12 GENERAL VIEW AND BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



society is often necessary in order to ensure success. e The 

 intellectual life is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. 

 Unless he lives in a great capital, the man devoted to that 

 life is more than all other men liable to suffer from isola- 

 tion, to feel utterly alone beneath the deafness of space 

 and the silence of the stars.' l 



It is not one band or class of men, however, but all 

 mankind who, in widely different degrees, either directly 

 or indirectly, willingly or unwillingly, promote scientific 

 discovery. The great cause of all things is a resistless 

 power, and compels even the most unwilling and anti- 

 scientific persons unconsciously to assist in the general 

 development and progress of mankind, and thus indirectly 

 to promote the discovery of new truth. The man of busi- 

 ness, working chiefly for money, requires the aid of science 

 in getting that money. He seeks the assistance of new 

 inventions, and they can often only be made by the aid of 

 original knowledge and research ; he constantly uses the 

 steam-engine, the telegraph, chemical analysis, and a 

 multitude of other appliances based upon the discoveries 

 of scientific men. 2 The theologian, often lamentably 

 ignorant of the laws of creative power, painfully alarmed 

 at the encroachments of new knowledge upon his domain 

 of dogmatism, sooner or later adapts his views to the cur- 

 rent of new thought developed by new truths* If he does 

 not admit the recent conclusions of Darwin, he at least 

 admits those of Newton not two centuries old ; and if he 

 will not be a pioneer of newly discovered truths of the 



1 The Intelleetiuil Life, by Hamerton, p. 235). 



For a very interesting instance of one of the ways in which emi- 

 nent men of science are, by the very force and vigour of their intel- 

 lectual gifts, temporarily disqualified for success in fashionable society, 

 see Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, pp. 119 and 310. 



2 'National Importance of Scientific Kesearch,' Westminster Re- 

 view, April, 1873. 



