THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN ENGLAND. 251 



and hieroglyphics were made known to the learned world 

 through his French contemporaries. Dalton, 1 Charles 

 Bell, 2 Faraday, Darwin, and Maxwell, no less than 

 Bentley and Gibbon, 3 have furnished the text for lecture- 

 courses in German universities, and created a whole 

 literature of pamphlets and scientific memoirs. 4 English 

 societies may sometimes honour and admire, but they do 

 not support, their great representatives, and these them- 

 selves often refuse to be tied by exclusive academic 

 duties, still more by official restrictions. Two charac- 

 teristics have marked most of them : they have, at all 

 expense and sacrifice, guarded their individual freedom 25. 

 of thought, and they have almost always shown a great character 



and practi- 



desire to combine some application with their abstract cai tendency 



of English 



researches, to take part in the great practical work of science - 

 the nation. Continental thinkers, whose lives are devoted 

 to the realisation of some great ideal, complain of the 

 want of method, of the erratic absence of discipline, which 

 is peculiar to English genius. The fascination which 

 practical interests exert in this country appears to them 

 an absence of full devotedness to purely ideal pursuits. 5 



1 See above, p. 245, note. 



2 See above, p. 193, note. 



3 See above, p. 169, note. 



4 Germany may be said to have 

 produced Dcmvinismus in this cen- 

 tury as France created Newtonian- 

 isme in the last. Huxley writes 

 ('Life of Darwin,' vol. ii. p. 186) : 

 " None of us dreamed (in 1860) 

 that in the course of a few years 

 the strength (and perhaps I may 

 add the weakness) of Darwinismus 

 would have its most extensive and 

 most brilliant illustrations in the 

 land of learning." Quite recently 

 Prof. Boltzmann at Munich, and 

 M. Poiiicare', have published courses 



of lectures on Maxwell's electric 

 theories. 



5 What appears irksome to an 

 English genius the red tape of 

 academic restrictions, the barriers 

 of officialism, and the duties of the 

 teacher melted away in the glow 

 of enthusiasm and love of truth 

 which animated the great leaders 

 and founders of university culture 

 abroad ; as Goethe has told us that 

 the rigid form of the sonnet melts 

 in the fervour of the love-song : 



" Das Allerstarrste freudig aufzuschmel- 



zen 



Muss Liebesfeuer allgewaltig gltthen." 

 Sonette No. 14. 



