December 10, 1886.] 



SCIENCE, 



543 



any class of men, scientists or others, that they do 

 not want these things, it is well to remember the 

 remarks made by old Sandy Mackay after he had 

 heard a sermon on unis'ersal brotherhood : " And 

 so the deevil's dead. Puir auld Nickie ; and him 

 so little appreciated, too. E%'ery gowk laying his 

 sins on auld Nick's back. But I'd no bury him 

 until he began to smell a wee strong like. It's a 

 grewsome thing is premature interment." 



I have tried to indicate briefly the sense in 

 which the terms 'scientist' and 'scientific man' 

 are to be used and understood, and you see it is 

 not an easy matter. The difficulty is less as re- 

 gards the term 'man of science.' By this expres 

 sion we mean a man who belongs to science pecul- 

 iarly and especially, whose chief object in life is 

 scientific investigation, whose thoughts and hopes 

 and desires are mainly concentrated upon his 

 search for new knowledge, whose thirst for fresh 

 and accurate information is constant and insati- 

 able. These are the men who have most advanced 

 science, and whom we delight to honor, more 

 especially in these later days, by glowing eulo- 

 giums of their zeal, energy, and disinterestedness. 

 The man of science, as defined by his eulogists, 

 is the heau ideal of a philosopher, a man whose 

 life is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge 

 for its own sake, and not for the sake of money 

 or fame, or of professional position or advance- 

 ment. He undertakes scientific investigations ex- 

 clusively or mainly because he loves the work it- 

 self, and not with any reference to the probable 

 utility of the results. Such men delight in mental 

 effort, or in the observation of natural phenomena, 

 or in experimental work, or in historical research, 

 in giving play to their imagination, in framing 

 hypotheses and then in endeavoring to A'erify or 

 disprove them, but always the main incentive is 

 their own personal satisfaction (with which may 

 be mingled some desire for personal fame), and 

 not the pleasure or the good of others. Carried 

 to an extreme, the eulogy of such men and their 

 work is expressed in the toast of the Mathematical 

 society of England : " Pure mathematics ; may it 

 never be of use to any man ! " Now, it is one 

 thing to seek one's own pleasure, and quite 

 another thing to pride one's self upon doing so. 

 The men who do their scientific work for the love 

 of it do some of the best work, and, as a rule, do 

 not pride themselves on it, or feel or express con- 

 tempt for those who seek their pleasure and 

 amusement in other directions. It is only from a 

 certain class of eulogists of pure science, so 

 called, that we get such specimens of scientific 

 'dudeism' as the toast just quoted, opposed to 

 which may be cited the Arab saying that "a wise 

 man without works is like a cloud without water." 



There are other men who devote themselves to 

 scientific work, but who prefer to seek informa- 

 tion that may be useful ; who try to advance our 

 knowledge of nature's laws in order that man 

 may know how to adapt himself and his surround- 

 ings to those laws, and thus be healthier and hap- 

 pier. They make investigations, like the men of 

 pure science, — investigations in which they may 

 or may not take pleasure, but which they make, 

 even if tedious and disagreeable, for the sake of 

 solving some problem of practical importance. 

 These are the men who receive from the public 

 the most honor, for it is seen that their work 

 benefits others. After all, this is not peculiar to 

 the votaries of science. In all countries and all 

 times, and among all sorts and conditions of 

 men, it has always been agreed that the best 

 life, that which most deserves praise, is that 

 which is devoted to the helping of others, which 

 is unselfish, not stained by envy or jealousy, and 

 which has as its main pleasure and spring of 

 action the desire of making other lives more 

 pleasant, of bringing light into the dark places, of 

 helping humanity. 



But, on the other hand, the man who makes a 

 profession of doing this, and who makes a living by 

 so doing, the professional philanthropist, whether 

 he be scientist or emotionalist, is by no means to 

 be judged by his own assertions. Some wise 

 German long ago remarked that ' esel singen 

 schlecht, weil sie zu hoch anstimmen,' — that is, 

 ' asses sing badly because they pitch their voices 

 too high,' — and it is a criticism which it is well 

 to bear in mind. 



In one of the sermons of Kin O ' the preacher 

 tells the story of a powerful clam who laughed at 

 the fears of other fish, saying that when he shut 

 himself up he felt no anxiety ; but on trying this 

 method on one occasion when he again opened his 

 shell he found himself in a fishmonger's shop. 

 And to rely on one's own talents, on the services 

 one may have rendered, on cleverness, judgment, 

 strength, or official position, and to feel secure in 

 these, is to court the fate of the clam. 



There are not very many men of science, and 

 there are no satisfactory means of increasing the 

 number ; it is just as useless to exhort men to 

 love science, or to sneer at them because they do 

 not, as it is to advise them to be six feet three 

 inches high, or to condemn a man because his hair 

 is not red. 



While the ideal man of science must have a 

 " clear, cold, keen intellect, as inevitable and as 

 merciless in its concludons as a logic engine," it 

 would seem that, in the opinion of some, his 

 greatness and superiority consist not so much in 

 1 Cornhill magazine, August, 1869, p. 196. 



