Part 5

For those people also who, without being students, take an interest in science, the reading of original memoirs may be recommended. Much of the science they learn in this way will be wrong, but they will see it as something thoroughly human and, it may be, as something thoroughly sympathetic. The text-book has an air of infallibility which is very repellent, and it is difficult to avoid associating this with the scientific man. But it is merely a manifestation of the same tendency that produces stereotyped restaurants. A reading of the old memoirs shows science as tentative, imaginative, courageous. They show that the man of science is a humanist.

THE ENTENTE CORDIALE

Those who are interested in current “serious” literature, and more particularly that branch of it which deals in a speculative way with those vague but impressive problems which have always haunted men, the existence of God, the “meaning” of the Universe and so on, cannot have failed to notice the unaccustomed prestige now enjoyed by science. The supposed contributions of science to these discussions are now listened to with a gravity and politeness, with a kind of serious hush, which was formerly reserved for quotations from Plato and Aristotle. Compared with the crude materialists of Huxley’s day, it is evident that the modern man of science has greatly improved his social standing; he now frequently talks to the best people, on equal terms, on such subjects as the Good and the Beautiful. The underbred, pushing, clamorous self-assertion of the Victorian scientist is a rare note in these improving conversations between philosophers and men of science. A man like Haeckel is dismissed as a mere vulgarian; no one would trouble to refute him; his loud voice and hob-nailed boots are sufficient condemnation. Even Huxley is felt to be a rather noisy person; the modern expositor of the relations of Science and Religion or Science and Philosophy no longer borrows his technique from the Hyde Park orator; he has adopted rather the insinuating charm of the curate. There are, of course, survivals on both sides; sweetness and light are not yet universal; the general atmosphere of mutual forbearance and respect is still occasionally marred by the harsh note of some exceptionally fanatic or insensitive partisan. One or two grave lapses of this kind may be detected amongst the mass of recent books devoted to cosmical questions. There are still one or two literary men and philosophers who hint at those dreadful early days of science, before it went to Oxford, and there are still one or two provincial men of science, _farouche_, suspicious, who attend a modern cultured salon carrying their obsolete life-preserver in their pocket. But on the whole good manners prevail everywhere. It is realised that there is no reason why anybody should feel awkward at meeting anybody else in a world which is so indulgent of the difference between a man’s private and public capacities.

To be on amiable terms with everybody is worth a sacrifice, and in our relief at escaping from the ferocious savagery of the Victorian controversialists we may well endure the minor discomforts of a reconciliation between science, philosophy and religion so effective as to render indistinguishable the separate persons of this trinity. The particular advantage of this amalgamation that concerns us here is the fact that it has brought a new branch of literature into existence. As is usual in an amalgamation, each member profits by the custom brought by the others, until finally a composite article is evolved which is, as it were, simultaneously buff and blue. That is how we get these very curious and interesting modern works on cosmical questions--works which seem to result from a close collaboration between, say, a professor of physics, an archdeacon and a Bond Street crystal-gazer. A very comprehensive _Weltanschauung_ is thereby afforded, and doubtless a truly “balanced” mind must result from the perusal of such works, but we may doubt whether each component, as it were, is presented in its purity. The advantages of association are only obtained by a certain loss of individuality. We cannot speak for the philosophy and religion of these works, but we are impelled to these reflections by detecting a certain quality which pervades the scientific part of the expositions. It is, as we have admitted, a good thing for science that it has been taken up in this way. It moves in an atmosphere of culture; it finds itself being described in chapters headed with Greek quotations; it is complimented on its strong vein of poetry; its peculiarities are explained, inaccurately but sympathetically, in columns of literary causerie, and the unexpected but gratifying discovery is made that it by no means lacks the bump of reverence and proper respect for constituted authority.

