, I conclude that the zebra has a
circulation."
That is a deduction, a very fair deduction, but by no means to be
considered scientifically secure. This last quality in fact can only be
given by _verification_--that is, by making a zebra the subject of
all the experiments performed on the horse. Of course, in the present
case, the _deduction_ would be _confirmed_ by this process of
verification, and the result would be, not merely a positive widening
of knowledge, but a fair increase of confidence in the truth of one's
generalisations in other cases.
Thus, having settled the point in the zebra and horse, our philosopher
would have great confidence in the existence of a circulation in the
ass. Nay, I fancy most persons would excuse him, if in this case he did
not take the trouble to go through the process of verification at all;
and it would not be without a parallel in the history of the human
mind, if our imaginary physiologist now maintained that he was
acquainted with asinine circulation _à priori_.
However, if I might impress any caution upon your minds, it is, the
utterly conditional nature of all our knowledge,--the danger of
neglecting the process of verification under any circumstances; and the
film upon which we rest, the moment our deductions carry us beyond the
reach of this great process of verification. There is no better
instance of this than is afforded by the history of our knowledge of
the circulation of the blood in the animal kingdom until the year 1824.
In every animal possessing a circulation at all, which had been
observed up to that time, the current of the blood was known to take
one definite and invariable direction. Now, there is a class of animals
called _Ascidians_, which possess a heart and a circulation, and
up to the period of which I speak, no one would have dreamt of
questioning the propriety of the deduction, that these creatures have a
circulation in one direction; nor would any one have thought it worth
while to verify the point. But, in that year, M. von Hasselt, happening
to examine a transparent animal of this class, found, to his infinite
surprise, that after the heart had beat a certain number of times, it
stopped, and then began beating the opposite way--so as to reverse the
course of the current, which returned by and by to its original
direction.
I have myself timed the heart of these little animals. I found it as
regular as possible in its periods of reversal: and I know no spectacle
in the animal kingdom more wonderful than that which it presents--all
the more wonderful that to this day it remains an unique fact, peculiar
to this class among the whole animated world. At the same time I know
of no more striking case of the necessity of the _verification_ of
even those deductions which seem founded on the widest and safest
inductions.
Such are the methods of Biology--methods which are obviously identical
with those of all other sciences, and therefore wholly incompetent to
form the ground of any distinction between it and them. [5]
But I shall be asked at once, Do you mean to say that there is no
difference between the habit of mind of a mathematician and that of a
naturalist? Do you imagine that Laplace might have been put into the
Jardin des Plantes, and Cuvier into the Observatory, with equal
advantage to the progress of the sciences they professed?
To which I would reply, that nothing could be further from my thoughts.
But different habits and various special tendencies of two sciences do
not imply different methods. The mountaineer and the man of the plains
have very different habits of progression, and each would be at a loss
in the other's place; but the method of progression, by putting one leg
before the other, is the same in each case. Every step of each is a
combination of a lift and a push; but the mountaineer lifts more and
the lowlander pushes more. And I think the case of two sciences
resembles this.
I do not question for a moment, that while the Mathematician is busy
with deductions _from_ general propositions, the Biologist is more
especially occupied with observation, comparison, and those processes
which lead _to_ general propositions. All I wish to insist upon
is, that this difference depends not on any fundamental distinction in
the sciences themselves, but on the accidents of their subject-matter,
of their relative complexity, and consequent relative perfection.
The Mathematician deals with two properties of objects only, number and
extension, and all the inductions he wants have been formed and
finished ages ago. He is occupied now with nothing but deduction and
verification.
The Biologist deals with a vast number of properties of objects, and
his inductions will not be completed, I fear, for ages to come; but
when they are, his science will be as deductive and as exact as the
Mathematics themselves.
Such is the relation of Biology to those sciences which deal with
objects having fewer properties than itself. But as the student, in
reaching Biology, looks back upon sciences of a less complex and
therefore more perfect nature; so, on the other hand, does he look
forward to other more complex and less perfect branches of knowledge.
Biology deals only with living beings as isolated things--treats only
of the life of the individual: but there is a higher division of
science still, which considers living beings as aggregates--which deals
with the relation of living beings one to another--the science which
_observes_ men--whose _experiments_ are made by nations one
upon another, in battlefields--whose _general propositions_ are
embodied in history, morality, and religion--whose _deductions_
lead to our happiness or our misery--and whose _verifications_ so
often come too late, and serve only
"To point a moral, or adorn a tale"--
I mean the science of Society or _Sociology_.
I think it is one of the grandest features of Biology, that it occupies
this central position in human knowledge. There is no side of the human
mind which physiological study leaves uncultivated. Connected by
innumerable ties with abstract science, Physiology is yet in the most
intimate relation with humanity; and by teaching us that law and order,
and a definite scheme of development, regulate even the strangest and
wildest manifestations of individual life, she prepares the student to
look for a goal even amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to
believe that history offers something more than an entertaining
chaos--a journal of a toilsome, tragi-comic march no-whither.
The preceding considerations have, I hope, served to indicate the
replies which befit the first two of the questions which I set before
you at starting, viz. What is the range and position of Physiological
Science as a branch of knowledge, and what is its value as a means of
mental discipline?
Its _subject-matter_ is a large moiety of the universe--its
_position_ is midway between the physico-chemical and the social
sciences. Its _value_ as a branch of discipline is partly that
which it has in common with all sciences--the training and
strengthening of common sense; partly that which is more peculiar to
itself--the great exercise which it affords to the faculties of
observation and comparison; and, I may add, the _exactness_ of
knowledge which it requires on the part of those among its votaries who
desire to extend its boundaries.
If what has been said as to the position and scope of Biology be
correct, our third question--What is the practical value of
physiological instruction?--might, one would think, be left to answer
itself.
On other grounds even, were mankind deserving of the title "rational,"
which they arrogate to themselves, there can be no question that they
would consider, as the most necessary of all branches of instruction
for themselves and for their children, that which professes to acquaint
them with the conditions of the existence they prize so highly--which
teaches them how to avoid disease and to cherish health, in themselves
and those who are dear to them.
I am addressing, I imagine, an audience of educated persons; and yet I
dare venture to assert that, with the exception of those of my hearers
who may chance to have received a medical education, there is not one
who could tell me what is the meaning and use of an act which he
performs a score of times every minute, and whose suspension would
involve his immediate death;--I mean the act of breathing--or who could
state in precise terms why it is that a confined atmosphere is
injurious to health.
The _practical value_ of Physiological knowledge! Why is it that
educated men can be found to maintain that a slaughter-house in the
midst of a great city is rather a good thing than otherwise?--that
mothers persist in exposing the largest possible amount of surface of
their children to the cold, by the absurd style of dress they adopt,
and then marvel at the peculiar dispensation of Providence, which
removes their infants by bronchitis and gastric fever? Why is it that
quackery rides rampant over the land; and that not long ago, one of the
largest public rooms in this great city could be filled by an audience
gravely listening to the reverend expositor of the doctrine--that the
simple physiological phaenomena known as spirit-rapping, table-turning,
phreno-magnetism, and I know not what other absurd and inappropriate
names, are due to the direct and personal agency of Satan?
Why is all this, except from the utter ignorance as to the simplest
laws of their own animal life, which prevails among even the most
highly educated persons in this country?
But there are other branches of Biological Science, besides Physiology
proper, whose practical influence, though less obvious, is not, as I
believe, less certain. I have heard educated men speak with an
ill-disguised contempt of the studies of the naturalist, and ask, not
without a shrug, "What is the use of knowing all about these miserable
animals--what bearing has it on human life?"
I will endeavour to answer that question. I take it that all will admit
there is definite Government of this universe--that its pleasures and
pains are not scattered at random, but are distributed in accordance
with orderly and fixed laws, and that it is only in accordance with all
we know of the rest of the world, that there should be an agreement
between one portion of the sensitive creation and another in these
matters.
Surely then it interests us to know the lot of other animal
creatures--however far below us, they are still the sole created things
which share with us the capability of pleasure and the susceptibility
to pain.
I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and
evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his
own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view
with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government,
which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake,--to
be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of
happiness among living things--their lavish beauty--the secret and
wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the
lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean
doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many
tears, for mere utilitarian ends.
There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am convinced,
take a profound hold upon practical life,--and that is, by its
influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all sources of
that pleasure which is derivable from beauty. I do not pretend that
natural-history knowledge, as such, can increase our sense of the
beautiful in natural objects. I do not suppose that the dead soul of
Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature says,--
A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,--
And it was nothing more,--
would have been a whit roused from its apathy by the information that
the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla
and central placentation. But I advocate natural-history knowledge from
this point of view, because it would lead us to _seek_ the
beauties of natural objects, instead of trusting to chance to force
them on our attention. To a person uninstructed in natural history, his
country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with
wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to
the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his
hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning round. Surely our
innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford
to despise this or any other source of them. We should fear being
banished for our neglect to that limbo, where the great Florentine
tells us are those who, during this life, "wept when they might be
joyful."
But I shall be trespassing unwarrantably on your kindness, if I do not
proceed at once to my last point--the time at which Physiological
Science should first form a part of the Curriculum of Education.
The distinction between the teaching of the facts of a science as
instruction, and the teaching it systematically as knowledge, has
already been placed before you in a previous lecture: and it appears to
me that, as with other sciences, the _common facts_ of Biology--the
uses of parts of the body--the names and habits of the living
creatures which surround us--may be taught with advantage to the
youngest child. Indeed, the avidity of children for this kind of
knowledge, and the comparative ease with which they retain it, is
something quite marvellous. I doubt whether any toy would be so
acceptable to young children as a vivarium of the same kind as, but of
course on a smaller scale than, those admirable devices in the
Zoological Gardens.
On the other hand, systematic teaching in Biology cannot be attempted
with success until the student has attained to a certain knowledge of
physics and chemistry: for though the phaenomena of life are dependent
neither on physical nor on chemical, but on vital forces, yet they
result in all sorts of physical and chemical changes, which can only be
judged by their own laws.
And now to sum up in a few words the conclusions to which I hope you
see reason to follow me.
