328 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



natural phenomena. It personified them; it made realistic beings 

 of them, constructed in its own semblance — that is, souls and gods. 

 Such is, in fact, the universal tendency, as has been established by 

 travelers among savages. Our own children, too, are prompt to 

 transform their joys and their fears into superhuman phantoms. The 

 images of dreams serve them as guides in this respect. In a word, 

 observation shows that men are drawn by a spontaneous inclination 

 to give objectivity to the products of their own thought, in order to 

 create personalities and symbols, to which thej r shortly assign an 

 absolute character, autonomous and divine. In this way, at the 

 origin of the civilizations, every invention, every organism, was 

 attributed to celestial revelations. The most intelligent and best 

 instructed men founded their domination on such prepossessions, 

 which they shared in, too, and when the temples rose at Memphis 

 and Babylon, all knowledge was concentrated around their altars. 

 The same persons, protected by their sacred character, then repre- 

 sented science and religion. The two orders of ideas were confused 

 into a common dogmatism. A similar condition was reproduced at 

 the beginning of the middle ages, after the destruction of the ancient 

 civilization by the barbarians. 



Hence the singular character of these primitive sciences, like 

 astrology and alchemy, in which positive results were associated with 

 the dreams of magic, and in which the efficacy of experimental 

 practices had to be assured by the use of formulas and incantations, 

 intended to control the will of the gods and command their assist- 

 ance. Miracle was then obligatory upon the divinity, and independ- 

 ent of all moral notions. The Greek philosophers first tried to dis- 

 engage true science from this alliance and render it purely rational. 

 They, too, were at first accused of impiety — an accusation which has 

 not ceased to be sounded for two thousand years, and which has cost the 

 lives, from Socrates down, of the purest and most disinterested men. 

 Yet, Greek genius, with all its power, never reached a clear appre- 

 hension of the scientific method, as we apply it now in the study of 

 the world and of man. That method was not distinctly separated 

 from pure and established logic till the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries, during which period the experimental sciences and the 

 sciences of observation — physics, astronomy, mechanics, chemistry, 

 physiology, and natural history — were definitely constituted. The 

 method has been since extended to the historical and sociological sci- 

 ences, in place of the old systems — the issue of the theology of the 

 middle ages. "We add, finally, that it is only in our own time that 

 the scientific method, which looks to the relative and excludes the 

 absolute, has begun to be fully applied and extended to ideas of 

 every order. 