Yet, kindly as are the surrounding faces, and pleasant as is the consciousness that one’s clothes and accent excite no comment, there is, on the part of many scientific men, a persistent uneasy feeling that one has gained this position on false pretences. It is these remarkable modern books to which we have referred which render the feeling acute. At the same time, it is very difficult to state precisely the elements of this feeling. We understand, however, that there are young poets and novelists who experience very much the same emotion when one of the great “official” men of letters talks about literature. It appears that such people often get everything subtly wrong, that their criticism never pierces to the real heart of the matter, that they make literature at once more pompous and more tame than it really is. These new cultured expositors of science affect one very much like that. Their indisputable intelligence and their wide knowledge do not save them; they lack something--it may be a mere familiar way of talking--which marks the practitioner; we feel they touch their subject with padded fingers. We attribute no occult influence to laboratories, but we think the expositor of science who is not also a creator is something like that curiously unconvincing creature--the theoretical sailor who has never been to sea. For that reason we are uneasy in the presence of these numerous modern expositions. Such work of the kind as was done in the old days was done by real men of science in their spare time. They had the competence, if also something of the crudity, of the workman in the factory who explains to you how his machine works. The modern writers are so much more like those frock-coated “attendants” at Exhibitions. One is oppressed with the same suavity, the same incredible readiness, the same secret doubt whether he has ever handled a tool in his life....

Such being our estimate of our modern teachers, we may be permitted to be sceptical concerning the complete satisfactoriness of their account of the present disposition and relations of science. When they vouch for the complete respectability and harmlessness of science we wonder if they are not a little too kind. We have an absurd nervousness, as in the presence of a reformed burglar. He looks well-dressed enough and his hands are not impossibly horny; moreover, we are told that the two very respectable gentlemen with him find him a most charming companion. We are prejudiced, we suppose; but to our thinking there is a coarseness about the jaw, an occasional hard glint in the eye, which would make us reluctant to accept him as, at any rate, a sleeping companion. We wonder if those two gentlemen, the one reverend and the other nearly so, ever feel a little apprehensive during the night?

POPULAR SCIENCE

The Victorian Age was unquestionably the great age of physical science. It was not only the number and quality of the scientific men whose working lives were covered by this period that were responsible for this--although no period in history makes a braver show--but it was due also to the fact that the scientific discoveries of that age were often of the kind that rouses a vast amount of public attention. The attention of a cultured minority was no new thing in the history of science. Newton’s discoveries, largely through the influence of his indefatigable populariser Voltaire, speedily became, in a more or less adequate form, the common property of the cultured part of Europe. But from the time of Newton to that of Davy there was no such general attention paid to science; England and the Continent largely lost touch, even technical students working in comparative isolation, so that the great French advances in Newtonian philosophy were not appreciated for several years in England, and the cultured public in England itself no longer considered the intelligent observation of scientific progress to be one of its chief duties. It never did regain this outlook; science, becoming increasingly technical, became more and more completely the affair of a small and specialised class, until, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was the most dissociated of intellectual activities. The great recrudescence of general interest in science was brought about by the discovery that this dissociation was merely a consequence of lack of attention, and that, in fact, scientific discovery was not unconnected with the major interests of mankind.

The publication in 1859 of Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ persuaded the men of that time, rightly or wrongly, that science and religion were very intimately connected, and science, at one blow, obtained a degree of public attention without precedent in its history. The interest thus evoked was not always very intelligent, but it was intense and widely diffused; it extended to other branches of science, influenced the educational system of the country and gave rise to an enormous extension of “popular” science lectures and articles. This popular interest was of a different kind from the leisurely interest previously shown by the cultured classes. The latter was, indeed, much more genuinely an interest in science for its own sake; the former had a different emotional basis and was merely the diversion of an interest in religious or social questions. There is a controversial air about nearly all the popular scientific writings of that time; the scientific man, like his audience, was fully aware that he was talking about a good deal more than the ostensible subject of discussion. Science, the creature of the least popular of man’s activities, patient and unprejudiced ratiocination, became associated with violent emotions. With Biology and Geology this association was inevitable and immediate; their subject-matter happened to be that of the first few chapters of Genesis. But the more exact sciences, when public attention turned their way, could offer no such excitements. They seem to have compromised by specialising on “marvels.” The “Marvels of Science” became a familiar heading, and the unsophisticated public were stunned by figures: the distances of the stars, the number of molecules in a cubic centimetre of water, the weight, in tons, of the earth, the incredible minuteness of light-waves, and so on, the whole object of such discourses being, as Maxwell unkindly put it, to prevent the audience realising that intellectual exhaustion had set in until the hour had elapsed.

