NA TURE 



341 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 1905. 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT IN EUROPE. 

 A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 

 Century. By John Theodore Merz. Vol. i., pp. xiv 

 + 458; vol. ii., pp. xiv + 807. (Edinburgh and 

 London : William Blackwood and Sons, 1903-4.) 



ANEWSP.'\PER review of this book has come into 

 our possession, which gives the impression that 

 its most prominent feature is the treatment of bio- 

 logical questions such as the Darwinian theory. Doubt- 

 less the reviewer was a biologist. His remark that 

 " the book is not a very easy one to read " is, how- 

 «ver, very true. 



Now to the present writer the feature which appears 

 most noteworthy is the author's intimate knowledge of 

 mathematics, as revealed in his masterly expositions 

 of the development of all branches of mathematical 

 thought during the last century. Probably an exhaus- 

 tive account of this work could only be given by a 

 number of different reviews written by specialists in 

 different subjects, and such reviews would be so 

 different that it would be difficult to realise that they 

 all referred to the same book. The course we propose 

 to follow is to give a general outline of the scope and 

 subject-matter of the book, to scrutinise a little more 

 •closely the portions devoted to mathematics and 

 mathematical physics, and to subject such branches as 

 thermodynamics and kinetic theory to a still closer 

 scrutiny. 



At the outset (pp. 24-27), Dr. Merz is confronted 

 with the difficulty that he can find no precise equiva- 

 lent in French or German for our English word 

 ■thought; for instance, he says: — 



" No other language has a word so comprehensive, 

 denoting at once the process and the result, the parts 

 and the ideal whole of what is felt and meant. . . ." 



" And yet I think I am right in saying that the con- 

 ception of thought in the sense in which I am using it 

 is truly an outcome of interrational, not of specifically 

 English progress, and belongs mainly to the period of 

 which I am treating. ..." 



What thought precisely is the author considers im- 

 possible to define, but it is only thought which renders 

 the phenomena of nature intelligible, as he says 

 (p. 2) :- 



" That which has made facts and events capable of 

 being chronicled and reviewed, that which underlies 

 and connects them, that which must be reproduced by 

 the historian who unfolds them to us is the hidden 

 €lernent of thought." 



It is the object of these volumes, as the author re- 

 marks on page 13, 



" to rescue from oblivion that which appears 



to me to be our secret property ; in the last and dying 

 hour of a remarkable age to throw the light upon the 

 fading outlines of its mental life; to try to trace them, 

 and with the aid of all possible information gained 

 from the written testimonies or the records of others 

 to work them into a coherent picture, which may give 

 those who follow some idea of the peculiar manner in 

 which our age looked upon the world and life, how it 

 intellectualised and spiritualised them." 

 NO. 1837, VOL. 71] 



On p. 34 he says : — 



" .\ history of this thought will be a definition of 

 thought itself." 



In order to limit the scope of the inquiry, Dr. Merz 

 confines his attention to European thought, and of 

 tliis, again, he only selects the central portion, the 

 thought embodied in French, German, and English 

 literature. Accordingly the first three chapters deal 

 with the scentific spirit in France, Germany, and 

 England respectively. This order of arrangement is 

 a fitting one, and well brings out all that has been 

 said by various writers about " England's neglect of 

 science." Thus (p. 75) : — 



" Compared with Germany in philosophy and with 

 France in science, England during the early part of the 

 century appears remarkably unproductive. English 

 science and English philosophy had flourished in the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and leavened the 

 whole of European thought, but in the beginning of 

 our period we find neither represented by any great 

 schools. The great discoveries in science belonged to 

 individual names who frequently stood isolated ; the 

 organisation and protection which science could boast 

 of in France was then unknown in England ; into 

 popular thought it had hardly entered as an element 

 at all." 



It is to France that we must turn in order to find 

 what might be described as a national scientific spirit, 

 and this spirit was very largely the outcome of the 

 foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences. 



" Whilst the Royal Society of London only received 

 a charter, and existed by the entrance payments and 

 contributions of its own members, augmented by pri- 

 vate donations ; the Paris Academy had as far back as 

 1671 received the funds with which to commence its 

 labours in connection with the survey of the kingdom 

 and its extensive dependencies." . . . " It was almost 

 exclusively by these observations that the data were 

 found with which to substantiate Newton's mathe- 

 matical reasoning ; in his own country that fruitful 

 cooperation which can only be secured by an academic 

 organisation and the endowment of research was 

 wanting " (p. 99). " In two important departments — 

 the popularisation and the teaching of science — France 

 for a long period led the way. A general interest was 

 thus created in the proceedings and debates of the 

 Academy " 



In the present connection are cited Laplace's 

 " M^canique Celeste," and the development of the 

 analytical methods rendered possible by Leibnitz's in- 

 vention of the calculus, about which we are told (p. 

 loi), 



" No learned body did more than the Paris Academi- 

 cians to perfect (with purely scientific interest) this 

 new calculus, which in the course of the eighteenth 

 century had in the hands of Lagrange been adapted to 

 all the purposes and problems contained or suggested 

 in Newton's Principia." 



As another illustration we take the popular interest 

 which centred round Laplace's discovery of the cal- 

 culus of probabilities (pp. 120 et seq). 



Passing on to Germany we find national interest 

 converging towards another equally important centre, 

 namely, the university system, which is unique of its 

 kind. This system was perfected in the eighteenth, 

 and fully developed at the beginning of the present 

 century. It is essentially a training school of research 



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