THE CHARACTER OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE. 



725 



our present mode of thinking, one single demand of the understanding. 

 There is no science about our present homes, or how could they get 

 filled with sewer-gas, be devoid of arrangements for ventilation, and 

 have square chimneys. Architecture, so called, is not a science, but 

 an imitative art, beautiful but blundering. Manufactures have, too 

 often, been carried on with great disregard of science, with the result 

 that either empiricism was, for the time, successful enough, or that 

 the manufacture went simply out of existence. It is the same with 

 commerce. These arts have worked by tradition, by prescription, by 

 precedent. They all wait for an infusion of the scientific method, tlie 

 method of principle based upon natural laws immutable and inde- 

 structible. While not often scientific themselves, these branches of 

 human knowledge, administering all the time, for a consideration of 

 gain to be paid by the recipient, to important human wants, have yet 

 indirectly advanced science by cither finding and bringing, or by pro- 

 ducing some of its materials. 



Antiquity, then, possessed Ho science, except alone the results of 

 meditation, which have been termed metaphysics, and which, if al- 

 lowed to include ethics and logic, have no doubt attained in the treat- 

 ment of philosophers a high degree of development. The contempla- 

 tion of Nature, however, in its inorganic and organized shape, and of 

 the causes determining all motion and development, was not greatly 

 developed. The power of distinction, the mother of all knowledge, 

 was not applied to all things, and consequently they termed a process 

 such as fire an element, and allowed some all-pervading material to 

 exist under tlie name of the quintessence. Bodies fell to the ground 

 because they possessed weight; but that the falling was a reciprocal 

 action between the earth and the body falling upon it escaped their 

 observation, and was only found by science. 



Mere observation is not science, but only the beginning of science. 

 When a person, sitting in the railway-train, beholds the traveling 

 shadow, he makes an observation. He begins a scientific inquiry, 

 when he asks whether the shadow travels as quickly as th& train, so as 

 to be in a line falling from the sun past the train or whether the 

 shadow is not a little later. If once the question has arisen, it is im- 

 material where it is solved, whether upon the railway-train, or the 

 satellites of Jupiter the question must lead to the idea that light re- 

 quires time for traveling ; exact science determines this time by meas- 

 uring space. Science began its development with the elucidation of 

 celestial phenomena, and became astronomy, or the doctrine of the 

 laws according to which heavenly bodies move. Copernicus is from 

 this point of view the father, the creator of science. Kepler, Galileo, 

 and Newton, reduced the observations of these phenomena to expres- 

 sions of regularity Avhich wo call laws. The method once found was 

 applied to other branches of knowledge; then arose the physiology 

 of the animal and vegetable world, based upon anatomy as a science. 



