This electronic edition prepared by Dr. David C. Bossard
from original documents in his personal library.

August, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 by David C. Bossard.

INTRODUCTION.

[014] I feel obliged to limit myself to European Thought. Such a limitation would hardly have been called for a century ago, because it would have been a matter of course; but the steady growth and peculiar civilization of a new and vigorous people on the other side of the Atlantic force frome me the twofold confession, that there is a large world of growing importance of which I have no personal knowledge, and to estimate which I therefore feel unqualified and unprepared; and further, that I am equally unable to picture to myself the aspect which the whole of our European culture in its present state may assume to an outside and far-removed observer who is placed in the New World. As this New World grows not only in numbers and national wealth, but also in mental depth, as it becomes more and more intellectualised and spiritualised, so it will no doubt experience the desire of recording its own inner life and culture... but the tendencies of thisnew culture are to me vague and enigmatical, and I frankly admit that I am unable to say anything definit on this subject.

[015] The subject before us is European Thought -- i.e. the fhought of France, Germany, and England -- during the greater part of the nineteenth century.

[030] In the place of the high-sounding but indefinable search after truth, modern science has put an elaborate method of inquiry: this method has to be learnt by patient practice, and not by listening to a description of it. It is laid down in the works of those modern heroes of science, from Galileo and Newton onward, who have practised it successfully, and from those writings philosophers from Bacon to Comte and Mill have -- not without misunderstanding and error -- tried to extract the rationale.

[049]  Both Mr. Herbert Spencer's 'System' and [Rudolph Hermann - ed.] Lotze's 'Microcosmus' are written with the object of establishing the unity of thought, of preserving the conviction that things exist and that events happen in some intelligible connection, and especially that the religious and the scientific views of the world and life are reconcilable.  ... The other great work was that of A. v. Humboldt [footnote: 'Kosmos'], who in the course of a long career, peculiarly favoured by opportunities for studying Nature on an extensive scale, and for appreciating the detail of modern reserach, of which he was an illustrious representative, had never lost sight of the all-pervading unity.

PART I. -- SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT.

Three chapters on the growth and the diffusion of the scientific spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER I.

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN FRANCE.

[91] The great inventions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were made without special scientific knowledge, and frequently by persons who possessed skill rather than learning.

[122] Laplace [an inventor, with Newton, of calculus, the science of infinitesimals - ed], like so many other men of science, had been called by the Emperor [Napoleon] to assist in the labours of administration, but, according to his judgment, proved himself a poor administrator, being unable to grasp practical issues, and always descending into infinitesimals. It is hardly to be doubted now, after the lapse of a century, that the infinitesimals of Laplace play a more important par4t in problems of administration and government than the ideas of Napoleon.

[138 - Cuvier on the effects of the French Revolution]. "There is always a revolution required in order to change habits which have become general... The events which disturbed the world, and which for natural science temporarily dried up the sources of its riches, obliged it to return to itself, and to make a new study of what it possessed, more fruitful than the most fortunate departures could have been. During this apparent rest, all the different parts of method were deepened; the interior of natural objects was studied; even minerals were dissected and reduced to their mechanical elements; a still more intimate analysis was made by a perfected chemistry; the earth itself was, during this interval, if the expression is allowable, dissected by the geologists; its depts were sounded; the order and layers of rock which formed its shell were recognized... The botanists did not gather so many plants in their collections, but with the lens in hand they demonstrated more and more intimate structure of the fruit, the seed, the various relations which connect the parts of the flower... The most delicate forms of organic tissues were exhibited; medicine and chemistry united their efforts to appreciate in the minutest detail the action of external elements on the living organism. ... The old natural history had ceased to rule. It was not that old natural history any more, but a science full of life and youth, armed with quite novel ways and means, which beheld the world reopened by the Peace [at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars - footnote]."

[141 - Cuvier on the effect of the suppression caused by the French revolution] The Convention had destroyed academies, colleges, universities; nobody would have dared to ask boldly for their restitution; but soon the effects of their suppression showed themselves in the most susceptible point; the armies were without doctors and surgeons, and these could not be created without schools. But who would believe that time was required to give courage enough to call them schools of medicine. Doctor and surgeon were titles too contrary to equality, apparently because there is no authority over the patient more necessary than that of the doctor; therefore the odd term 'schools of health' was used, and there was no question of either examination or diploma for the students."

