THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



AUGUST, 1878. 



B 



CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 1 



Br Professor EMIL DU BOIS-REYMOND, 



OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN. 



PART II. 



VI. The Technico-Inductive Period. 



UT there was still a long road to travel, before even the threshold 

 of the temple of truth was reached. Nothing is better fitted to 

 humble the spirit of speculation, which is ever and again lifting its head 

 in Germany, than a contemplation of the first faltering steps of natural 

 science, after it had at last been aroused from its slumber. If specula- 

 tion were of any avail, one might suppose that it would succeed, above 

 all, in throwing light upon a subject so comparatively accessible to our 

 understanding as the laws of motion. But as Kant in later times failed 

 to discover a priori the conservation of energy, so did the foremost 

 minds of the Renaissance fail to find a priori the simplest truths of 

 mechanics truths since so transformed, if the expression be allowed, 

 into flesh and blood of civilized man, that nativists 2 might be tempted 

 to regard them as innate. To us it appears inconceivable that once it 

 required the profoundest meditation to discover the first law of motion, 

 the inertia, as it is called, of matter, in virtue of which the motion of a 

 body does not change without an external cause ; that, down to the 

 period of which we are speaking, no one had acquired a clear notion 

 as to why a rolling ball at last stands still. Galilei even at first believed 

 that a body, water, for instance, may move in a circle, without being 



1 An address delivered before the Scientific Lectures Association of Cologne. Trans- 

 lated from the German by J. Fitzgerald, A. M., and carefully revised by the author. 

 * Upholders of the doctrine of innate ideas. 

 vol. xin. 25 



