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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



speaks of this " humble confession " 

 as "characteristic of the man," but 

 we do not find this view of the mat- 

 ter satisfactory. The question is a 

 simple one. In what does scientific 

 success or failure consist ? Either 

 word should have its own distinct 

 meaning. If Lord Kelvin is to be 

 counted among those who have 

 failed, whom shall we put down as 

 having succeeded ? Sir Isaac New- 

 ton ? But Sir Isaac Newton did not 

 " penetrate the mystery of the con- 

 stitution of matter," to use Prof. 

 Gray's expression, any more than 

 Lord Kelvin has done. He provided 

 a formula which expressed one kind 

 of action exerted by bodies on one 

 another, but he gave no clew to the 

 nature of gravitation. He worked 

 out a great number of intricate ques- 

 tions in mathematical astronomy, but 

 none of his solutions do more than 

 correlate phenomena. "We may ad- 

 mit him to have been a greater genius 

 than Lord Kelvin ; but that would not 

 justify us in saying that the labors of 

 the latter bore the stamp of failure. 

 Each was successful in a high de- 

 gree in what constitutes the true 

 work of the scientific investigator, 

 the reduction of phenomena to law : 

 if either aimed at doing more than 

 this he failed, but the failure was 

 not a scientific one; it was the in- 

 evitable failure of the human mind 

 in striving to transcend the region 

 of cause and effect and the relation 

 of subject and object. 



We have only to consider for a 

 moment in order to see and feel that 

 so long as any one phenomenon or 

 condition is recognized as the cause 

 of any other, the secret of the uni- 

 verse has not been penetrated — we 

 are as much in the presence of 

 *' mystery " as if we had a thousand 

 or a thousand thousand separate 

 causes to deal with. Our minds are 

 90 constituted that, while our whole 

 consciousness depends on the recog- 



nition of difference, we have a con- 

 stant craving for unification; we 

 would fain, as it were, destroy that 

 by which we live. It is the baffled 

 desire for unification that gives us 

 the sense of mystery; and when 

 Lord Kelvin talks of "failure" he 

 means no more than that he has not 

 succeeded in merging effects into 

 causes and causes into effects, and 

 making a unity in which thought 

 itself would disappear. 



We think ourselves that the 

 word is unfortunately used ; for there 

 are those who are on the watch to 

 catch every confession or expression 

 of weakness on the part of science. 

 " The foremost physicist of the age," 

 these will say, " confesses that all 

 his labors of fifty years may be 

 summed up in the one word 'fail- 

 ure'; that he knows no more to-day 

 about the deeper questions of science 

 than he did fifty years ago. Is it 

 not plain that the Mosaic account of 

 creation must be correct in all its 

 details, and that men in general can 

 not do better than submit themselves 

 to ecclesiastical authority ? " Per- 

 haps the deductions may not be ex- 

 pressed in this broad and simple 

 way; but such at least will be the 

 drift of the argument. And yet the 

 truth is that science is all the time 

 doing all that it can reasonably be 

 expected to do — revealing the order 

 and relations of phenomena, detect- 

 ing, by means of approved appli- 

 ances, operations of Nature which 

 had eluded previous observation and 

 which must ever have eluded the 

 unaided senses of man, opening wider 

 and wider regions to human thought, 

 and conferring upon mankind an 

 ever-increasing mastery of the laws 

 and resources of the physical world. 

 It does all this by the aid of symbol- 

 ical language and working hypothe- 

 ses — in other words, by a kind of 

 algebra of its own; and the utmost 

 fault its critics can find with it is 



