312 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



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 thej 

 new era of European history may be excused the scornj 

 with which he has sometimes treated these theoretical] 

 politicians. \ 



8. The leading ideas which I select as marking the progressl 



Leading . _ ^ & r & , 



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



ideas mostly '' ^ 



Indent. 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 toj 

 such remarkable results, are of great age, and were' 

 familiar to the philosophers of Greece and Eome ; the 

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

 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, audi 

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

 modern ideas on heat, of the molecular theory of gasesj 

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

 which through Darwin have revolutionised the uaturali 

 sciences have been traced in the suggestions of much ear-l 



i 



not so. When the professors turned j thought the German professorsi 



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 clei'ks ; for 

 to them parliaments and freedom 



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 ; i 



of the press were identical with no wonder that they overestimated* 



politics. The mouthpiece of Ger- | the importance of this spirit and of | 



many was in the universities, as this so-called public opinion " (ibid., i 



that of France was at the bar ; p. 254). See also Treitschke's i 



they only heard each other : was ' Deutsche Geschichte,' vol. v. p. 



it therefore unnatural if they 408, &c. 