Biology needs no apologist when she demands a place--and a prominent
place--in any scheme of education worthy of the name. Leave out the
Physiological sciences from your curriculum, and you launch the student
into the world, undisciplined in that science whose subject-matter
would best develop his powers of observation; ignorant of facts of the
deepest importance for his own and others' welfare; blind to the
richest sources of beauty in God's creation; and unprovided with that
belief in a living law, and an order manifesting itself in and through
endless change and variety, which might serve to check and moderate
that phase of despair through which, if he take an earnest interest in
social problems, he will assuredly sooner or later pass.
Finally, one word for myself. I have not hesitated to speak strongly
where I have felt strongly; and I am but too conscious that the
indicative and imperative moods have too often taken the place of the
more becoming subjunctive and conditional. I feel, therefore, how
necessary it is to beg you to forget the personality of him who has
thus ventured to address you, and to consider only the truth or error
in what has been said.
* * * * *
Footnotes:
[1] "In the third place, we have to review the method of Comparison,
which is so specially adapted to the study of living bodies, and by
which, above all others, that study must be advanced. In Astronomy,
this method is necessarily inapplicable; and it is not till we arrive
at Chemistry that this third means of investigation can be used, and
then only in subordination to the two others. It is in the study, both
statical and dynamical, of living bodies that it first acquires its
full development; and its use elsewhere can be only through its
application here."--COMTE'S _Positive Philosophy_, translated by
Miss Martineau. Vol. i. p. 372.
By what method does M. Comte suppose that the equality or inequality
of forces and quantities and the dissimilarity or similarity of
forms--points of some slight importance not only in Astronomy and
Physics, but even in Mathematics--are ascertained, if not by
Comparison?
[2] "Proceeding to the second class of means,--Experiment cannot but be
less and less decisive, in proportion to the complexity of the
phaenomena to be explored; and therefore we saw this resource to be
less effectual in chemistry than in physics: and we now find that it is
eminently useful in chemistry in comparison with physiology. _In
fact, the nature of the phenomena seems to offer almost insurmountable
impediments to any extensive and prolific application of such a
procedure in biology._"--COMTE, vol. i. p. 367.
M. Comte, as his manner is, contradicts himself two pages further on,
but that will hardly relieve him from the responsibility of such a
paragraph as the above.
[3] _Nouvelle Fonction du Foie considéré comme organe producteur de
matière sucrée chez l'Homme et les Animaux, par_ M. Claude Bernard.
[4] "_Natural Groups given by Type, not by Definition_.... The
class is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given,
though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary-line
without, but by a central point within; not by what it strictly
excludes, but what it eminently includes; by an example, not by a
precept; in short, instead of Definition we have a _Type_ for our
director. A type is an example of any class, for instance, a species of
a genus, which is considered as eminently possessing the characters of
the class. All the species which have a greater affinity with this
type-species than with any others, form the genus, and are ranged about
about it, deviating from it in various directions and different
degrees."--WHEWELL, _The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences_,
vol. i. pp. 476, 477.
[5] Save for the pleasure of doing so, I need hardly point put my
obligations to Mr. J. S. Mill's _System of Logic_, in this view of
scientific method.
III
EMANCIPATION--BLACK AND WHITE
[1865.]
Quashie's plaintive inquiry, "Am I not a man and a brother?" seems at
last to have received its final reply--the recent decision of the
fierce trial by battle on the other side of the Atlantic fully
concurring with that long since delivered here in a more peaceful way.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly
convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating
half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and
for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the
victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished.
It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men;
but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average
negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.
And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his
disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field
and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete
successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a
contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The
highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be
within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means
necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever
the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social
gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will
henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his
hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for
evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real
justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion;
emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a
pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but
all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can
arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own
nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any
physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a
double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than
the freed-man.
The like considerations apply to all the other questions of
emancipation which are at present stirring the world--the multifarious
demands that classes of mankind shall be relieved from restrictions
imposed by the artifice of man, and not by the necessities of Nature.
One of the most important, if not the most important, of all these, is
that which daily threatens to become the "irrepressible" woman
question. What social and political rights have women? What ought they
to be allowed, or not allowed, to do, be, and suffer? And, as involved
in, and underlying all these questions, how ought they to be educated?
There are philogynists as fanatical as any "misogynists" who, reversing
our antiquated notions, bid the man look upon the woman as the higher
type of humanity; who ask us to regard the female intellect as the
clearer and the quicker, if not the stronger; who desire us to look up
to the feminine moral sense as the purer and the nobler; and bid man
abdicate his usurped sovereignty over Nature in favour of the female
line. On the other hand, there are persons not to be outdone in all
loyalty and just respect for womankind, but by nature hard of head and
haters of delusion, however charming, who not only repudiate the new
woman-worship which so many sentimentalists and some philosophers are
desirous of setting up, but, carrying their audacity further, deny even
the natural equality of the sexes. They assert, on the contrary, that
in every excellent character, whether mental or physical, the average
woman is inferior to the average man, in the sense of having that
character less in quantity and lower in quality. Tell these persons of
the rapid perceptions and the instinctive intellectual insight of
women, and they reply that the feminine mental peculiarities, which
pass under these names, are merely the outcome of a greater
impressibility to the superficial aspects of things, and of the absence
of that restraint upon expression which, in men, is imposed by
reflection and a sense of responsibility. Talk of the passive endurance
of the weaker sex, and opponents of this kind remind you that Job was a
man, and that, until quite recent times, patience and long-suffering
were not counted among the specially feminine virtues. Claim passionate
tenderness as especially feminine, and the inquiry is made whether all
the best love-poetry in existence (except, perhaps, the "Sonnets from
the Portuguese ") has not been written by men; whether the song which
embodies the ideal of pure and tender passion--"Adelaida "--was
written by _Frau_ Beethoven; whether it was the Fornarina, or
Raphael, who painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one such
heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the ark itself, so to speak,
and to defend the startling paradox that, even in physical beauty, man
is the superior. He admitted, indeed, that there was a brief period of
early youth when it might be hard to say whether the prize should be
awarded to the graceful undulations of the female figure, or the
perfect balance and supple vigour of the male frame. But while our new
Paris might hesitate between the youthful Bacchus and the Venus
emerging from the foam, he averred that, when Venus and Bacchus had
reached thirty, the point no longer admitted of a doubt; the male form
having then attained its greatest nobility, while the female is far
gone in decadence; and that, at this epoch, womanly beauty, so far as
it is independent of grace or expression, is a question of drapery and
accessories.
Supposing, however, that all these arguments have a certain foundation;
admitting, for a moment, that they are comparable to those by which the
inferiority of the negro to the white man may be demonstrated, are they
of any value as against woman-emancipation? Do they afford us the
smallest ground for refusing to educate women as well as men--to give
women the same civil and political rights as men? No mistake is so
commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad
because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent,
non-sensical. And we conceive that those who may laugh at the arguments
of the extreme philogynists, may yet feel bound to work heart and soul
towards the attainment of their practical ends.
As regards education, for example. Granting the alleged defects of
women, is it not somewhat absurd to sanction and maintain a system of
education which would seem to have been specially contrived to
exaggerate all these defects?
Naturally not so firmly strung, nor so well balanced as boys, girls are
in great measure debarred from the sports and physical exercises which
are justly thought absolutely necessary for the full development of the
vigour of the more favoured sex. Women are, by nature, more excitable
than men--prone to be swept by tides of emotion, proceeding from hidden
and inward, as well as from obvious and external causes; and female
education does its best to weaken every physical counterpoise to this
nervous mobility--tends in all ways to stimulate the emotional part of
the mind and stunt the rest. We find girls naturally timid, inclined to
dependence, born conservatives; and we teach them that independence is
unladylike; that blind faith is the right frame of mind; and that
whatever we may be permitted, and indeed encouraged, to do to our
brother, our sister is to be left to the tyranny of authority and
tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated
either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man; or a sort of angels above
him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and
Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in
the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of
character is neither better nor worse than the male, but only weaker;
that women are meant neither to be men's guides nor their play-things,
but their comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature
puts no bar to that equality, does not seem to have entered into the
minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls.
If the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as
inherently absurd; and if that which we have just indicated is the true
position of woman, what is the first step towards a better state of
things? We reply, emancipate girls. Recognise the fact that they share
the senses, perceptions, feelings, reasoning powers, emotions, of boys,
and that the mind of the average girl is less different from that of
the average boy, than the mind of one boy is from that of another; so
that whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys,
justifies its application to girls as well. So far from imposing
artificial restrictions upon the acquirement of knowledge by women,
throw every facility in their way. Let our Faustinas, if they will,
toil through the whole round of
"Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider! auch Philosophie."
Let us have "sweet girl graduates" by all means. They will be none the
less sweet for a little wisdom; and the "golden hair" will not curl
less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains
within. Nay, if obvious practical difficulties can be overcome, let
those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the gladiatorial
arena of life, not merely in the guise of _retiariae_, as
heretofore, but as bold _sicariae_, breasting the open fray. Let
them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let
them have a fair field, but let them understand, as the necessary
correlative, that they are to have no favour. Let Nature alone sit high
above the lists, "rain influence and judge the prize."
And the result? For our parts, though loth to prophesy, we believe it
will be that of other emancipations. Women will find their place, and
it will neither be that in which they have been held, nor that to which
some of them aspire. Nature's old salique law will not be repealed, and
no change of dynasty will be effected. The big chests, the massive
brains, the vigorous muscles and stout frames of the best men will
carry the day, whenever it is worth their while to contest the prizes
of life with the best women. And the hardship of it is, that the very
improvement of the women will lessen their chances. Better mothers will
bring forth better sons, and the impetus gained by the one sex will be
transmitted, in the next generation, to the other. The most Darwinian
of theorists will not venture to propound the doctrine, that the
physical disabilities under which women have hitherto laboured in the
struggle for existence with men are likely to be removed by even the
most skilfully conducted process of educational selection.
