THE century's GREAT MEN IN SCIENCE. (595 



ages had defined it, nor anything set down in a hook; hut, on the eon- 

 trary, a mode of life; not knowledge, hut the devoted, well-considered 

 life pursuit of knowledge; devotion to truth— not '' devotion to truth 

 as one sees iV for that is no devotion to truth at all, hut only to party- 

 no, far from that, devotion to the truth that the man is not yet al)le to 

 see })ut is striving to ohtain. The word was thus, from the etymo- 

 logical point of view, already a misnomer. And so it remains \vith 

 the scientists of to-day. What they meant and still mean hv ''science" 

 ought, etymologically, to be called philosophy. But during the nine- 

 teenth century it was only a metaphysical professor of a now ol^soles- 

 cent type, as I hope, who could sit in his academic chair, puffed up witii 

 his ''systematized knowledge ""—no true philosopher, but a nuu-e i)hiU>- 

 doxer. For a snap shot at the nineteenth century man of science one 

 may take Sir Humphrey Davy, willing, as early as 1818, seriously to 

 investigate the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius; or John 

 Tyndall. with scientific ingenuousness proposing that prayer test to 

 which no clerical Elijah has yet been found with the faith and good 

 faith to respond; or William Crookes, devoting years of his magnifi- 

 cent powers to examining the supposed evidences of the direct action 

 of mind upon matter in the face of the world's scorn. Contrast these 

 instances with th« refusal of Laplace and Biot in the closing years of 

 the previous century to accept the evidence that stones fall from hea\-en 

 (evidence proving that they do so daily), simply because their prepos- 

 sessions were the other way. One of the geologist brothers De Luc 

 declared that he would not belie\e such a thing though he saw it with 

 his own eyes; and a scientificallv given English ecclesiastic who hap- 

 pened to be sojourning in Siena when a shower of aerolites were dashed 

 in broad daylight into an open square of that town, wrote home that 

 having seen the stones he had found the testimony of eyewitnesses so 

 unimpeachable and so trustworthy that — that he accepted the fact, you 

 will say? by no means — that he knew not what to think! Such was 

 the bon sens that guided the eighteenth century— a pretty phrase for 

 ineradicable prejudice. 



To this self-effacement before the grandeur of reason and truth is 

 tracea])le the greatness of nineteenth-century science, most obviously 

 in mathematics. In the minds of eighteenth-century mathematicians 

 their science existed for the sake of its applications. Forgetfuliiess 

 of this was in their eyes repi-ehensible, immoral. The question was, 

 what would a given piece of mathematics do ? They liked smooth- 

 running and elegant machinery— there was economy in that; l)ut they 

 were not sedulous that it should have symmetry: idle admiration of 

 its beautv thev hardly approved. If it was excessively compluiit.-.l 

 and intricate, that was regarded rather as a feature to be proud «>l than 

 as a l)lemish. Were the complete revolution that the nineteenth century 

 wrought upon the ideal of mathematics not notorious, one could soon 



