To Teach the History of Science? 45 



without criticism of any kind, and thus instead of helping us they hasten 

 the disintegration of our studies, — the spiritual degradation to which I 

 referred before — or a least they make the upbuilding more difficult. 



These dangerous friends would have no hesitation in answering the 

 second question "Is it possible to teach the history of science?" It is not 

 only possible, they would say, but very easy, too easy, — a task to be left 

 to second-rate or third-rate minds. 



There is no time for me to explain here and now the diflBculties of 

 the historical method in general or of the history of science in particular. 

 That cannot be done even in a course in the history of science in which 

 the instructor has hardly time enough to describe the main results of 

 research, but certainly none to explain how those results were obtained. 

 A few difficulties have been indicated, however, in the two previous lec- 

 tures and for the others I must ask your indulgence and your confidence. 

 The great men to whom we owe a good part of our knowledge, Moritz 

 Cantor, Karl Sudhoff, Paul Tannery, Pierre Duhem, Sir Thomas 

 Heath, Lippmann, Ruska, and tutti qtianti, spent their lives working 

 with zeal and patience, grappling with one problem after another, clear- 

 ing up riddles and obscurities, and sometimes they ventured to compose 

 a synthesis of all the knowledge they had managed to unravel and to put 

 in order, making it possible for their successors to continue their task and 

 to improve it; would you say they wrestled with shadows? 



History as an art is as old as medicine, which is but another way of 

 saying that it is extremely old. Some of the earliest writings of every 

 cultural group are historical in pm-pose. Moreover there were great his- 

 torians in ancient and mediaeval times. I need not mention their names 

 for you know them; nevertheless, historical methods were not established 

 much before the last century and that century has seen the birth of his- 

 torical science as well as of medical science. At first, history was pri- 

 marily concerned with political and military matters, the history of dy- 

 nasties, kings and generals. Then the field was gradually expanded as 

 well as diversified; we were invited to study or to consider economic 

 history, social history, the history of the people, of the common man, the 

 history of agriculture and of commerce, the history of literatures, etc. 

 Among these many branches of the historical tree, three deserve to arrest 

 our attention: our own, the history of science, and two others sufficiently 

 close to it to incite comparison, the history of religion and the history of 

 art. The two last-named are (in their modern form) very young but 

 not quite as young as the history of science, and hence they may help to 

 guide the development of the latter. 



Writing in 1905, the distinguished French art historian, Andre Mi- 

 chel, declared,^^ "The history of art has been the last of the historical 

 sciences to be constituted, and as such it can now claim a share in their 

 methods and take its place in their company. The nature and complex- 

 ity of facts that it is its duty to analyze and to classify would suffice to 

 explain the slowness of its ascension." He then refers to the fantasies 



^ In his preface to the Histoire de I'art of which he had assumed direction ( Paris 

 1905^.). 