We readily admit that popular science of a very different kind was also provided. Faraday, Kelvin, Huxley, Tyndall, Maxwell himself, did their best to make the lay public acquainted with scientific methods as well as results, to present their results as part of a coherent theory instead of as items in catalogue of marvels. But it is the marvel-mongers who have proved most tenacious of life, so that “popular” science has now become a term of contempt, and any statement whatever, provided it has the right marvellous flavour, may be printed in our newspapers as scientific information. In America such marvellous statements, not only inaccurate but meaningless, occupy pages of the Sunday supplements, so that that meritorious organ, _The Scientific American_, has to announce, in self-defence, that it publishes, not “popular” science, but merely non-technical science. In our own country that sober periodical _Nature_ used to print extracts from the more marvellous scientific items provided by the daily press, thus furnishing a little light relief from its own austere pages. The fact that this quackery exists is not unimportant. If it does no more, it often leads to a waste of time, for there has been more than one worthy gentleman who has imagined himself to be attacking the pernicious doctrines of science, when, as his argument makes clear, it is this kind of quackery he has in mind. The cure for this kind of thing would seem to be the development of a conscience in newspaper editors, unless we prefer to wait patiently until a tincture of science forms part of the education of an English adult.

But, turning to the popular but accurate scientific article, we may ask what purpose it serves. Should its object be to supply the deficiencies of a defective general education, to provide an easy introduction to science? Doubtless such articles or lectures have served such a purpose; Faraday himself, as we know, was won over to science by the blandishments of Mrs. Somerville, and there is more than one case where the current of a man’s life has been definitely changed by a lantern lecture. It is, nevertheless, a mistake to suppose that the attentive perusal of a number of popular science articles is equivalent to a scientific education, a mistake which is unfortunately very common. The fact is that the scientific treatise and the popular science article, so far from being rivals, serve entirely different ends, and may be read with profit by the same man. Broadly speaking, the function of the popular science article is to present science in its humanistic aspect. It should, while dealing with as definite a scientific problem as the author chooses, hint at the relations between this problem and the other interests of mankind. Very often these relations are implicit in the subject; such subjects are, in fact, usually chosen, and for that reason. But there is another type of article which has for its object the exposition of relations which are not obvious, and this exposition may be the result of a genuine and valuable intellectual effort on the part of the writer. Such articles are really essays in criticism and are not essentially different from the best type of literary criticism. Some of the best articles of this kind--some of those by W. K. Clifford, for example--are as truly “research” work as is the technical paper. A third type of article may, either by way of history or by way of logic, show the position occupied by a given theory or fact in a scheme of knowledge. This type is usually of more interest to the scientific student than to the general reader, since a general acquaintance with the whole subject is presupposed, and in this connection it is interesting to note that a powerful plea has recently been made for the more effective endowment of the teaching of the history of science.

If a popular science article serves none of these three purposes, it must inevitably be nothing but the description of a “marvel.” In competent hands this may be agreeable enough; the appetite for marvels is vigorous and universal, and its indulgence cannot be condemned as a vice. To look at a marvel for the pleasure of gaping is not, however, a very intelligent occupation, and, to judge from the number and kind of phenomena unhesitatingly ascribed to “the electricity in the air,” merely increases credulity. Regarded as a marvel, wireless telegraphy is, of course, merely a miracle, a fact extensively exploited by spiritualists. The human tendency to seize on the merely marvellous should, in fact, be carefully allowed for by the writer of popular science articles; he should, if anything, be even more reserved and pedantically precise than when addressing a scientific audience; an incautiously flamboyant remark is very likely to be seized upon to support some preposterous philosophy or religion. Usually, however, the popular science writer yields to the temptation, to _épater_ his audience, to make himself more readable, as readability is now understood, and so he may, while speaking the truth, have all the effect of telling a lie.

Thus the division between the genuine and the quack science article is not, in practice, clearly defined. The difference between the writers is definite enough; but it is writer and public together which make the popular science article. Lack of education is just as great a hindrance to perception as is lack of sensitiveness. The poet may be subtly and completely misunderstood because his audience lacks sensitiveness, and, to compare small things with great, the conscientious retailer of scientific information may be in a like case for a different reason. So that if it is true that the best type of poetry is that written by the poet “for himself,” it is perhaps true that the best type of popular science article is written for a similar reason--because the writer is genuinely interested in working out certain speculations or treating certain facts in a certain way. Some of the very best popular articles--those by Helmholtz, for example--are of this kind, and have achieved a relative immortality, although, like the poetry which is read chiefly by poets, they are probably read chiefly by scientific men.

