432 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



of half knowledge. A cheerfully laborious and temperate 

 people — a people morally strong — can well afEord to look 

 truth full in the face. Nor are they to be ruined by the 

 enunciation of one-sided theories, even when these may 

 appear to threaten the bases of society.'* These words 

 of Helmholtz are, in my opinion, wiser and more appli- 

 cable to the condition of Germany at the present moment 

 than those which express the fears of Professor Virchow. 

 It will be remembered that at the time of his lecture his 

 chief anxieties were directed toward France; but France 

 has since that time given ample evidence of her ability to 

 crush, not only Socialists, but anti- Socialists, who would 

 impose on her a yoke which she refuses to bear. 



In close connection with these utterances of Helmholtz, 

 I place another utterance not less noble, which I trust 

 was understood and appreciated by those to whom it was 

 addressed. "If,'* said the President of the British Asso- 

 ciation in his opening address in Dublin, *'we could lay 

 down beforehand the precise limits of possible knowledge, 

 the problem of physical science would be already half 

 solved. But the question to which the scientific explorer 

 has often to address himself is, not merely whether he is 

 able to solve this or that problem ; but whether he can so 

 far unravel the tangled threads of the matter with which 

 he has to deal as to weave them into a definite problem 

 at all. ... If his eye seem dim, he must look stead- 

 fastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very 

 clouds wreathe themselves into definite forms. If his ear 

 seem dull, he must listen patiently and with sympathetic 

 trust to the intricate whisperings of Nature — the goddess, 

 as she has been called, of a hundred voices — until here 

 and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his 