We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children
may, and ought, to become as free from danger and long disability to
the civilised woman as it is to the savage; nor is it improbable that,
as society advances towards its right organisation, motherhood will
occupy a less space of woman's life than it has hitherto done. But
still, unless the human species is to come to an end altogether--a
consummation which can hardly be desired by even the most ardent
advocate of "women's rights"--somebody must be good enough to take the
trouble and responsibility of annually adding to the world exactly as
many people as die out of it. In consequence of some domestic
difficulties, Sydney Smith is said to have suggested that it would have
been good for the human race had the model offered by the hive been
followed, and had all the working part of the female community been
neuters. Failing any thorough-going reform of this kind, we see nothing
for it but the old division of humanity into men potentially, or
actually, fathers, and women potentially, if not actually, mothers. And
we fear that so long as this potential motherhood is her lot, woman
will be found to be fearfully weighted in the race of life.
The duty of man is to see that not a grain is piled upon that load
beyond what Nature imposes; that injustice is not added to inequality.
IV
A LIBERAL EDUCATION; AND WHERE TO FIND IT
[1868.]
The business which the South London Working Men's College has
undertaken is a great work; indeed, I might say, that Education, with
which that college proposes to grapple, is the greatest work of all
those which lie ready to a man's hand just at present.
And, at length, this fact is becoming generally recognised. You cannot
go anywhere without hearing a buzz of more or less confused and
contradictory talk on this subject--nor can you fail to notice that, in
one point at any rate, there is a very decided advance upon like
discussions in former days. Nobody outside the agricultural interest
now dares to say that education is a bad thing. If any representative
of the once large and powerful party, which, in former days, proclaimed
this opinion, still exists in a semi-fossil state, he keeps his
thoughts to himself. In fact, there is a chorus of voices, almost
distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that
education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the
country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated.
The politicians tells us, "You must educate the masses because they are
going to be masters." The clergy join in the cry for education, for
they affirm that the people are drifting away from church and chapel
into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists
swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad
workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or
steam engines, cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod!
the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices are lifted up in
favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they
are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and
suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people
perish for lack of knowledge.
These members of the minority, with whom I confess I have a good deal
of sympathy, are doubtful whether any of the other reasons urged in
favour of the education of the people are of much value--whether,
indeed, some of them are based upon either wise or noble grounds of
action. They question if it be wise to tell people that you will do for
them, out of fear of their power, what you have left undone, so long as
your only motive was compassion for their weakness and their sorrows.
And, if ignorance of everything which it is needful a ruler should know
is likely to do so much harm in the governing classes of the future,
why is it, they ask reasonably enough, that such ignorance in the
governing classes of the past has not been viewed with equal horror?
Compare the average artisan and the average country squire, and it may
be doubted if you will find a pin to choose between the two in point of
ignorance, class feeling, or prejudice. It is true that the ignorance
is of a different sort--that the class feeling is in favour of a
different class--and that the prejudice has a distinct savour of
wrong-headedness in each case--but it is questionable if the one is
either a bit better, or a bit worse, than the other. The old
protectionist theory is the doctrine of trades unions as applied by the
squires, and the modern trades unionism is the doctrine of the squires
applied by the artisans. Why should we be worse off under one _régime_
than under the other?
Again, this sceptical minority asks the clergy to think whether it is
really want of education which keeps the masses away from their
ministrations--whether the most completely educated men are not as open
to reproach on this score as the workmen; and whether, perchance, this
may not indicate that it is not education which lies at the bottom of
the matter?
Once more, these people, whom there is no pleasing, venture to doubt
whether the glory, which rests upon being able to undersell all the
rest of the world, is a very safe kind of glory--whether we may not
purchase it too dear; especially if we allow education, which ought to
be directed to the making of men, to be diverted into a process of
manufacturing human tools, wonderfully adroit in the exercise of some
technical industry, but good for nothing else.
And, finally, these people inquire whether it is the masses alone who
need a reformed and improved education. They ask whether the richest of
our public schools might not well be made to supply knowledge, as well
as gentlemanly habits, a strong class feeling, and eminent proficiency
in cricket. They seem to think that the noble foundations of our old
universities are hardly fulfilling their functions in their present
posture of half-clerical seminaries, half racecourses, where men are
trained to win a senior wranglership, or a double-first, as horses
are trained to win a cup, with as little reference to the needs of
after-life in the case of the man as in that of the racer. And, while
as zealous for education as the rest, they affirm that, if the
education of the richer classes were such as to fit them to be the
leaders and the governors of the poorer; and, if the education of the
poorer classes were such as to enable them to appreciate really wise
guidance and good governance, the politicians need not fear mob-law,
nor the clergy lament their want of flocks, nor the capitalists
prognosticate the annihilation of the prosperity of the country.
Such is the diversity of opinion upon the why and the wherefore of
education. And my hearers will be prepared to expect that the practical
recommendations which are put forward are not less discordant. There is
a loud cry for compulsory education. We English, in spite of constant
experience to the contrary, preserve a touching faith in the efficacy
of acts of Parliament; and I believe we should have compulsory
education in the course of next session, if there were the least
probability that half a dozen leading statesmen of different parties
would agree what that education should be.
Some hold that education without theology is worse than none. Others
maintain, quite as strongly, that education with theology is in the
same predicament. But this is certain, that those who hold the first
opinion can by no means agree what theology should be taught; and that
those who maintain the second are in a small minority.
At any rate "make people learn to read, write, and cipher," say a great
many; and the advice is undoubtedly sensible as far as it goes. But, as
has happened to me in former days, those who, in despair of getting
anything better, advocate this measure, are met with the objection that
it is very like making a child practise the use of a knife, fork, and
spoon, without giving it a particle of meat. I really don't know what
reply is to be made to such an objection.
But it would be unprofitable to spend more time in disentangling, or
rather in showing up the knots in, the ravelled skeins of our
neighbours. Much more to the purpose is it to ask if we possess any
clue of our own which may guide us among these entanglements. And by
way of a beginning, let us ask ourselves--What is education? Above all
things, what is our ideal of a thoroughly liberal education?--of that
education which, if we could begin life again, we would give
ourselves--of that education which, if we could mould the fates to our
own will, we would give our children? Well, I know not what may be your
conceptions upon this matter, but I will tell you mine, and I hope I
shall find that our views are not very discrepant.
* * * * *
Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every
one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a
game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a
primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces;
to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of
giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look
with a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed
his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without
knowing a pawn from a knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of
those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something
of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than
chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man
and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her
own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play
is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that
he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with
that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight
in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but
without remorse.
My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.
Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong angel
who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and
I should accept it us an image of human life.
Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in
the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and
their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in
harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less
than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be
tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not
call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of
numbers, upon the other side.
It is important to remember that, in strictness, there is no such thing
as an uneducated man. Take an extreme case. Suppose that an adult man,
in the full vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the
world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best
might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature
would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the
properties of objects. Pain and pleasure would be at his elbow telling
him to do this and avoid that; and by slow degrees the man would
receive an education which, if narrow, would be thorough, real, and
adequate to his circumstances, though there would be no extras and very
few accomplishments.
And if to this solitary man entered a second Adam, or, better still, an
Eve, a new and greater world, that of social and moral phenomena, would
be revealed. Joys and woes, compared with which all others might seem
but faint shadows, would spring from the new relations. Happiness and
sorrow would take the place of the coarser monitors, pleasure and pain;
but conduct would still be shaped by the observation of the natural
consequences of actions; or, in other words, by the laws of the nature
of man.
To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And
then, long before we were susceptible of any other mode of instruction,
Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its
educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with
Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross
disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past
for any one, be he as old as he may. For every man the world is as
fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for
him who has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her
patient education of us in that great university, the universe, of
which we are all members--Nature having no Test-Acts.
Those who take honours in Nature's university, who learn the laws which
govern men and things and obey them, are the really great and
successful men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the
"Poll," who pick up just enough to get through without much discredit.
Those who won't learn at all are plucked; and then you can't come up
again. Nature's pluck means extermination.
Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature
is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and passed long ago.
But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and
wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful
disobedience--incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime.
Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first;
but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your
ears are boxed.
The object of what we commonly call education--that education in
which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial
education--is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to
prepare the child to receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor
ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand the
preliminary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on
the ear. In short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation
of natural education. And a liberal education is an artificial education
which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils
of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and
to seize upon the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as
her penalties.
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam
engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as
well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a
knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws
of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and
fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous
will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to
respect others as himself.
Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for
he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will
make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely:
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.
Where is such an education as this to be had? Where is there any
approximation to it? Has any one tried to found such an education?
Looking over the length and breadth of these islands, I am afraid that
all these questions must receive a negative answer. Consider our
primary schools and what is taught in them. A child learns:--
1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in a very large
proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure in reading, or to
be able to write the commonest letter properly.
2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, nine times out
of ten, understands next to nothing.
3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall with it, a few of
the broadest and simplest principles of morality. This, to my mind, is
much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the
apple in Newton's garden an integral part of the doctrine of
gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the
inverse squares.
4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, and perhaps a
little something about English history and the geography of the child's
own country. But I doubt if there is a primary school in England in
which hangs a map of the hundred in which the village lies, so that the
children may be practically taught by it what a map means.
5. A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, respect for
others: obtained by fear, if the master be incompetent or foolish; by
love and reverence, if he be wise.
So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory and
practice of obedience to the moral laws of Nature, I gladly admit, not
only that it contains a valuable educational element, but that, so far,
it deals with the most valuable and important part of all education.
Yet, contrast what is done in this direction with what might be done;
with the time given to matters of comparatively no importance; with the
absence of any attention to things of the highest moment; and one is
tempted to think of Falstaff's bill and "the halfpenny worth of bread
to all that quantity of sack."
Let us consider what a child thus "educated" knows, and what it does
not know. Begin with the most important topic of all--morality, as the
guide of conduct. The child knows well enough that some acts meet with
approbation and some with disapprobation. But it has never heard that
there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as
cogent and as well defined as that which underlies every physical law;
that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil
consequences, as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out of a
garret window. Again, though the scholar may have been made acquainted,
in dogmatic fashion, with the broad laws of morality, he has had no
training in the application of those laws to the difficult problems
which result from the complex conditions of modern civilisation. Would
it not be very hard to expect any one to solve a problem in conic
sections who had merely been taught the axioms and definitions of
mathematical science?
