54 



LECTURES AND ESS A YS 



SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM 



1868 



THE celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on 

 the " Vocation of the Scholar," insisted 

 on a culture which should be not one- 

 sided, but all-sided. The scholar's in- 

 tellect was to expand spherically, and 

 not in a single direction only. In one 

 direction, however, Fichte required that 

 the scholar should apply himself directly 

 to nature, become a creator of know- 

 ledge, and thus repay, by original labours 

 of his own, the immense debt he owed 

 to the labours of others. It was these 

 which enabled him to supplement the 

 knowledge derived from his own re- 

 searches, so as to render his culture 

 rounded and not one-sided. 



As regards science, Fichte's idea is to 

 some extent illustrated by the constitu- 

 tion and labours of the British Associa- 

 tion. We have here a body of men 

 engaged in the pursuit of Natural Know- 

 ledge, but variously engaged. While 

 sympathising with each of its departments, 

 and supplementing his culture by know- 

 ledge drawn from all of them, each 

 student amongst us selects one subject 

 for the exercise of his own original faculty 

 one line, along which he may carry 

 the light of his private intelligence a 

 little way into the darkness by which all 

 knowledge is surrounded. Thus, the 

 geologist deals with the rocks; the biolo- 

 gist with the conditions and phenomena 

 of life ; the astronomer with stellar 

 masses and motions ; the mathematician 

 with the relations of space and number ; 

 the chemist pursues his atoms ; while 

 the physical investigator has his own 

 large field in optical, thermal, electrical, 

 acoustical, and other phenomena. The 

 British Association then, as a whole, 

 faces physical nature on all sides, and 



pushes knowledge centrifugally outwards, 

 the sum of its labours constituting what 

 Fichte might call the sphere of natural 

 knowledge. In the meetings of the 

 Association it is found necessary to 

 resolve this sphere into its component 

 parts, which take concrete form under 

 the respective letters of our Sections. 



Mathematics and Physics have been 

 long accustomed to coalesce, and here 

 they form a single section. No matter 

 how subtle a natural phenomenon may 

 be, whether we observe it in the 

 region of sense or follow it into that of 

 imagination, it is in the long run reducible 

 to mechanical laws. But the mechanical 

 data once guessed or given, mathematics 

 are all-powerful as an instrument of 

 deduction. The command of Geometry 

 over the relations of space, and the far- 

 reaching power which Analysis confers, 

 are potent both as means of physical 

 discovery and of reaping the entire fruits 

 of discovery. Indeed, without mathe- 

 matics, expressed or implied, our know- 

 ledge of physical science would be both 

 friable and incomplete. 



Side by side with the mathematical 

 method we have the method of experi- 

 ment. Here, from a starting-point fur- 

 nished by his own researches or those of 

 others, the investigator proceeds by 

 combining intuition and verification. 

 He ponders the knowledge he possesses, 

 and tries to push it further ; he guesses, 

 and checks his guess ; he conjectures, 

 and confirms or explodes his conjecture. 

 These guesses and conjectures are by no 

 means leaps in the dark; for knowledge 

 once gained casts a faint light beyond 

 its own immediate boundaries. There 

 is no discovery so limited as not to 



1 President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at 

 Norwich. 





