THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE n 



l>n>l'ssed to despise science, and the high and dry 

 philosophers who professed to despise practical 

 results, is at an end. 



Nevertheless, that which is true of the infancy 

 of physical science in the Greek world, that which 

 is true of its adolescence in the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries, remains true of its riper age 

 in these latter days of the nineteenth century 

 The great steps in its progress have been made, 

 are made, and will be made, by men who seek 

 knowledge simply because they crave for it. 

 They have their weaknesses, their follies, their 

 vanities, and their rivalries, like the rest of the 

 world ; but, whatever by-ends may mar their dig- 

 nity and impede their usefulness, this chief end 

 redeems them. 1 Nothing great in science has 

 ever been done by men, whatever their powers, 

 in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker 

 \vanting. Men of moderate capacity have 



1 Fresncl, after a brilliant career of discovery in some of the 

 must difficult regions of physico-mathematical science, died .it 

 thirty-nine years of age. The following passage of a letter from 

 him to Young \vrittcuinNovember, 182-1), quoted by Whewell, 

 -o aptly illustrates the spirit which animates the scientific 

 immirer that I may cite it : 



" For a long time that sensibility, or that vanity, which people 

 call love of glory is much blunted in me. I labour much less 

 to catch the suffrages of the public than to obtain an inward 

 approval which has always been the mental reward of iny efforts. 

 Without doubt I have often wanted the spur of vanity t. 

 me to pursue my research--* in moments of disgust and discour- 

 agement. But all the compliments which 1 have received from 

 MM. Arago, De Laplace, or Biot, never gave me so much pleasure 

 as tin- discovery of a theoretical truth or the confirmation of a 

 calculation by experiment." 