A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, while he sees
others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs with what would keep
his children from starvation. Would it not be well to have helped that
man to calm the natural promptings of discontent by showing him, in his
youth, the necessary connection of the moral law which prohibits
stealing with the stability of society--by proving to him, once for
all, that it is better for his own people, better for himself, better
for future generations, that he should starve than steal? If you have
no foundation of knowledge, or habit of thought, to work upon, what
chance have you of persuading a hungry man that a capitalist is not a
thief "with a circumbendibus?" And if he honestly believes that, of
what avail is it to quote the commandment against stealing, when he
proposes to make the capitalist disgorge?
Again, the child learns absolutely nothing of the history or the
political organisation of his own country. His general impression is,
that everything of much importance happened a very long while ago; and
that the Queen and the gentlefolks govern the country much after the
fashion of King David and the elders and nobles of Israel--his sole
models. Will you give a man with this much information a vote? In easy
times he sells it for a pot of beer. Why should he not? It is of about
as much use to him as a chignon, and he knows as much what to do with
it, for any other purpose. In bad times, on the contrary, he applies
his simple theory of government, and believes that his rulers are the
cause of his sufferings--a belief which sometimes bears remarkable
practical fruits.
Least of all, does the child gather from this primary "education" of
ours a conception of the laws of the physical world, or of the
relations of cause and effect therein. And this is the more to be
lamented, as the poor are especially exposed to physical evils, and are
more interested in removing them than any other class of the community.
If any one is concerned in knowing the ordinary laws of mechanics one
would think it is the hand-labourer, whose daily toil lies among levers
and pulleys; or among the other implements of artisan work. And if any
one is interested in the laws of health, it is the poor workman, whose
strength is wasted by ill-prepared food, whose health is sapped by bad
ventilation and bad drainage, and half whose children are massacred by
disorders which might be prevented. Not only does our present primary
education carefully abstain from hinting to the workman that some of
his greatest evils are traceable to mere physical agencies, which could
be removed by energy, patience, and frugality; but it does worse--it
renders him, so far as it can, deaf to those who could help him, and
tries to substitute an Oriental submission to what is falsely declared
to be the will of God, for his natural tendency to strive after a
better condition.
What wonder, then, if very recently an appeal has been made to
statistics for the profoundly foolish purpose of showing that education
is of no good--that it diminishes neither misery nor crime among the
masses of mankind? I reply, why should the thing which has been called
education do either the one or the other? If I am a knave or a fool,
teaching me to read and write won't make me less of either one or the
other--unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to
wise and good purposes.
Suppose any one were to argue that medicine is of no use, because it
could be proved statistically, that the percentage of deaths was just
the same among people who had been taught how to open a medicine chest,
and among those who did not so much as know the key by sight. The
argument is absurd; but it is not more preposterous than that against
which I am contending. The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all
the other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write,
and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But
it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he
is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he
swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as
well be purblind, as unable to read--lame, as unable to write. But I
protest that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I
would rather that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of
both these mighty arts, than that they should remain ignorant of that
knowledge to which these arts are means.
* * * * *
It may be said that all these animadversions may apply to primary
schools, but that the higher schools, at any rate, must be allowed to
give a liberal education. In fact they professedly sacrifice everything
else to this object.
Let us inquire into this matter. What do the higher schools, those to
which the great middle class of the country sends its children, teach,
over and above the instruction given in the primary schools? There is a
little more reading and writing of English. But, for all that, every
one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper
classes who can read aloud decently, or who can put his thoughts on
paper in clear and grammatical (to say nothing of good or elegant)
language. The "ciphering" of the lower schools expands into elementary
mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a
little Euclid. But I doubt if one boy in five hundred has ever heard
the explanation of a rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise
than by rote.
Of theology, the middle class schoolboy gets rather less than poorer
children, less absolutely and less relatively, because there are so
many other claims upon his attention. I venture to say that, in the
great majority of cases, his ideas on this subject when he leaves
school are of the most shadowy and vague description, and associated
with painful impressions of the weary hours spent in learning collects
and catechism by heart.
Modern geography, modern history, modern literature; the English
language as a language; the whole circle of the sciences, physical,
moral and social, are even more completely ignored in the higher than
in the lower schools. Up till within a few years back, a boy might have
passed through any one of the great public schools with the greatest
distinction and credit, and might never so much as have heard of one of
the subjects I have just mentioned. He might never have heard that the
earth goes round the sun; that England underwent a great revolution in
1688, and France another in 1789; that there once lived certain notable
men called Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller.
The first might be a German and the last an Englishman for anything he
could tell you to the contrary. And as for Science, the only idea the
word would suggest to his mind would be dexterity in boxing.
I have said that this was the state of things a few years back, for the
sake of the few righteous who are to be found among the educational
cities of the plain. But I would not have you too sanguine about the
result, if you sound the minds of the existing generation of public
schoolboys, on such topics as those I have mentioned.
Now let us pause to consider this wonderful state of affairs; for the
time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the stock example of
the stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the nineteenth century. The
most thoroughly commercial people, the greatest voluntary wanderers and
colonists the world has ever seen, are precisely the middle classes of
this country. If there be a people which has been busy making history
on the great scale for the last three hundred years--and the most
profoundly interesting history--history which, if it happened to be
that of Greece or Rome, we should study with avidity--it is the
English. If there be a people which, during the same period, has
developed a remarkable literature, it is our own. If there be a nation
whose prosperity depends absolutely and wholly upon their mastery over
the forces of Nature, upon their intelligent apprehension of, and
obedience to the laws of the creation and distribution of wealth, and
of the stable equilibrium of the forces of society, it is precisely
this nation. And yet this is what these wonderful people tell their
sons:--"At the cost of from one to two thousand pounds of our
hard-earned money, we devote twelve of the most precious years of your
lives to school. There you shall toil, or be supposed to toil; but
there you shall not learn one single thing of all those you will most
want to know directly you leave school and enter upon the practical
business of life. You will in all probability go into business, but you
shall not know where, or how, any article of commerce is produced, or
the difference between an export or an import, or the meaning of the
word "capital." You will very likely settle in a colony, but you shall
not know whether Tasmania is part of New South Wales, or _vice versâ_.
"Very probably you may become a manufacturer, but you shall not be
provided with the means of understanding the working of one of your own
steam-engines, or the nature of the raw products you employ; and, when
you are asked to buy a patent, you shall not have the slightest means
of judging whether the inventor is an impostor who is contravening the
elementary principles of science, or a man who will make you as rich as
Croesus.
"You will very likely get into the House of Commons. You will have to
take your share in making laws which may prove a blessing or a curse to
millions of men. But you shall not hear one word respecting the
political organisation of your country; the meaning of the controversy
between free-traders and protectionists shall never have been mentioned
to you; you shall not so much as know that there are such things as
economical laws.
"The mental power which will be of most importance in your daily life
will be the power of seeing things as they are without regard to
authority; and of drawing accurate general conclusions from particular
facts. But at school and at college you shall know of no source of
truth but authority; nor exercise your reasoning faculty upon anything
but deduction from that which is laid down by authority.
"You will have to weary your soul with work, and many a time eat your
bread in sorrow and in bitterness, and you shall not have learned to
take refuge in the great source of pleasure without alloy, the serene
resting-place for worn human nature,--the world of art."
Said I not rightly that we are a wonderful people? I am quite prepared
to allow, that education entirely devoted to these omitted subjects
might not be a completely liberal education. But is an education which
ignores them all a liberal education? Nay, is it too much to say that
the education which should embrace these subjects and no others would
be a real education, though an incomplete one; while an education which
omits them is really not an education at all, but a more or less useful
course of intellectual gymnastics?
For what does the middle-class school put in the place of all these
things which are left out? It substitutes what is usually comprised
under the compendious title of the "classics"--that is to say, the
languages, the literature, and the history of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, and the geography of so much of the world as was known to these
two great nations of antiquity. Now, do not expect me to depreciate the
earnest and enlightened pursuit of classical learning. I have not the
least desire to speak ill of such occupations, nor any sympathy with
those who run them down. On the contrary, if my opportunities had lain
in that direction, there is no investigation into which I could have
thrown myself with greater delight than that of antiquity.
What science can present greater attractions than philology? How can a
lover of literary excellence fail to rejoice in the ancient
masterpieces? And with what consistency could I, whose business lies so
much in the attempt to decipher the past, and to build up intelligible
forms out of the scattered fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to
take a sympathetic, though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a
Niebuhr, a Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of
the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as
for other kinds of palaeontology--that is to say, a respect for the
facts which it establishes as for all facts, and a still greater
respect for it as a preparation for the discovery of a law of progress.
But if the classics were taught as they might be taught--if boys and
girls were instructed in Greek and Latin, not merely as languages, but
as illustrations of philological science; if a vivid picture of life on
the shores of the Mediterranean two thousand years ago were imprinted
on the minds of scholars; if ancient history were taught, not as a
weary series of feuds and fights, but traced to its causes in such men
placed under such conditions; if, lastly, the study of the classical
books were followed in such a manner as to impress boys with their
beauties, and with the grand simplicity of their statement of the
everlasting problems of human life, instead of with their verbal and
grammatical peculiarities; I still think it as little proper that they
should form the basis of a liberal education for our contemporaries, as
I should think it fitting to make that sort of palaeontology with which
I am familiar the back-bone of modern education.
It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training could be
made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I
could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its
terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat
the recent famous production of the head-masters out of the field in
all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy
fossils, and bring out all their powers of memory and all their
ingenuity in the application of my osteo-grammatical rules to the
interpretation, or construing, of those fragments. To those who had
reached the higher classes, I might supply odd bones to be built up
into animals, giving great honour and reward to him who succeeded in
fabricating monsters most entirely in accordance with the rules. That
would answer to verse-making and essay-writing in the dead languages.
To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look at these
fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. But what then? Would
such a catastrophe destroy the parallel? What, think you, would Cicero,
or Horace, say to the production of the best sixth form going? And
would not Terence stop his ears and run out if he could be present at
an English performance of his own plays? Would _Hamlet_, in the
mouths of a set of French actors, who should insist on pronouncing
English after the fashion of their own tongue, be more hideously
ridiculous?