[145 - on positive effects of the revolution]. The fundamental notions of a mechanical science... were expanded into a system of materialistic philosophy in 'L'Homme Machine,' the 'Système de la Nature,' and other works, the extreme views of which the great scientific thinkers could hardly approve of. Much of the good done by Fontenelle, by Voltaire, by Buffon, was spoiled or neutralised by premature and ill-founded theories. How much, or how little, they contributed to bring about the Revolution is a matter of much controversy; certain it is that the Revolution broke their sway, and destroyed their immediate influence. To the purely literary the Revolution added something different -- viz., the modern practical popularisation of science: it establiehed its educational and its technical importance. Science was to be not an elegant amusement, or a refined luxury, nor even exclusively the serious occupation of the rare genius: it was to be the basis of a national instruction, and the foundation of the greatness and wealth of the nation. The Memoirs of the Academy were cleansed of all dangerous generalizations which might have brought them into touch with political controversy; the language was confined to the measured and concise statement of facts, or to theories capable of mathematical verification and treatment; conjectural matter was carefully excluded, and a standard of scientific excellence, both in matter and form, was raised, to which we still look up with admiration. ... If now we continually appeal to scientific authorities for aid in the solution of practical problems, it is well to remember that nothing helped more to raise science to the eminence of a great social power than the action of the Revolutionary Government in 1793. Whilst it guillotined Lavoisier, Bailly, and Cousin; drove Dondorcet to suicide, and others lile Vicq-d'Azyr [footnote: the great forerunner of Cuvier in the new science of comparative anatomy] and Dionis du Séjour into premature death; it had to appeal for its most necessary requirements to the society of scientific authorities, which it professed not to need. ... In the space of a few years science had become a necessity to society at large.

[152 - on Napoleon] I cannot but recognise that he was, amongst the great heroes and statesmen of his age, the first and foremost, if not the only one, who seemed thoroughly to realise the part which science was destined to play in the immediate future. ... In the first decades of this century [19th] the home of the scientific spirit was France.

CHAPTER II.

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN GERMANY.

CHAPTER III.

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN ENGLAND.

[251] English societies may sometimes honour and admire, but they do not support, their great representatives, and these themselves often refuse to be tied by exclusive academic duties, still more by official restrictions. Two characteristics have marked most of them: they have, at all expense and sacrifice, guarded their individual freedom of thought, and they have almost always shown a great desire to combine some application with their abstract researches, to take part in the great practical work of the nation. Continental thinkers, whose lives are devoted to the realisation of some great ideal, complain of the want of method, of the erratic absence of discipline, which is peculiar to English genius.

[276] There is something casual and accidental about the great ideas which British men of science contributed during the first half of the century. each of them chooses an isolated position, a special form of delivery, frequently a language and style of his own. They attach little or no importance to the labours of others, with which they are frequently unacquainted. Important papers are lost or buried, as in the case of cavendish and Green. Novel ideas are communicated in unintelligible language and symbols, and accordingly neglected. This was the case with Dr. Young's writings, and to a certain extent with Faraday's. The greatest discoveries were unduly postponed through the absence of assistance, as seems to have been the case with Adam's discovery of Neptune, perhaps with Stoke's anticipation of spectrum analysis. What might not these great minds have accomplished had they attached the same importance to style and form as most of the great French men of science, or had they been called upon to teach a number of eager pupils, anxious, not to take honours and degrees, but to understand and further elaborate the suggestions of their masters, as has been the custom and tradition in Germany?

[290 on the formation of the Geological Society in 1807] At that time the war of the Wernerians and Huttonians, or, as they were also called, the Neptunists and Plutonists, was raging in the northern metropolis. The Geological Society of London was established with a view to "multiply and record observations, and patiently to await the result at some future period." -- that is, its founders resolved to apply themselves to descriptive geology, thinking the time not come for that theoretical geology which had then long fired the controversial ardour of Neptunists and Plutonists.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ASTRONOMICAL VIEW OF NATURE.

[313] Elaborate claims to priority have been set up for persons to whom it is said the credit of modern discoveries should be given. I do not intend to contribute to this controversial literature, except  by a general remark, which will explain how it has come to pass that ideas and principles now recognized as useful instruments of thought and research have ony recently attained this importance, while they have frequently been the property of many ages of philosophical thought, and familiar even to the writers of antiquity. It is the scientific method, the exact statement, which was wanting, and which raises the vague guesses of the philosophical or the dreams of the poetic mind to the rank of definite canons of thought, capable of precise expression, of mathematical analysis, and of exact verification. Obscure notions of the attractive and repulsive forces of nature have floated before the minds of philosophers since the time of Empedocles, but they did not become useful to science till  Galileo and Newton took the first step to measure the intensity of those forces.  Lucretius's poem introduces to us the early speculations on the atomic constitution of matter, but the hypotheses of his school only led to real knowledge of the things of nature when Dalton, following Lavoisier and Richter, reduced this idea to definite numbers; still more so when, through the law of Avogadro and Ampère, the calculations of Joule, Clausius, and THomson, the velocities, the number, and sizes of atoms became calculable and measurable quantities....

    Heraclitus proclaimed, six hundred years before the Christian era, the theory that everything moves or flows; but not till this century was the attempt made to work out the definite hypothesis of Daniel Bernoulli, and to explain the properties of bodies, apparently at rest -- the pressure of gases, or the phenomena of elasticity -- by assuming a hidden motion of the imperceptible portions of matter. ... In every case the awakening touch has been the mathematical spirit, the attempt to count, to measure, or to calculate. What to the poet or the seer may appear to be the very death of all his poetry and all his visions -- the cold touch of the calculating mind, -- this has proved to be the spell by which knowledge has been born, by which new sciences have been created.

CHAPTER V.

THE ATOMIC VIEW OF NATURE.

[436] The atomic theory, known to the ancients, revived by Dalton in the early years of the century, and employed by chemical philosophers for half a century as a convenient symbolism, had, about the year 1860, been accepted by physicists, and used not merely as a convenient symbolism, but as a physical reality.