312 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



8. 



Leading 

 scientific 

 ideas most- 

 ly very 

 ancient. 



prescribe the lines on which the desired unification of the 

 nation could be secured. Events took their own course, 

 and the great statesman who was the central figure of the 

 new era of European history may be excused the scorn 

 with which he has sometimes treated these theoretical 

 politicians. 



The leading ideas which I select as marking the progress 

 of scientific research in our century have, with few excep- 

 tions, hardly been discoveries or inventions of this age. 

 Some of them are very old. The ideas of attraction, 

 which in the hands of Newton and Laplace have led to 

 such remarkable results, are of great age, and were 

 familiar to the philosophers of Greece and Rome ; the 

 same can be said of the atomic theory, which in the 

 hands of Dalton became such a powerful instrument. 

 The principles of energy and its conservation can be 

 traced back to the writings of Newton and Leibniz, and 

 even to earlier thinkers. The same may be said of the 

 modern ideas on heat, of the molecular theory of gases, 

 and even of Lord Kelvin's vortices ; whilst the views 

 which through Darwin have revolutionised the natural 

 sciences have been traced in the suggestions of much ear- 



not so. When the professors turned 

 their backs on science in order to 

 turn to politics, they imagined pol- 

 itics were now only beginning : 

 with the wonted pride of learning 

 they saw in the administrative 

 class only labourers and clerks ; for 

 to them parliaments and freedom 

 of the press were identical with 

 politics. The mouthpiece of Ger- 

 many was in the universities, as 

 that of France was at the bar ; 

 they only heard each other : was 

 it therefore unnatural if they 



thought the German professors 

 composed the German nation, as 

 the French lawyers formed the 

 French nation ? And indeed pub- 

 lic opinion in Germany was that of 

 the professors. . . . The learned 

 newspaper writers imagined the 

 spirit of the age spake in them ; 

 no wonder that they overestimated 

 the importance of this spirit and of 

 this so-called public opinion " (ibid., 

 p. 254). See also Treitschke's 

 'Deutsche Geschichte,' vol. v. p. 

 408, &c. 