But it will be said that I am forgetting the beauty, and the human
interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I reply that it
is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of a landscape
as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road. What with
short-windedness, stones, ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of
rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the
beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary schoolboy is
precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there
is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him
till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to
the top.
But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teaching at
its best--and I gather from those who have authority to speak on such
matters that it is so--what is to be said of classical teaching at its
worst, or in other words, of the classics of our ordinary middle-class
schools? [1] I will tell you. It means getting up endless forms and
rules by heart. It means turning Latin and Greek into English, for the
mere sake of being able to do it, and without the smallest regard to
the worth, or worthlessness, of the author read. It means the learning
of innumerable, not always decent, fables in such a shape that the
meaning they once had is dried up into utter trash; and the only
impression left upon a boy's mind is, that the people who believed such
things must have been the greatest idiots the world ever saw. And it
means, finally, that after a dozen years spent at this kind of work,
the sufferer shall be incompetent to interpret a passage in an author
he has not already got up; that he shall loathe the sight of a Greek or
Latin book; and that he shall never open, or think of, a classical
writer again, until, wonderful to relate, he insists upon submitting
his sons to the same process.
These be your gods, O Israel! For the sake of this net result (and
respectability) the British father denies his children all the
knowledge they might turn to account in life, not merely for the
achievement of vulgar success, but for guidance in the great crises of
human existence. This is the stone he offers to those whom he is bound
by the strongest and tenderest ties to feed with bread.
* * * * *
If primary and secondary education are in this unsatisfactory state,
what is to be said to the universities? This is an awful subject, and
one I almost fear to touch with my unhallowed hands; but I can tell you
what those say who have authority to speak.
The Rector of Lincoln College, in his lately published valuable
"Suggestions for Academical Organisation with especial reference to
Oxford," tells us (p. 127):--
"The colleges were, in their origin, endowments, not for the elements
of a general liberal education, but for the prolonged study of special
and professional faculties by men of riper age. The universities
embraced both these objects. The colleges, while they incidentally
aided in elementary education, were specially devoted to the highest
learning....
"This was the theory of the middle-age university and the design of
collegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances have
brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote the
researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there
college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in larger
proportions than may be found in private life. Elementary teaching of
youths under twenty is now the only function performed by the
university, and almost the only object of college endowments. Colleges
were homes for the life-study of the highest and most abstruse parts of
knowledge. They have become boarding schools in which the elements of
the learned languages are taught to youths."
If Mr. Pattison's high position, and his obvious love and respect for
his university, be insufficient to convince the outside world that
language so severe is yet no more than just, the authority of the
Commissioners who reported on the University of Oxford in 1850 is open
to no challenge. Yet they write:--
"It is generally acknowledged that both Oxford and the country at large
suffer greatly from the absence of a body of learned men devoting their
lives to the cultivation of science, and to the direction of academical
education.
"The fact that so few books of profound research emanate from the
University of Oxford, materially impairs its character as a seat of
learning, and consequently its hold on the respect of the nation."
Cambridge can claim no exemption from the reproaches addressed to
Oxford. And thus there seems no escape from the admission that what we
fondly call our great seats of learning are simply "boarding schools"
for bigger boys; that learned men are not more numerous in them than
out of them; that the advancement of knowledge is not the object of
fellows of colleges; that, in the philosophic calm and meditative
stillness of their greenswarded courts, philosophy does not thrive, and
meditation bears few fruits.
It is my great good fortune to reckon amongst my friends resident
members of both universities, who are men of learning and research,
zealous cultivators of science, keeping before their minds a noble
ideal of a university, and doing their best to make that ideal a
reality; and, to me, they would necessarily typify the universities,
did not the authoritative statements I have quoted compel me to believe
that they are exceptional, and not representative men. Indeed, upon
calm consideration, several circumstances lead me to think that the
Rector of Lincoln College and the Commissioners cannot be far wrong.
I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner who should wish to
become acquainted with the scientific, or the literary, activity of
modern England, would simply lose his time and his pains if he visited
our universities with that object.
And, as for works of profound research on any subject, and, above all,
in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice
almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German
university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our
vast and wealthy foundations elaborate in ten.
Ask the man who is investigating any question, profoundly and
thoroughly--be it historical, philosophical, philological, physical,
literary, or theological; who is trying to make himself master of any
abstract subject (except, perhaps, political economy and geology, both
of which are intensely Anglican sciences), whether he is not compelled
to read half a dozen times as many German as English books? And
whether, of these English books, more than one in ten is the work of a
fellow of a college, or a professor of an English university?
Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared with the
German mind? The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert
Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no further back than the
contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a
suggestion. England can show now, as she has been able to show in every
generation since civilisation spread over the West, individual men who
hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of
her intellectual eminence.
But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in virtue of
their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which
will not recognise impediments. They are not trained in the courts of
the Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts
of irregular ways, and with much loss of time and power, in order to
obtain their legitimate positions.
Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do not offer them
positions, in which it should be their highest duty to do, thoroughly,
that which they are most capable of doing; but, as far as possible,
university training shuts out of the minds of those among them, who are
subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in the world for
which they are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt to
still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by
putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry
of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose!
Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to
persuade such men that the education which leads to perfection in such
elegances is alone to be called culture; while the facts of history,
the process of thought, the conditions of moral and social existence,
and the laws of physical nature are left to be dealt with as they may
by outside barbarians!
It is not thus that the German universities, from being beneath notice
a century ago, have become what they are now--the most intensely
cultivated and the most productive intellectual corporations the world
has ever seen.
The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of
professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs
to know there is some one ready to teach him, some one competent to
discipline him in the way of learning; whatever his special bent, let
him but be able and diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction
and a career. Among his professors, he sees men whose names are known
and revered throughout the civilised world; and their living example
infects him with a noble ambition, and a love for the spirit of work.
The Germans dominate the intellectual world by virtue of the same
simple secret as that which made Napoleon the master of old Europe.
They have declared _la carrière ouverte aux talents_, and every
Bursch marches with a professor's gown in his knapsack. Let him become
a great scholar, or man of science, and ministers will compete for his
services. In Germany, they do not leave the chance of his holding the
office he would render illustrious to the tender mercies of a hot
canvass, and the final wisdom of a mob of country parsons.
In short, in Germany, the universities are exactly what the Rector of
Lincoln and the Commissioners tell us the English universities are not;
that is to say, corporations "of learned men devoting their lives to
the cultivation of science, and the direction of academical
education." They are not "boarding schools for youths," nor clerical
seminaries; but institutions for the higher culture of men, in which
the theological faculty is of no more importance, or prominence, than
the rest; and which are truly "universities," since they strive to
represent and embody the totality of human knowledge, and to find room
for all forms of intellectual activity.
May zealous and clear-headed reformers like Mr. Pattison succeed in
their noble endeavours to shape our universities towards some such
ideal as this, without losing what is valuable and distinctive in their
social tone! But until they have succeeded, a liberal education will be
no more obtainable in our Oxford and Cambridge Universities than in our
public schools.
If I am justified in my conception of the ideal of a liberal education;
and if what I have said about the existing educational institutions of
the country is also true, it is clear that the two have no sort of
relation to one another; that the best of our schools and the most
complete of our university trainings give but a narrow, one-sided, and
essentially illiberal education--while the worst give what is really
next to no education at all. The South London Working-Men's College
could not copy any of these institutions if it would; I am bold enough
to express the conviction that it ought not if it could.
For what is wanted is the reality and not the mere name of a liberal
education; and this College must steadily set before itself the
ambition to be able to give that education sooner or later. At present
we are but beginning, sharpening our educational tools, as it were,
and, except a modicum of physical science, we are not able to offer
much more than is to be found in an ordinary school.
Moral and social science--one of the greatest and most fruitful of our
future classes, I hope--at present lacks only one thing in our
programme, and that is a teacher. A considerable want, no doubt; but it
must be recollected that it is much better to want a teacher than to
want the desire to learn.
Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must call
Physical Geography. What I mean is that which the Germans call
"_Erdkunde_." It is a description of the earth, of its place and
relation to other bodies; of its general structure, and of its great
features--winds, tides, mountains, plains: of the chief forms of the
vegetable and animal worlds, of the varieties of man. It is the peg
upon which the greatest quantity of useful and entertaining scientific
information can be suspended.
Literature is not upon the College programme; but I hope some day to
see it there. For literature is the greatest of all sources of refined
pleasure, and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable
us to enjoy that pleasure. There is scope enough for the purposes of
liberal education in the study of the rich treasures of our own
language alone. All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of
a refined taste by attention to sound criticism. But there is no reason
why French and German should not be mastered sufficiently to read what
is worth reading in those languages with pleasure and with profit.
And finally, by and by, we must have History; treated not as a
succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series of biographies;
not as evidence that Providence has always been on the side of either
Whigs or Tories; but as the development of man in times past, and in
other conditions than our own.
But, as it is one of the principles of our College to be
self-supporting, the public must lead, and we must follow, in these
matters. If my hearers take to heart what I have said about liberal
education, they will desire these things, and I doubt not we shall be
able to supply them. But we must wait till the demand is made.
* * * * *
Footnotes:
[1] For a justification of what is here said about these
schools, see that valuable book, _Essays on a Liberal Education,
passim_.
V
SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION: NOTES OF AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
[1869]
[Mr. Thackeray, talking of after-dinner speeches, has lamented that
"one never can recollect the fine things one thought of in the
cab," in going to the place of entertainment. I am not aware that
there are any "fine things" in the following pages, but such as
there are stand to a speech which really did get itself spoken, at
the hospitable table of the Liverpool Philomathic Society, more or
less in the position of what "one thought of in the cab."]
The introduction of scientific training into the general education of
the country is a topic upon which I could not have spoken, without some
more or less apologetic introduction, a few years ago. But upon this,
as upon other matters, public opinion has of late undergone a rapid
modification. Committees of both Houses of the Legislature have agreed
that something must be done in this direction, and have even thrown out
timid and faltering suggestions as to what should be done; while at the
opposite pole of society, committees of working men have expressed
their conviction that scientific training is the one thing needful for
their advancement, whether as men, or as workmen. Only the other day,
it was my duty to take part in the reception of a deputation of London
working men, who desired to learn from Sir Roderick Murchison, the
Director of the Royal School of Mines, whether the organisation of the
Institution in Jermyn Street could be made available for the supply of
that scientific instruction the need of which could not have been
apprehended, or stated, more clearly than it was by them.
