August 5. 1897] 



NA TURE 



333 



eminent the names of our own Joule and Thomson ; we have 

 perhaps forgotten that, brilliant as is the work of the modern 

 electrician, his achievements depend upon the theoretical 

 researches of disinterested students such as Faraday and 

 Hertz ; we have perhaps forgotten, as a contributor to Nature 

 said last year, that " Kekule first gave definite form to 

 Frankland s conception of valency, and his application of 

 this idea to the study of the carbon compounds was nothing 

 less than epoch making. Out of this conception grew the 

 famous theory of cyclic compounds which has been prolific 

 to an extent almost unparalleled in the history of pure 

 science, and which on the practical side has made Germany 

 what it is in the domain of organic chemical technology." 

 In our own art, proud as we may be of Jenner and Lister, 

 yet we have to remember that the recent advances in the 

 theory of infection are due rather to the schools of Pasteur and 

 Koch than to our own ; while the scarcely less remarkable 

 advance in the discovery and manufacture of new drugs is 

 almost entirely of foreign growth. 



How comes it, then, that if we are a people of contempla- 

 tive as well as of practical gifts, we have so far forgotten our- 

 selves as to fall behind — in many respects far behind— in 

 discovery and, consequently, in practical success? Some of 

 the reasons are not far to seek. The most important of all is, 

 no doubt, that Englishmen, by their practical genius — that is, 

 by their gifts of adventure, of restless energy, of perception of 

 contingency and accident in daily life, and of a correlative 

 readiness of resource — have achieved so much in the mastery 

 over man and nature, that in their day of prosperity they have 

 lost reverence for those qualities of the mind upon which the 

 development of science and art must in the main depend. The 

 system of practical rules and maxims which they have built up 

 are now becoming obsolete, and need revision in the face of 

 larger requirements ; as the rules of the first steam engineers 

 had to be revised in the face of the discovery of the mechanical 

 equivalent of heat, a discovery not made by engineers, but 

 given to them. That practical rules shall from time to time 

 be brought up for revision, and be remodelled on the lines of 

 advancing theoretical research, is essential to the continuance 

 of our progress and of all successful practice. 



Another reason of our defect is that our people are above 

 all things efficient in the manual arts. Now the manual arts 

 are less open to theoretical inadequacy than the chemical arts 

 or the art of medicine ; the complexity of the conditions is 

 less, the incursions of incidental contingencies are fewer, 

 and the necessary calculations are both simpler and in their 

 effects more immediate and obvious. Hence we are tempted to 

 assume that the ready calculations of the practical man are 

 roughly sufficient for all other arts, as they are for the manual ; 

 and that they pay as promptly and obviously. But this is not 

 the case ; as we pass from the manual arts to the chemical, let 

 us say, or to the physiological, we have to deal with causes of 

 much greater complexity, contingencies are multiplied and are 

 less and less easily foreseen ; thus it is that even valid generalisa- 

 tions have to wait for the fulfilment, or practical fulfilment, of a 

 number of secondary verifications before they can be utilised ; 

 meanwhile they are as useless to the practical man as, for ex- 

 ample, the more general laws of meteorology are to the navi- 

 gator. Now thus to wait means time and men's lives ; both 

 must be spent without reward until a considerable block of dis- 

 covery is made, verified and applied. Research, then, in the 

 chemical and biological sciences, at any rate, cannot be self- 

 supporting, but must rest on large endowments. The American 

 people and the people of Lancashire and Yorkshire now see this 

 more or less darkly, and they are endowing research with a 

 generous hand ; but national aid— liberally given in the United 

 Slates as well as in France and Germany — is refused in England, 

 and will be refused until the nation, aroused by the urgency of 

 pressing need, determines no longer to be governed by the clerks 

 of the Treasury. 



Another reason for our defect is the want of a bridge between 

 the contemplative and the practical man. The man of ab- 

 stract speculation, the experimenter absorbed in his single 

 desire to wrest her secrets from nature begins at the opposite 

 pole from him whose whole activity is absorbed in industrial 

 adventure. 



