14 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVIt. No. 418. 



pathy with President Wilson in the dis- 

 tress which some of the results of science, 

 direct or indirect, have given him, I wish 

 to say that giving the words of his sesqui- 

 centennial address their most sinister inter- 

 pretation a modern man would infer that 

 President Wilson is inclined to turn back 

 to the hope of a revival of classical and 

 cloistered erudition as the chief end of 

 iearning. Now, I think that many of us 

 feel that science itself is threatened by 

 just this sort of thing in its own field. 

 Many of us in fact know so much of the 

 partial knowledges that have been reached 

 during the century that we are deterred 

 from effective work. 'We advise all men,' 

 says Bacon, ' to think of the true ends of 

 knowledge, and that they endeavor not 

 after it for curiosity, contention, or the sake 

 of despising others, nor yet for profit, 

 reputation, power, or any such inferior 

 consideration, but solely for the occasions 

 and uses of life.' 



Above all I believe it to be in general a 

 perverting thing to use the elements and 

 results of science as a basis of metaphysical 

 speculation. 'I believe,' with Ruskin, 

 'that Metaphysicians and Philosophers are, 

 "on the whole, the greatest troubles the 

 world has got to deal with ; and that, while 

 a tyrant or bad man is of some use in 

 teaching people submission or indignation, 

 and a thoroughly idle man is only harmful 

 ■in setting an idle example, and communi- 

 cating to other lazy people his own lazy 

 misunderstandings, busy metaphysicians 

 are always entangling good and active 

 people and weaving cobwebs among the 

 finest wheels of the world's business; and 

 are as much as possible by all prudent 

 persons to be brushed aside like spiders.' 



There is, of course, a legitimate sphere 

 of scientific speculation of a certain kind, 

 but the purely suggestive and highly ten- 

 tative efforts in this line should not be con- 



fused with the more substantial work of 

 science, and this is precisely what happens 

 in the popular imagination. The majority 

 of men do not appreciate the difference 

 between a discussion of the motion of stars 

 in the line of sight based upon spectro- 

 scopic measurements and a discussion of 

 the habitation of Mars based on nothing 

 at all! Idle speculation is the last in- 

 firmity of strong minds, but it is certainly 

 the first infirmity of weak ones, and popu- 

 lar science is, I think, primarily specula- 

 tion. 



The extent to which some of our elemen- 

 tary text-books in physics indulge in weak 

 phases of speculation is very surprising to 

 me for in this connection it is absolutely 

 out of place and entirely misleading. 

 What do yo^^ think, for example, of the 

 following quotation from Maxwell as a 

 help to clear up an inadequate definition 

 of energy in a secondary school book in 

 physics? "We are acquainted with mat- 

 ter only as that which may have energy 

 imparted to it from other matter, and 

 which may in its turn communicate its 

 energy to other matter. Energy, on the 

 other hand, we know only as that which 

 in all natural phenomena is continually 

 passing from one portion of matter to 

 another." What do you think of the 

 following from an elementary English 

 text-book? "The fundamental property 

 of matter, which distinguishes it from the 

 only other real thing in the universe, is 

 inertia. * * * We are now in a position 

 to give one or two provisional definitions 

 of matter— provisional because we cannot 

 yet say, possibly may never be able to say, 

 what matter really is. It may be defined 

 in terms of any of its distinctive charac- 

 teristics. We may say that matter is that 

 which possesses inertia, or again since we 

 have no Icnowledge of energy except in 

 association with matter, we may assert that 

 matter is the Vehicle of Energy." I 



