SCIENCE AND MAN 



77 



Science demands above all things per- 

 sonal concentration. Its home is the 

 study of the mathematician, the quiet 

 laboratory of the experimenter, and the 

 cabinet of the meditative observer of 

 nature. Different atmospheres are re- 

 quired by the man of science, as such, 

 and the man of action. Thus the 

 facilities of social and international inter- 

 course, the railway, the telegraph, and 

 the post-office, which are such undoubted 

 boons to the man of action, re-act, to 

 some extent injuriously, on the man of 

 science. Their tendency is to break up 

 that concentrativeness which, as I have 

 said, is an absolute necessity to the 

 scientific investigator. 



The men who have most profoundly 

 influenced the world from the scientific 

 side have habitually sought isolation. 

 Faraday, at a certain period of his career, 

 formally renounced dining out. Darwin 

 lives apart from the bustle of the world 

 in his quiet home in Kent. Mayer and 

 Joule dealt in unobtrusive retirement 

 with the weightiest scientific questions. 

 There is, however, one motive power in 

 the world which no man, be he a scien- 

 tific student or otherwise, can afford to 

 treat with indifference ; and that is, the 

 cultivation of right relations with his 

 fellow-men the performance of his duty, 

 not as an isolated individual, but as a 

 member of society. It is duty in this 

 aspect, overcoming alike the sense of 

 possible danger and the desire for repose, 

 that has placed me in your presence here 

 to-night. 



To look at his picture as a whole, a 

 painter requires distance ; and to judge 

 of the total scientific achievement of any 

 age, the standpoint of a succeeding age 

 is desirable. We may, however, trans- 

 port ourselves in idea into the future, 

 and thus survey with more or less com- 

 pleteness the science of our time. We 

 sometimes hear it decried, and contrasted 

 to its disadvantage with the science of 

 other times. I do not think that this 

 will be the verdict of posterity. I think, 

 on the contrary, that posterity will 

 acknowledge that in the history of 



science no higher samples of intellectual 

 conquest are recorded than those which 

 this age has made its own. One of the 

 most salient of these I propose, with 

 your permission, to make the subject of 

 our consideration during the coming 

 hour. 



It is now generally admitted that the 

 man of to-day is the child and product 

 of incalculable antecedent time. His 

 physical and intellectual textures have 

 been woven for him during his passage 

 through phases of history and forms of 

 existence which lead the mind back to 

 an abysmal past. One of the qualities 

 which he has derived from that past is 

 the yearning to let in the light of prin- 

 ciples on the otherwise bewildering flux 

 of phenomena. He has been described 

 by the German Lichtenberg as " das 

 rastlose Ursachenthier " the restless 

 cause-seeking animal in whom facts 

 excite a kind of hunger to know the 

 sources from which they spring. Never, 

 I venture to say, in the history of the 

 world has this longing been more liberally 

 responded to, both among men of science 

 and the general public, than during the 

 last thirty or forty years. I say " the 

 general public," because it is a feature of 

 our time that the man of science no 

 longer limits his labours to the society of 

 his colleagues and his peers, but shares, 

 as far as it is possible to share, with the 

 world at large the fruits of inquiry. 



The celebrated Robert Boyle regarded 

 the universe as a machine ; Mr. Carlyle 

 prefers regarding it as a tree. He loves 

 the image of the umbrageous Igdrasil 

 better than that of the Strasburg clock. A 

 machine may be defined as an organism 

 with life and direction outside ; a tree 

 may be defined as an organism with life 

 and direction within. In the light of 

 these definitions, I close with the con- 

 ception of Carlyle. The order and 

 energy of the universe I hold to be 

 inherent, and not imposed from without, 

 the expression of fixed law and not of 

 arbitrary will, exercised by what Carlyle 

 would call an Almighty Clockmaker. But 

 the two conceptions are not so much 