It is not that theory and practice are essentially opposed, 



but that the man of theory loves to move in the larger 



phere of those more general laws which express the order of 



henomena in their wider orbits, and therein to neglect those 



NO. 1449, VOL. 56] 



incidental and subordinate causes which, after all, are the main 

 concerns of the journeyman. It is as though a mathematician 

 would work at his problems, neglecting friction ; a political 

 economist at the secular aspects of industrial problems, without 

 taking account of the passions of mankind ; a hydrographer at 

 the sweep of the great systems of oceanic currents, without tak- 

 ing account of the whirlpools, races, and under-currenis which 

 modify them on every coast and in every gulf ; yet the journey- 

 man is mainly concerned with the irregularities of which the 

 abstract-thinker may be ignorant. While, therefore, the theorist 

 may rightly reproach the practical man with the narrowness of 

 his outlook, the practical man may usefully retort that a theory 

 which only accoimts for the larger recurrent cycles is imperfect, 

 even as a theoretical statement ; and that in respect of cases 

 not only are the wider laws to be formulated, but also the smaller 

 periods of those many contingencies and perturbations which, 

 in a complete theoretical statement, have all to be reckoned 

 with. If we forecast our weather on barometrical pressure 

 alone, we shall be disappointed ; a complete theory of meteor- 

 ological cases must comprehend formulas for the phenomena of 

 moisture, of temperature, of electricity, of oceanic currents, and 

 so forth. A meteorologist, who pursued his studies in the 

 Islands of the Blest, might become a very learned philosopher, 

 but would be a very untrustworthy guide to the weather ; and 

 one who should work, say at physics or physiology, in a univer-- 

 sity where engineering and medicine are unknown, would like- 

 wise fall out of touch with the practical ends which are the 

 ultimate purpose of all science. There is a casuistry in the arts,, 

 as there is in morals ; particular instances are apt to elude 

 general principles : and although it be true that, as with 

 statistics,, by taking a sufficiently large number of instances we 

 may eliminate incidental causes, yet this is precisely what the 

 practical man must avoid. 



We shall not, as practical men, whether in medicine or in 

 morals, allow ourselves to be blinded by the light of the 

 brilliant generalisations of the laboratory and the lecture-room, 

 helpful as this light is, to the value of the empirical rules which, 

 have been painfully gathered together in the trials and errors 

 of generations of men. As Oliver Wendell Holmes says, 

 " Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper 

 chamber if he has common sense on the ground floor ; but if a 

 man has not got plenty of good common sense, the more science 

 he has the worse for his patient." A sagacious man is not 

 to be driven too readily out of his rules, absurd as they may 

 seem. 



On the other hand, while clinging to our rules until sortie^ 

 thing better is demonstrated to us, we practical men must 

 not forget day by day to submit our empirical laws to revision ; 

 we must bear in mind that empiricism is science without 

 roots. We are right in our paradoxical tolerance of anomalies ; 

 we are right in our instinct that broad generalisations are 

 too often impracticable in that they may not take account 

 of incidents and contingencies, but this is not all. 



In England the man of thought and the man of action have 

 been too much apart ; thus both have suffered. So long as 

 our national work has been pioneering work, rough practicaf 

 rules of thumb, applied with indomitable energy, have been- 

 irresistible ; but as industrial pursuits become more com- 

 plex, and the sciences concerned also more complex, rule 

 of thumb is no longer wide enough or refined enough ; 

 methods based upon wider theoretical considerations have to • 

 be introduced. 



We cannot stand still ; we must advance, revolve, or de- 

 generate ; pathology must be renewed by the new meanings and 

 new bearings of biology and by a comparative method, embrac- 

 ing in experience no less than the diseases of all living things. 

 We must work out, or obtain from our fellows who work 

 them out, the mechanical and chemical laws which 

 underlie all life, and by a method of exclusion ascertain 

 what the residuum is which may be peculiar to living matter^ 

 We shall not assume vitality as a principle, and grudg- 

 ingly admit a little chemistry and physics to fill up a few 

 holes in a threadbare principle. Medic'me depends upon theo- 

 retical advance, not in physiology only, but in all sciences ; and 

 upon the practice of many, as upon practical optics in respect of 

 our microscopes, upon mechanics in respect of our graphic 

 machinery and so forth ; as we change we change our circum- 

 stances, and circumstances reacting on us change us again ; sa 

 that we depend upon a highly compound process of advance^ 

 and need theoretical reinforcement from all sides. 



