MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES. 39 
for by it. As Professor Huxley says :—‘In its earliest develop- 
ment knowledge is self-sown. Impressions force themselves upon 
men’s senses whether they will or not, and often against their 
will. The amount of interest which these impressions awaken 
is detemrined bythe coarser pains and pleasures which they carry in 
their train, or by mere curiosity ; and reason deals with the mate- 
rials supplied to it as far as that interest carries it, and no further. 
Such knowledge is rather brought than sought; and such ratioci- 
nation is little more than the working of a blind intellectual 
instinct, There can be no doubt that a large proportion of the 
ordinary man’s knowledge is of this self-imposed and unsought 
character ; and, so far as it is so, it cannot be regarded as the 
result of observation in the true sense of that term. But even 
when the knowledge advances to a higher stage, when the mind is 
consciously engaged in acquiring it, and puts forth some degree of 
effort in that direction, such effort is generally without any guiding 
principle, and the knowledge acquired is of the vaguest and most 
unsatisfactory description. This aimlessness is a marked character- 
istic of ordinary observation, and leads to a loose, fragmentary 
and disconnected knowledge of many things, but to no exact know- 
ledge of anything in particular. Moreover the observations so 
made are not only fragmentary, they are also comparatively with- 
out significance and value. In order that observed facts may have 
their proper meaning and importance, they must be}! seen in their 
relations to each other, and to some genera] notion which com- 
bines and gives unity to the whole. In the light of this central 
idea every tact becomes full of meaning, whereas without such an 
idea facts are of little or no scientific value. Hence the compara- 
tive worthlessness, from a scientific point of view, of the numerous 
facts of all kinds which are accumulated by common observation. 
Such facts may, no doubt, be of great value in many ways; they 
may be even taken by the scientist and turned to a scientific use, 
but as regards the observer himself, they are in no sense scientific 
facts. So also children may be taught to use their eyes and other 
senses in observing the qualities and proverties of objects, and 
this is a most important part of education, tending to the forma- 
tion and strengthening of a most valuable habit, but to call such 
observation scientific, displays, to my mind, a gross misconception 
of what scientific observation means. No observation that deals 
merely with isolated facts can be properly called scientific. It 
matters not how numerous and minute the observed phenomena 
may be, so long as they are seen only as disconnected facts having 
no necessary relation to each other. The observer must, in my 
opinion, have some object in view, and all his observations must 
be directed towards that end. There must be some general idea, 
some law, or at least some hypothesis, which stands out asaguiding 
ae and gives direction and significance to every observation 
made. 
‘‘ But, further, common observation is generally hasty and in- 
discriminating. Sufficient care is not taken to analyse and test 
apparent facts, and hence hasty and erroneous inferences are often 
accepted as undoubted facts of observation. For thousands of 
years men believed that the earth was the centre of the universe ; 
and that, while all the heavenly bodies revolved round it in twenty- 
four hours, it remained fixed on solid and immovable foundations. 