The heads of colleges in our great universities (who have not the
reputation of being the most mobile of persons) have, in several cases,
thought it well that, out of the great number of honours and rewards at
their disposal, a few should hereafter be given to the cultivators of
the physical sciences. Nay, I hear that some colleges have even gone so
far as to appoint one, or, maybe, two special tutors for the purpose of
putting the facts and principles of physical science before the
undergraduate mind. And I say it with gratitude and great respect for
those eminent persons, that the head masters of our public schools,
Eton, Harrow, Winchester, have addressed themselves to the problem of
introducing instruction in physical science among the studies of those
great educational bodies, with much honesty of purpose and
enlightenment of understanding; and I live in hope that, before long,
important changes in this direction will be carried into effect in
those strongholds of ancient prescription. In fact, such changes have
already been made, and physical science, even now, constitutes a
recognised element of the school curriculum in Harrow and Rugby, whilst
I understand that ample preparations for such studies are being made at
Eton and elsewhere.
Looking at these facts, I might perhaps spare myself the trouble of
giving any reasons for the introduction of physical science into
elementary education; yet I cannot but think that it may be well if I
place before you some considerations which, perhaps, have hardly
received full attention.
At other times, and in other places, I have endeavoured to state the
higher and more abstract arguments, by which the study of physical
science may be shown to be indispensable to the complete training of
the human mind; but I do not wish it to be supposed that, because I
happen to be devoted to more or less abstract and "unpractical"
pursuits, I am insensible to the weight which ought to be attached
to that which has been said to be the English conception of
Paradise--namely, "getting on." I look upon it, that "getting on" is a
very important matter indeed. I do not mean merely for the sake of the
coarse and tangible results of success, but because humanity is so
constituted that a vast number of us would never be impelled to those
stretches of exertion which make, us wiser and more capable men, if it
were not for the absolute necessity of putting on our faculties all the
strain they will bear, for the purpose of "getting on" in the most
practical sense.
Now the value of a knowledge of physical science as a means of getting
on is indubitable. There are hardly any of our trades, except the
merely huckstering ones, in which some knowledge of science may not be
directly profitable to the pursuer of that occupation. As industry
attains higher stages of its development, as its processes become more
complicated and refined, and competition more keen, the sciences are
dragged in, one by one, to take their share in the fray; and he who can
best avail himself of their help is the man who will come out uppermost
in that struggle for existence, which goes on as fiercely beneath the
smooth surface of modern society, as among the wild inhabitants of the
woods.
But in addition to the bearing of science on ordinary practical life,
let me direct your attention to its immense influence on several of the
professions. I ask any one who has adopted the calling of an engineer,
how much time he lost when he left school, because he had to devote
himself to pursuits which were absolutely novel and strange, and of
which he had not obtained the remotest conception from his instructors?
He had to familiarise himself with ideas of the course and powers of
Nature, to which his attention had never been directed during his
school-life, and to learn, for the first time, that a world of facts
lies outside and beyond the world of words. I appeal to those who know
what engineering is, to say how far I am right in respect to that
profession; but with regard to another, of no less importance, I shall
venture to speak of my own knowledge. There is no one of us who may not
at any moment be thrown, bound hand and foot by physical incapacity,
into the hands of a medical practitioner. The chances of life and death
for all and each of us may, at any moment, depend on the skill with
which that practitioner is able to make out what is wrong in our bodily
frames, and on his ability to apply the proper remedy to the defect.
The necessities of modern life are such, and the class from which the
medical profession is chiefly recruited is so situated, that few
medical men can hope to spend more than three or four, or it may be
five, years in the pursuit of those studies which are immediately
germane to physic. How is that all too brief period spent at present? I
speak as an old examiner, having served some eleven or twelve years in
that capacity in the University of London, and therefore having a
practical acquaintance with the subject; but I might fortify myself by
the authority of the President of the College of Surgeons, Mr. Quain,
whom I heard the other day in an admirable address (the Hunterian
Oration) deal fully and wisely with this very topic. [1]
A young man commencing the study of medicine is at once required to
endeavour to make an acquaintance with a number of sciences, such as
Physics, as Chemistry, as Botany, as Physiology, which are absolutely
and entirely strange to him, however excellent his so-called education
at school may have been. Not only is he devoid of all apprehension of
scientific conceptions, not only does he fail to attach any meaning to
the words "matter," "force," or "law" in their scientific senses, but,
worse still, he has no notion of what it is to come into contact with
Nature, or to lay his mind alongside of a physical fact, and try to
conquer it, in the way our great naval hero told his captains to master
their enemies. His whole mind has been given to books, and I am hardly
exaggerating if I say that they are more real to him than Nature. He
imagines that all knowledge can be got out of books, and rests upon the
authority of some master or other; nor does he entertain any misgiving
that the method of learning which led to proficiency in the rules of
grammar will suffice to lead him to a mastery of the laws of Nature.
The youngster, thus unprepared for serious study, is turned loose among
his medical studies, with the result, in nine cases out of ten, that
the first year of his curriculum is spent in learning how to learn.
Indeed, he is lucky if, at the end of the first year, by the exertions
of his teachers and his own industry, he has acquired even that art of
arts. After which there remain not more than three, or perhaps four,
years for the profitable study of such vast sciences as Anatomy,
Physiology, Therapeutics, Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, and the like,
upon his knowledge or ignorance of which it depends whether the
practitioner shall diminish, or increase, the bills of mortality. Now
what is it but the preposterous condition of ordinary school education
which prevents a young man of seventeen, destined for the practice of
medicine, from being fully prepared for the study of Nature; and from
coming to the medical school, equipped with that preliminary knowledge
of the principles of Physics, of Chemistry and of Biology, upon which
he has now to waste one of the precious years, every moment of which
ought to be given to those studies which bear directly upon the
knowledge of his profession?
There is another profession, to the members of which, I think, a
certain preliminary knowledge of physical science might be quite as
valuable as to the medical man. The practitioner of medicine sets
before himself the noble object of taking care of man's bodily welfare;
but the members of this other profession undertake to "minister to
minds diseased," and, so far as may be, to diminish sin and soften
sorrow. Like the medical profession, the clerical, of which I now
speak, rests its power to heal upon its knowledge of the order of the
universe--upon certain theories of man's relation to that which lies
outside him. It is not my business to express any opinion about these
theories. I merely wish to point out that, like all other theories,
they are professedly based upon matters of fact. Thus the clerical
profession has to deal with the facts of Nature from a certain point of
view; and hence it comes into contact with that of the man of science,
who has to treat the same facts from another point of view. You know
how often that contact is to be described as collision, or violent
friction; and how great the heat, how little the light, which commonly
results from it.
In the interests of fair play, to say nothing of those of mankind, I
ask, Why do not the clergy as a body acquire, as a part of their
preliminary education, some such tincture of physical science as will
put them in a position to understand the difficulties in the way of
accepting their theories, which are forced upon the mind of every
thoughtful and intelligent man, who has taken the trouble to instruct
himself in the elements of natural knowledge?
Some time ago I attended a large meeting of the clergy, for the purpose
of delivering an address which I had been invited to give. I spoke of
some of the most elementary facts in physical science, and of the
manner in which they directly contradict certain of the ordinary
teachings of the clergy. The result was, that, after I had finished,
one section of the assembled ecclesiastics attacked me with all the
intemperance of pious zeal, for stating facts and conclusions which no
competent judge doubts; while, after the first speakers had subsided,
amidst the cheers of the great majority of their colleagues, the more
rational minority rose to tell me that I had taken wholly superfluous
pains, that they already knew all about what I had told them, and
perfectly agreed with me. A hard-headed friend of mine, who was
present, put the not unnatural question, "Then why don't you say so in
your pulpits?" to which inquiry I heard no reply.
In fact the clergy are at present divisible into three sections: an
immense body who are ignorant and speak out; a small proportion who
know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according
to their knowledge. By the clergy, I mean especially the Protestant
clergy. Our great antagonist--I speak as a man of science--the Roman
Catholic Church, the one great spiritual organisation which is able to
resist, and must, as a matter of life and death, resist, the progress
of science and modern civilisation, manages her affairs much better.
It was my fortune some time ago to pay a visit to one of the most
important of the institutions in which the clergy of the Roman Catholic
Church in these islands are trained; and it seemed to me that the
difference between these men and the comfortable champions of
Anglicanism and of Dissent, was comparable to the difference between
our gallant Volunteers and the trained veterans of Napoleon's Old
Guard.
The Catholic priest is trained to know his business, and do it
effectually. The professors of the college in question, learned,
zealous, and determined men, permitted me to speak frankly with them.
We talked like outposts of opposed armies during a truce--as friendly
enemies; and when I ventured to point out the difficulties their
students would have to encounter from scientific thought, they replied:
"Our Church has lasted many ages, and has passed safely through many
storms. The present is but a new gust of the old tempest, and we do not
turn out our young men less fitted to weather it, than they have been,
in former times, to cope with the difficulties of those times. The
heresies of the day are explained to them by their professors of
philosophy and science, and they are taught how those heresies are to
be met."
I heartily respect an organisation which faces its enemies in this way;
and I wish that all ecclesiastical organisations were in as effective a
condition. I think it would be better, not only for them, but for us.
The army of liberal thought is, at present, in very loose order; and
many a spirited free-thinker makes use of his freedom mainly to vent
nonsense. We should be the better for a vigorous and watchful enemy to
hammer us into cohesion and discipline; and I, for one, lament that the
bench of Bishops cannot show a man of the calibre of Butler of the
"Analogy," who, if he were alive, would make short work of much of the
current _à priori_ "infidelity."
