Reason and Invention. 855 



scientific facts. But if we compare the work of any one man with the 

 aggregate of discovery, we shall see that it is infinitessimally small. 

 The great aggregate of human knowledge is due to the vast accumulation 

 of minute contributions from individuals of many races and many genera- 

 tions. Each student to-day, thanks to the art of printing, has before 

 him the results of the investigations of those who have gone before, and 

 of his contemporaries in every part of the world. Having knowledge of 

 all these, he need not waste his time in fields which have already been 

 explored. If every one were compelled to begin at the beginning, and 

 to get his knowledge direct from nature, we should forever remain in a 

 state of barbarism. The scientist of to-day has but two hands and two 

 eyes, just as his savage ancestor had, but he has the help of 10,000 eyes, 

 hands, and brains to supplement and reinforce his own. If the scien- 

 tist writes a book on his favorite hobby, it is usually a very small one if 

 it contains no more than his original discoveries. 



But whatever these original discoveries are they cannot be anything 

 more than the formation in his cerebrum of perceptions of things in 

 nature. All the scientist does is to put himself in a position to be a 

 mark for the reflections of energy, in the shape of light, sound, odor, 

 &c. , from the body to be examined, and in saying he "puts himself" 

 in such a position, we really mean that he is put there, by the reaction 

 of some external stimulus upon his internal sense organs, which organs, as 

 we have seen, are themselves the productof former external stimuli. So 

 that after all, discoveries are simply manifestations to consciousness of 

 external energies, and are in fact such external energies in new forms. 



The author too is called an inventor. The man who has mastered a 

 library is a learned man, and that means simply that a number of other 

 people have told him the things they have seen, or heard, or found out. 

 A man gets the credit and applause of his neighbors if he has spent his 

 time in listening thus to what the rest of mankind have to say of their 

 experience and observations, and they call him learned, though he may 

 never have made an original discovery. If the learned man should 

 write a book, it will consist chiefly of elements drawn from that library, 

 modified by opinions and observations gathered from his personal con- 

 tact with the men of his own times and place. Obviously in all this he 

 has created nothing whatever, neither the ideas he has got from his 

 books, nor those obtained from his neighbors, nor yet those facts, if 

 there be any such, which have impressed themselves upon his senses 

 from environing nature. Nevertheless these facts may be original in 

 the sense that they were never before observed and recorded, and the 

 book may be called original if the parts of it are so arranged as to give 

 rise to ideas not before entertained. But as already observed, the origi- 

 nality is due to extrinsic influences. 



