SCIENCE AND THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



By Epheaim Miller, of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. 



An address delivered at lola, December 31, 1901, before the thirty-fourth annual meeting 

 of the Kansas Academy of Science. 



\ T the Battle of the Pyramids, July 21, 1798, the "Man of Destiny " 

 ■^-^ said to his soldiers: "Forty centuries are looking down upon 

 you." In this, the first year of the twentieth century, we need not 

 look back so far to arouse us to action. One hundred years of strenu- 

 ous life, full of splendid achievement, the nineteenth century is in- 

 comparably the most illustrious of all the centennials of time. Its 

 record, from start to finish, is marked by years of substantial growth 

 and progress. It is a century of coal, iron, and steel, of steam and 

 electricity — one in which the human mind has cut loose from the 

 dead weights of the past, to be evermore free from tradition and super- 

 stition. Along all avenues of human activity — literature, science, art, 

 architecture, government, trade and commerce, engineering, medical 

 and surgical science, law and theology — the steps of a giant are to be 

 seen. 



Eighteen centuries did not accomplish, in the aggregate, what the 

 imperial nineteenth has ; nay, even the forty centuries of Napoleon 

 fall far short of it. "From the earliest historic times certainly, if not 

 from the dawn of primitive humanity, down to the present day, the 

 problem of the universe has been the most attractive and the most 

 illusive subject of the attention of thinking men. All systems of 

 philosophy, religion and science are alike in having the solution of 

 this problem for their ultimate object." 



The problem is still unsolved. Man at a very early period began 

 to investigate, and in the infant years of his existence "devised three 

 distinct methods" that are, even in our day, persisting with equal 

 tenacity. The first of these is the a priori method. It reasons from 

 the subjective to the objective. It requires neither observation nor ex- 

 periment on the external world. The second is known as the historico- 

 critical method. It depends on tradition, history, direct human tes- 

 timony, and verbal congruity. It limits observation and experiment 

 to human affairs. The third is the method of science. It begins, in 

 its elements, with observation and experiment. Its early applications 

 were limited mostly to material things. In its subsequent expansion 

 it has gained a footing in nearly every field of thought. 



The first has been used by dogmatists, especially the founders and 

 advocates of all fixed creeds, from the atheistic and the pantheistic 



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