A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



** To the solid ground 

 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds Jor aye." — WORDSWORTH. 



THURSDAY, NOVEMBER i, 1S94. 



PAST AND PRESENT. 



JUST five-and-twenty years ago, the Editor of 

 Nature did me the honour to request that I 

 would write the leading article for his first number. 

 In complying with my friend's wish, I said that I 

 could think of no more appropriate preface to a 

 journal, the aim of which was " to mirror that 

 fashioning by nature of a picture of herself in the 

 mind of man," which is called science, than an 

 English version of the wonderful rhapsody Die 

 Natiir, which is to be found among Goethe's works,i 

 and which had been a source of instruction and 

 delight to me from my youth up. 



Whether my estimate of the fitness of these preg- 

 nant ajjhorisms for the place assigned to them was 

 shared by more than half-a-dozen of the readers to 

 whom they were submitted, is very doubtful ; indeed, 

 I feel bound to confess that a rumour reached my 

 ears, to the effect that some authorities, apparently 

 of the school of the most noble Festus, in their 

 haste, failing to discriminate between the great poet 

 and his translator, opined that much attempt to 

 learn, if not much learning, had made me mad. 



A verdict based on a mistake so flattering to any 

 literary vanity I might possess could be borne with 

 equanimity. Indeed, in view of the general state of 

 opinion among those interested in physical science at 

 the time, I had no right to imagine that a presenta- 

 tion of a theory of the universe based exclusively upon i 

 the scientific study of nature — a prose poem, which | 

 stands in somewhat the same relation to the 



^_ A better traiisKition th.in mine and .an intercstinp account of the very i 

 curion^i obscurity which hangs ahoul the parentage of Pic ,\rt/wrarc to i)e 

 found in Mr. J. Bailey S.iunders* recently published " Goethe's Aphorisms I 

 and Reflections." 



NO. 1305, VOL. 51] 



philosophy of Spinoza as the " Essay on Man " 

 to that of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke — would be 

 intelligible to more than a small minority; or ac- 

 ceptable to more than a fraction of even that fit 

 though few company. 



At that time, it was rare for even the most 

 deservedly eminent of the workers in science to 

 look much beyond the limits of the specialty 

 to which they were devoted ; rarer still to meet 

 with any one who had calmly and clearly thought 

 out the consequences of the application, in all 

 the regions into which the intellect can penetrate, of 

 that scientific organon, the power and fruitfulness of 

 which, within their particular departments, were so 

 obvious. 1 hough few read, and fewer still tried to com- 

 p rehend the writings oi Francis Bacon, a respectable, 

 almost venerable, tradition bid us glorify him as the 

 guide, philosopher, and friend of science ; and more 

 es pecially held him up as our exemplar in his insistence 

 upon the division of the world of thought into two — 

 an old and a new — but, unlike the corresponding 

 divisions of the terrestrial surface, separated by im- 

 passable barriers. In the new, the strict adherence 

 to scientific method was inculcated, and a rich reward 

 of benefits to man's estate promised to the faithful ; 

 in the old, on the contrary, scientific method was to 

 be anathematised, while absolute dependence was to 

 be placed on quite other mental processes. Men 

 were called upon to be citizens of two states, in which 

 mutually unintelligible languages were spoken and 

 mutually incompatible laws were enforced ; and the/ 

 were to be equally loyal to both. 



People engaged in the ordinary business of life 

 were not much troubled by difliiculties which were 

 not forced upon them by their avocations. Nor, 

 among the men of science, did they press hardly on 

 the mathematicians, the physicists, and the chemists. 



