INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS. 251 



himself to abstractions so far removed from the world of life and action that 

 he has become insensible alike to the attractions of pleasure and to the claims 

 of duty. 



In the present day, men of science are not looked upon with the same 

 awe or with the same suspicion. They are supposed to be in league with the 

 material spirit of the age, and to form a kind of advanced Radical party among 

 men of learning. 



We are not here to defend literary and historical studies. We admit that 

 the proper study of mankind is man. But is the student of science to be 

 withdrawn from the study of man, or cut off from every noble feeling, so long 

 as he lives in intellectual fellowship with men who have devoted their lives to 

 the discovery of truth, and the results of whose enquiries have impressed them- 

 selves on the ordinary speech and way of thinking of men who never heard 

 their names ? Or is the student of history and of man to omit from his con- 

 sideration the history of the origin and diffusion of those ideas which have 

 produced so great a difference between one age of the world and another ? 



It is true that the history of science is very different from the science of 

 history. We are not studying or attempting to study the working of those 

 blind forces which, we are told, are operating on crowds of obscure people, 

 shaking principalities and powers, and compelling reasonable men to bring events 

 to pass in an order laid down by philosophers. 



The men whose names are found in the history of science are not mere 

 hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in masses. We 

 recognise them as men like ourselves, and their actions and thoughts, being 

 more free from the influence of passion, and recorded more accurately than those 

 of other men, are all the better materials for the study of the calmer parts 

 of human nature. 



But the history of science is not restricted to the enumeration of success- 

 ful investigations. It has to tell of unsuccessful inquiries, and to explain why 

 some of the ablest men have failed to find the key of knowledge, and how 

 the reputation of others has only given a firmer footing to the errors into 

 which they fell. 



The history of the development, whether normal or abnormal, of ideas is 

 of all subjects that in which we, as thinking men, take the deepest interest. 

 But when the action of the mind passes out of the intellectual stage, in which 

 truth and error are the alternatives, into the more violently emotional states of 



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