I hope you will consider that the arguments I have now stated, even if
there were no better ones, constitute a sufficient apology for urging
the introduction of science into schools. The next question to which I
have to address myself is, What sciences ought to be thus taught? And
this is one of the most important of questions, because my side (I am
afraid I am a terribly candid friend) sometimes spoils its cause by
going in for too much. There are other forms of culture beside physical
science; and I should be profoundly sorry to see the fact forgotten, or
even to observe a tendency to starve, or cripple, literary, or
aesthetic, culture for the sake of science. Such a narrow view of the
nature of education has nothing to do with my firm conviction that a
complete and thorough scientific culture ought to be introduced into
all schools. By this, however, I do not mean that every schoolboy
should be taught everything in science. That would be a very absurd
thing to conceive, and a very mischievous thing to attempt. What I mean
is, that no boy nor girl should leave school without possessing a grasp
of the general character of science, and without having been
disciplined, more or less, in the methods of all sciences; so that,
when turned into the world to make their own way, they shall be
prepared to face scientific problems, not by knowing at once the
conditions of every problem, or by being able at once to solve it; but
by being familiar with the general current of scientific thought, and
by being able to apply the methods of science in the proper way, when
they have acquainted themselves with the conditions of the special
problem.
That is what I understand by scientific education. To furnish a boy
with such an education, it is by no means necessary that he should
devote his whole school existence to physical science: in fact, no one
would lament so one-sided a proceeding more than I. Nay more, it is not
necessary for him to give up more than a moderate share of his time to
such studies, if they be properly selected and arranged, and if he be
trained in them in a fitting manner.
I conceive the proper course to be somewhat as follows. To begin with,
let every child be instructed in those general views of the phaenomena
of Nature for which we have no exact English name. The nearest
approximation to a name for what I mean, which we possess, is "physical
geography." The Germans have a better, "Erdkunde" ("earth knowledge" or
"geology" in its etymological sense), that is to say, a general
knowledge of the earth, and what is on it, in it, and about it. If any
one who has had experience of the ways of young children will call to
mind their questions, he will find that so far as they can be put into
any scientific category, they come under this head of "Erdkunde." The
child asks, "What is the moon, and why does it shine?" "What is this
water, and where does it run?" "What is the wind?" "What makes this
waves in the sea?" "Where does this animal live, and what is the use of
that plant?" And if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask
foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual craving of a
young child; nor any bounds to the slow, but solid, accretion of
knowledge and development of the thinking faculty in this way. To all
such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete, though true
as far as they go, may be given by any teacher whose ideas represent
real knowledge and not mere book learning; and a panoramic view of
Nature, accompanied by a strong infusion of the scientific habit of
mind, may thus be placed within the reach of every child of nine or
ten.
After this preliminary opening of the eyes to the great spectacle
of the daily progress of Nature, as the reasoning faculties of the
child grow, and he becomes familiar with the use of the tools of
knowledge--reading, writing, and elementary mathematics--he should pass
on to what is, in the more strict sense, physical science. Now there
are two kinds of physical science: the one regards form and the
relation of forms to one another; the other deals with causes and
effects. In many of what we term sciences, these two kinds are mixed up
together; but systematic botany is a pure example of the former kind,
and physics of the latter kind, of science. Every educational advantage
which training in physical science can give is obtainable from the
proper study of these two; and I should be contented, for the present,
if they, added to our "Erdkunde," furnished the whole of the scientific
curriculum of school. Indeed, I conceive it would be one of the
greatest boons which could be conferred upon England, if henceforward
every child in the country were instructed in the general knowledge of
the things about it, in the elements of physics, and of botany. But I
should be still better pleased if there could be added somewhat of
chemistry, and an elementary acquaintance with human physiology.
So far as school education is concerned, I want to go no further just
now; and I believe that such instruction would make an excellent
introduction to that preparatory scientific training which, as I have
indicated, is so essential for the successful pursuit of our most
important professions. But this modicum of instruction must be so given
as to ensure real knowledge and practical discipline. If scientific
education is to be dealt with as mere bookwork, it will be better not
to attempt it, but to stick to the Latin Grammar which makes no
pretence to be anything but bookwork.
If the great benefits of scientific training are sought, it is
essential that such training should be real: that is to say, that the
mind of the scholar should be brought into direct relation with fact,
that he should not merely be told a thing, but made to see by the use
of his own intellect and ability that the thing is so and no otherwise.
The great peculiarity of scientific training, that in virtue of which
it cannot be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever, is this
bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and practising
the intellect in the completest form of induction; that is to say, in
drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by immediate
observation of Nature.
The other studies which enter into ordinary education do not discipline
the mind in this way. Mathematical training is almost purely deductive.
The mathematician starts with a few simple propositions, the proof of
which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of
his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of
languages, at any rate as ordinarily practised, is of the same general
nature,--authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental
operations of the scholar are deductive.
Again: if history be the subject of study, the facts are still taken
upon the evidence of tradition and authority. You cannot make a boy see
the battle of Thermopylae for himself, or know, of his own knowledge,
that Cromwell once ruled England. There is no getting into direct
contact with natural fact by this road; there is no dispensing with
authority, but rather a resting upon it.
In all these respects, science differs from other educational
discipline, and prepares the scholar for common life. What have we to
do in every-day life? Most of the business which demands our attention
is matter of fact, which needs, in the first place, to be accurately
observed or apprehended; in the second, to be interpreted by inductive
and deductive reasonings, which are altogether similar in their nature
to those employed in science. In the one case, as in the other,
whatever is taken for granted is so taken at one's own peril; fact and
reason are the ultimate arbiters, and patience and honesty are the
great helpers out of difficulty.
But if scientific training is to yield its most eminent results, it
must, I repeat, be made practical. That is to say, in explaining to a
child the general phaenomena of Nature, you must, as far as possible,
give reality to your teaching by object-lessons; in teaching him
botany, he must handle the plants and dissect the flowers for himself;
in teaching him physics and chemistry, you must not be solicitous to
fill him with information, but you must be careful that what he learns
he knows of his own knowledge. Don't be satisfied with telling him that
a magnet attracts iron. Let him see that it does; let him feel the pull
of the one upon the other for himself. And, especially, tell him that
it is his duty to doubt until he is compelled, by the absolute
authority of Nature, to believe that which is written in books. Pursue
this discipline carefully and conscientiously, and you may make sure
that, however scanty may be the measure of information which you have
poured into the boy's mind, you have created an intellectual habit of
priceless value in practical life.
One is constantly asked, When should this scientific education be
commenced? I should say with the dawn of intelligence. As I have
already said, a child seeks for information about matters of physical
science as soon as it begins to talk. The first teaching it wants is an
object-lesson of one sort or another; and as soon as it is fit for
systematic instruction of any kind, it is fit for a modicum of science.
People talk of the difficulty of teaching young children such matters,
and in the same breath insist upon their learning their Catechism,
which contains propositions far harder to comprehend than anything in
the educational course I have proposed. Again: I am incessantly told
that we, who advocate the introduction of science in schools, make no
allowance for the stupidity of the average boy or girl; but, in my
belief, that stupidity, in nine cases out of ten, "_fit, non
nascitur_," and is developed by a long process of parental and
pedagogic repression of the natural intellectual appetites,
accompanied by a persistent attempt to create artificial ones for food
which is not only tasteless, but essentially indigestible.
Those who urge the difficulty of instructing young people in
science are apt to forget another very important condition of
success--important in all kinds of teaching, but most essential, I am
disposed to think, when the scholars are very young. This condition is,
that the teacher should himself really and practically know his
subject. If he does, he will be able to speak of it in the easy
language, and with the completeness of conviction, with which he talks
of any ordinary every-day matter. If he does not, he will be afraid to
wander beyond the limits of the technical phraseology which he has got
up; and a dead dogmatism, which oppresses, or raises opposition, will
take the place of the lively confidence, born of personal conviction,
which cheers and encourages the eminently sympathetic mind of
childhood.
I have already hinted that such scientific training as we seek for may
be given without making any extravagant claim upon the time now devoted
to education. We ask only for "a most favoured nation" clause in our
treaty with the schoolmaster; we demand no more than that science shall
have as much time given to it as any other single subject--say four
hours a week in each class of an ordinary school.
For the present, I think men of science would be well content with such
an arrangement as this: but speaking for myself, I do not pretend to
believe that such an arrangement can be, or will be, permanent. In
these times the educational tree seems to me to have its roots in the
air, its leaves and flowers in the ground; and, I confess, I should
very much like to turn it upside down, so that its roots might be
solidly embedded among the facts of Nature, and draw thence a sound
nutriment for the foliage and fruit of literature and of art. No
educational system can have a claim to permanence, unless it recognises
the truth that education has two great ends to which everything else
must be subordinated. The one of these is to increase knowledge; the
other is to develop the love of right and the hatred of wrong.
With wisdom and uprightness a nation can make its way worthily, and
beauty will follow in the footsteps of the two, even if she be not
specially invited; while there is perhaps no sight in the whole world
more saddening and revolting than is offered by men sunk in ignorance
of everything but what other men have written; seemingly devoid of
moral belief or guidance; but with the sense of beauty so keen, and the
power of expression so cultivated, that their sensual caterwauling may
be almost mistaken for the music of the spheres.
At present, education is almost entirely devoted to the cultivation of
the power of expression, and of the sense of literary beauty. The
matter of having anything to say, beyond a hash of other people's
opinions, or of possessing any criterion of beauty, so that we may
distinguish between the Godlike and the devilish, is left aside as of
no moment. I think I do not err in saying that if science were made a
foundation of education, instead of being, at most, stuck on as cornice
to the edifice, this state of things could not exist.
In advocating the introduction of physical science as a leading element
in education, I by no means refer only to the higher schools. On the
contrary, I believe that such a change is even more imperatively called
for in those primary schools, in which the children of the poor are
expected to turn to the best account the little time they can devote to
the acquisition of knowledge. A great step in this direction has
already been made by the establishment of science-classes under the
Department of Science and Art,--a measure which came into existence
unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more importance
to the welfare of the people than many political changes over which the
noise of battle has rent the air.