PATIENT PLODDERS

It is a melancholy fact that the estimable qualities of patience and industry do not, by themselves, enable their possessor to attain eminence in the arts. There is very good reason to suppose that character, particularly a certain simple type of integrity and sincerity, is necessary to great artistic achievement, but it is certain that such gifts are not sufficient; they must be allied with very unusual mental qualities. In the sciences, however, we often find work of very great importance being performed by men of quite average intelligence, but of exceptional tenacity. A pure heart seems to be all that is necessary. This is not true, of course, of the mathematical sciences--mathematicians, like musicians, are “born”--but it is very obviously true of what are called the “observational” sciences. A history of Astronomy, in particular, is interesting from this point of view. The fact that the whole of our knowledge of the heavens comes through the sense of sight, and that we cannot experiment, in the ordinary way, upon the heavenly bodies, means that the patient observer, by merely accumulating observations, is performing an absolutely essential function. There is no other subject which yields such rich rewards to mere patience. There is no other subject which has so long a record of valuable discoveries achieved by purely average ability. It is interesting to notice how often a telescope and a capacity for sitting still have made their owners immortal. In the region of stellar astronomy the minuteness of the phenomena which may be observed has narrowed possible competitors to those possessing large instruments, and that usually means public institutions and professional astronomers. But the history of our knowledge of the nearer heavenly bodies, the sun, the planets and the moon, owes much to the industrious amateur. No history of planetary and lunar discoveries would be complete without mention of Schröter, the “Oberamtmann” of Lilienthal, who watched the moon and planets incessantly for thirty-four years with a patience only equalled by his enthusiasm. He died of a “broken heart,” the result of a French atrocity, for after firing, on the night of April 20, 1813, the Vale of Lilies and thereby destroying, amongst other things, the whole of Schröter’s books and writings, the French army under Vandamme broke into and pillaged his observatory. The old man, then sixty-eight years of age, had not the means to repair the catastrophe, and, deprived of his one great interest, he died three years later, leaving, amongst his published works, some of the most long-winded and entertaining observations in the history of astronomy.

But although Schröter is undoubtedly the most amusing of all amateur observers, he has had his prototypes in all countries. Francis Baily, the “philosopher of Newbury,” is a good example of our more sober English product. We may have doubts as to what sort of chief magistrate old Schröter was, but we know that Baily took his profession of stockbroking with the utmost seriousness. He did not allow astronomy to interfere with business. Beginning in 1799, he remained on the Stock Exchange in London for twenty-four years, devoting his leisure largely to solar observations, particularly those connected with eclipses. It is with two of these phenomena, the first annular, a ring of the sun being visible round the moon, and the second total, that Baily’s name is particularly associated, in each case for the vivid and accurate account he gave of what he witnessed. The first phenomenon, a ring of bright points extending round that part of the moon’s circumference which has just entered on the solar disc, is merely a consequence of the lunar edge being serrated with mountains. These “Baily’s beads,” as they were called, were successful, however, in stimulating interest in the physical aspect of eclipses, with the result that the next total eclipse, that of 1842, was looked for with an unprecedented degree of enthusiasm. Astronomers like Airy, Otto Struve and Arago travelled to Central or Southern Europe to observe the eclipse, and the indefatigable Mr. Baily accompanied them. He fitted up his telescope in an upper room of the University of Pavia. The result was magnificent. At the instant of totality the sun appeared decorated with a glorious _auréole_, the famous corona. It was not, of course, an unknown phenomenon, but it had never before excited so much attention. Mr. Baily, in particular, was moved to write a most eloquent description of this flaming object. He calls it splendid and astonishing, but continues: “Yet I must confess that there was at the same time something in its singular and wonderful appearance that was appalling; and I can readily imagine that uncivilised nations may occasionally have become alarmed and terrified at such an object....” Besides being a specialist on eclipses, Baily was an untiring editor of star-catalogues, and he also made no fewer than 2,153 laborious experiments, on Cavendish’s method, to determine the density of the earth. He was indeed a zealous worker in what Sir John Herschel called the “archæology of astronomy.” He was noted for his unvarying health, undisturbed equanimity and methodical habits.