Under the regulations to which I refer, a schoolmaster can set up a
class in one or more branches of science; his pupils will be examined,
and the State will pay him, at a certain rate, for all who succeed in
passing. I have acted as an examiner under this system from the
beginning of its establishment, and this year I expect to have not
fewer than a couple of thousand sets of answers to questions in
Physiology, mainly from young people of the artisan class, who have
been taught in the schools which are now scattered all over great
Britain and Ireland. Some of my colleagues, who have to deal with
subjects such as Geometry, for which the present teaching power is
better organised, I understand are likely to have three or four times
as many papers. So far as my own subjects are concerned, I can
undertake to say that a great deal of the teaching, the results of
which are before me in these examinations, is very sound and good; and
I think it is in the power of the examiners, not only to keep up the
present standard, but to cause an almost unlimited improvement. Now
what does this mean? It means that by holding out a very moderate
inducement, the masters of primary schools in many parts of the country
have been led to convert them into little foci of scientific
instruction; and that they and their pupils have contrived to find, or
to make, time enough to carry out this object with a very considerable
degree of efficiency. That efficiency will, I doubt not, be very much
increased as the system becomes known and perfected, even with the very
limited leisure left to masters and teachers on week-days. And this
leads me to ask, Why should scientific teaching be limited to
week-days?
Ecclesiastically-minded persons are in the habit of calling things they
do not like by very hard names, and I should not wonder if they brand
the proposition I am about to make as blasphemous, and worse. But, not
minding this, I venture to ask, Would there really be anything wrong in
using part of Sunday for the purpose of instructing those who have no
other leisure, in a knowledge of the phaenomena of Nature, and of man's
relation to Nature?
I should like to see a scientific Sunday-school in every parish, not
for the purpose of superseding any existing means of teaching the
people the things that are for their good, but side by side with them.
I cannot but think that there is room for all of us to work in helping
to bridge over the great abyss of ignorance which lies at our feet.
And if any of the ecclesiastical persons to whom I have referred,
object that they find it derogatory to the honour of the God whom they
worship, to awaken the minds of the young to the infinite wonder and
majesty of the works which they proclaim His, and to teach them those
laws which must needs be His laws, and therefore of all things needful
for man to know--I can only recommend them to be let blood and put on
low diet. There must be something very wrong going on in the instrument
of logic if it turns out such conclusions from such premises.
* * * * *
Footnotes:
[1] Mr. Quam's words (_Medical Times and Gazette_, February 20)
are:--"A few words as to our special Medical course of instruction
and the influence upon it of such changes in the elementary schools as
I have mentioned. The student now enters at once upon several
sciences--physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, botany, pharmacy,
therapeutics--all these, the facts and the language and the laws of
each, to be mastered in eighteen months. Up to the beginning of the
Medical course many have learned little. We cannot claim anything
better than the Examiner of the University of London and the Cambridge
Lecturer have reported for their Universities. Supposing that at school
young people had acquired some exact elementary knowledge in physics,
chemistry, and a branch of natural history--say botany--with the
physiology connected with it, they would then have gained necessary
knowledge, with some practice in inductive reasoning. The whole studies
are processes of observation and induction--the best discipline of the
mind for the purposes of life--for our purposes not less than any. 'By
such study (says Dr. Whewell) of one or more departments of inductive
science the mind may escape from the thraldom of mere words.' By that
plan the burden of the early Medical course would be much lightened,
and more time devoted to practical studies, including Sir Thomas
Watson's 'final and supreme stage' of the knowledge of Medicine."
VI
SCIENCE AND CULTURE
[1880]
Six years ago, as some of my present hearers may remember, I had the
privilege of addressing a large assemblage of the inhabitants of this
city, who had gathered together to do honour to the memory of their
famous townsman, Joseph Priestley; [1] and, if any satisfaction
attaches to posthumous glory, we may hope that the manes of the
burnt-out philosopher were then finally appeased.
No man, however, who is endowed with a fair share of common sense, and
not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary
or posthumous fame with the highest good; and Priestley's life leaves
no doubt that he, at any rate, set a much higher value upon the
advancement of knowledge, and the promotion of that freedom of thought
which is at once the cause and the consequence of intellectual
progress.
Hence I am disposed to think that, if Priestley could be amongst us
to-day, the occasion of our meeting would afford him even greater
pleasure than the proceedings which celebrated the centenary of his
chief discovery. The kindly heart would be moved, the high sense of
social duty would be satisfied, by the spectacle of well-earned wealth,
neither squandered in tawdry luxury and vainglorious show, nor
scattered with the careless charity which blesses neither him that
gives nor him that takes, but expended in the execution of a
well-considered plan for the aid of present and future generations of
those who are willing to help themselves.
We shall all be of one mind thus far. But it is needful to share
Priestley's keen interest in physical science; and to have learned, as
he had learned, the value of scientific training in fields of inquiry
apparently far remote from physical science; in order to appreciate, as
he would have appreciated, the value of the noble gift which Sir Josiah
Mason has bestowed upon the inhabitants of the Midland district.
For us children of the nineteenth century, however, the establishment
of a college under the conditions of Sir Josiah Mason's Trust, has a
significance apart from any which it could have possessed a hundred
years ago. It appears to be an indication that we are reaching the
crisis of the battle, or rather of the long series of battles, which
have been fought over education in a campaign which began long before
Priestley's time, and will probably not be finished just yet.
In the last century, the combatants were the champions of ancient
literature on the one side, and those of modern literature on the
other; but, some thirty years [2] ago, the contest became complicated
by the appearance of a third army, ranged round the banner of Physical
Science.
I am not aware that any one has authority to speak in the name of this
new host. For it must be admitted to be somewhat of a guerilla force,
composed largely of irregulars, each of whom fights pretty much for his
own hand. But the impressions of a full private, who has seen a good
deal of service in the ranks, respecting the present position of
affairs and the conditions of a permanent peace, may not be devoid of
interest; and I do not know that I could make a better use of the
present opportunity than by laying them before you.
* * * * *
From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science
into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates
of scientific education have met with opposition of two kinds. On the
one hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride
themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the
other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in
their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture and
monopolists of liberal education.
The practical men believed that the idol whom they worship--rule of
thumb--has been the source of the past prosperity, and will suffice for
the future welfare of the arts and manufactures. They were of opinion
that science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice have
nothing to do with one another; and that the scientific habit of mind
is an impediment, rather than an aid, in the conduct of ordinary
affairs.
I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical men--for
although they were very formidable thirty years ago, I am not sure that
the pure species has not been extirpated. In fact, so far as mere
argument goes, they have been subjected to such a _feu d'enfer_
that it is a miracle if any have escaped. But I have remarked that your
typical practical man has an unexpected resemblance to one of Milton's
angels. His spiritual wounds, such as are inflicted by logical weapons,
may be as deep as a well and as wide as a church door, but beyond
shedding a few drops of ichor, celestial or otherwise, he is no whit
the worse. So, if any of these opponents be left, I will not waste time
in vain repetition of the demonstrative evidence of the practical value
of science; but knowing that a parable will sometimes penetrate where
syllogisms fail to effect an entrance, I will offer a story for their
consideration.
Once upon a time, a boy, with nothing to depend upon but his own
vigorous nature, was thrown into the thick of the struggle for
existence in the midst of a great manufacturing population. He seems to
have had a hard fight, inasmuch as, by the time he was thirty years of
age, his total disposable funds amounted to twenty pounds.
Nevertheless, middle life found him giving proof of his comprehension
of the practical problems he had been roughly called upon to solve, by
a career of remarkable prosperity.
Finally, having reached old age with its well-earned surroundings of
"honour, troops of friends," the hero of my story bethought himself of
those who were making a like start in life, and how he could stretch
out a helping hand to them.
After long and anxious reflection this successful practical man of
business could devise nothing better than to provide them with the
means of obtaining "sound, extensive, and practical scientific
knowledge." And he devoted a large part of his wealth and five years of
incessant work to this end.
I need not point the moral of a tale which, as the solid and spacious
fabric of the Scientific College assures us, is no fable, nor can
anything which I could say intensify the force of this practical answer
to practical objections.
* * * * *
We may take it for granted then, that, in the opinion of those best
qualified to judge, the diffusion of thorough scientific education is
an absolutely essential condition of industrial progress; and that the
College which has been opened to-day will confer an inestimable boon
upon those whose livelihood is to be gained by the practise of the arts
and manufactures of the district.
The only question worth discussion is, whether the conditions, under
which the work of the College is to be carried out, are such as to give
it the best possible chance of achieving permanent success.
Sir Josiah Mason, without doubt most wisely, has left very large
freedom of action to the trustees, to whom he proposes ultimately to
commit the administration of the College, so that they may be able to
adjust its arrangements in accordance with the changing conditions of
the future. But, with respect to three points, he has laid most
explicit injunctions upon both administrators and teachers.
Party politics are forbidden to enter into the minds of either, so far
as the work of the College is concerned; theology is as stonily
banished from its precincts; and finally, it is especially declared
that the College shall make no provision for "mere literary instruction
and education."
It does not concern me at present to dwell upon the first two
injunctions any longer than may be needful to express my full
conviction of their wisdom. But the third prohibition brings us face to
face with those other opponents of scientific education, who are by no
means in the moribund condition of the practical man, but alive, alert,
and formidable.
It is not impossible that we shall hear this express exclusion of
"literary instruction and education" from a College which,
nevertheless, professes to give a high and efficient education, sharply
criticised. Certainly the time was that the Levites of culture would
have sounded their trumpets against its walls as against an educational
Jericho.
How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is
incompetent to confer culture; that it touches none of the higher
problems of life; and, what is worse, that the continual devotion to
scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in the
applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all
kinds? How frequently one has reason to observe that no reply to a
troublesome argument tells so well as calling its author a "mere
scientific specialist." And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to
speak of this form of opposition to scientific education in the past
tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only omission, but
prohibition, of "mere literary instruction and education" is a patent
example of scientific narrow-mindedness?
I am not acquainted with Sir Josiah Mason's reasons for the action
which he has taken; but if, as I apprehend is the case, he refers to
the ordinary classical course of our schools and universities by the
name of "mere literary instruction and education," I venture to offer
sundry reasons of my own in support of that action.
For I hold very strongly by two convictions--The first is, that neither
the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education is of such
direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the
expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second is, that for
the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific
education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary
education.
I need hardly point out to you that these opinions, especially the
latter, are diametrically opposed to those of the great majority of
educated Englishmen, influenced as they are by school and university
traditions. In their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal
education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not merely with
education and instruction in literature,
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