A Century of Science, and Other Essays

The followers of Cuvier regarded the methods and results of these evolutionists with strong disapproval. In the excess of such a feeling, they even went so far as to condemn all philosophic thinking on subjects within the scope of natural history as visionary and unscientific. Why seek for any especial significance in the fact that every spider and every lobster is made up of just twenty segments? Is it not enough to know the fact? Children must not ask too many questions. It is the business of science to gather facts, not to seek for hidden implications. Such was the mental attitude into which men of science were quite commonly driven, between 1830 and 1860, by their desire to blink the question of evolution. A feeling grew up that the true glory of a scientific career was to detect for the two hundredth time an asteroid, or to stick a pin through a beetle with a label attached bearing your own latinized name, Browni, or Jonesii, or Robinsoniense. This feeling was especially strong in France, and was not confined to physical science. It was exhibited a few years later in the election of some Swedish or Norwegian naturalist (whose name I forget) to the French Academy of Science instead of Charles Darwin: the former had described some new kind of fly, the latter was only a theorizer! The study of origins in particular was to be frowned upon. In 1863 the Linguistic Society of Paris passed a by-law that no communications bearing upon the origin of language would be received. In the same mood, Sir Henry Maine's treatise on "Ancient Law" was condemned at a leading American university: it was enough for us to know our own laws; those of India might interest British students who might have occasion to go there, but not Americans. Such crude notions, utterly hostile to the spirit of science, were unduly favoured fifty years ago by the persistent unwillingness to submit the phenomena of organic nature to the kind of scientific explanation which facts from all quarters were urging upon us.

During the period from 1830 to 1860, the factor in evolution which had hitherto escaped detection was gradually laid hold of and elaborately studied by Charles Darwin. In the nature of his speculations, and the occasion that called them forth, he was a true disciple of Lyell. The work of that great geologist led directly up to Darwinism. As long as it was supposed that each geologic period was separated from the periods before and after it by Titanic convulsions which revolutionized the face of the globe, it was possible for men to acquiesce in the supposition that these convulsions wrought an abrupt and a wholesale destruction of organic life, and that the lost forms were replaced by an equally abrupt and wholesale supernatural creation of new forms at the beginning of each new period. But, as people ceased to believe in the convulsions, such an explanation began to seem improbable, and it was completely discredited by the fact that many kinds of plants and animals have persisted with little or no change during several successive periods, side by side with other kinds in which there have been extensive variation and extinction.

In connection with this a fact of great significance was elicited. Between the fauna and flora of successive periods in the same geographical region there is apt to be a manifest family likeness, indicating that the later are connected with the earlier through the bonds of physical descent. It was a case of this sort that attracted Darwin's attention in 1835. The plants and animals of the Galapagos Islands are either descended, with specific modifications, from those of the mainland of Ecuador, or else there must have been an enormous number of special creations. The case is one which at a glance presents the notion of special creations in an absurd light. But what could have caused the modification? What was wanted was, to be able to point to some agency, similar to agencies now in operation, and therefore intelligible, which could be proved to be capable of making specific changes in plants and animals. Darwin's solution of the problem was so beautiful, it seems now so natural and inevitable, that we may be in danger of forgetting how complicated and abstruse the problem really was. Starting from the known experiences of breeders of domestic animals and cultivated plants, and duly considering the remarkable and sometimes astonishing changes that are wrought by simple selection, the problem was to detect among the multifarious phenomena of organic nature any agency capable of accomplishing what man thus accomplishes by selection. In detecting the agency of natural selection, working perpetually through the preservation of favoured individuals and races in the struggle for existence, Darwin found the true cause for which men were waiting. With infinite patience and caution, he applied his method of explanation to one group of organic phenomena after another, meeting in every quarter with fresh and often unexpected verification. After more than twenty years, a singular circumstance led him to publish an account of his researches. The same group of facts had set a younger naturalist to work upon the same problem, and a similar process of thought had led to the same solution. Without knowing what Darwin had done, Alfred Russel Wallace made the same discovery, and sent from the East Indies, in 1858, his statement of it to Darwin as to the man whose judgment upon it he should most highly prize. This made publication necessary for Darwin. The vast treasures of theory and example which he had accumulated were given to the world, the notion of special creations was exploded, and the facts of phylogenetic evolution won general acceptance.

Under the influence of this great achievement, men in every department of science began to work in a more philosophical spirit. Naturalists, abandoning the mood of the stamp collectors, saw in every nook and corner some fresh illustration of Darwin's views. One serious obstacle to any general statement of the doctrine of evolution was removed. It was in 1861 that Herbert Spencer began to publish such a general systematic statement. His point of departure was the point reached by Baer in 1829, the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The theory of evolution had already received in Spencer's hands a far more complete and philosophical treatment than ever before, when the discovery of natural selection came to supply the one feature which it lacked. Spencer's thought is often more profound than Darwin's, but he would be the first to admit the indispensableness of natural selection to the successful working-out of his own theory.

The work of Spencer is beyond precedent for comprehensiveness and depth. He began by showing that as a generalization of embryology Baer's law needs important emendations, and he went on to prove that, as thus rectified, the law of the development of an ovum is the law which covers the evolution of our planetary system, and of life upon the earth's surface in all its myriad manifestations. In Spencer's hands, the time-honoured Nebular Theory propounded by Immanuel Kant in 1755, the earliest of all scientific theories of evolution, took on fresh life and meaning; and at the same time the theories of Lamarck and Darwin as to organic evolution were worked up along with his own profound generalization of the evolution of mind into one coherent and majestic whole. Mankind have reason to be grateful that the promise of that daring prospectus which so charmed and dazzled us in 1860 is at last fulfilled; that after six-and-thirty years, despite all obstacles and discouragements, the Master's work is virtually done.

Such a synthesis could not have been achieved, nor even attempted, without the extraordinary expansion of molecular physics that marked the first half of the nineteenth century. When Priestley discovered oxygen, the undulatory theory of light, the basis of all modern physics, had not been established. It had indeed been propounded as long ago as 1678 by the illustrious Christian Huyghens, whom we should also remember as the discoverer of Saturn's rings and the inventor of the pendulum clock. But Huyghens was in advance of his age, and the overshadowing authority of Newton, who maintained a rival hypothesis, prevented due attention being paid to the undulatory theory until the beginning of the present century, when it was again taken up and demonstrated by Fresnel and Thomas Young. About the same time, our fellow countryman, Count Rumford, was taking the lead in that series of researches which culminated in the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat by Dr. Joule in 1843. One of Priestley's earliest books, the one which made him a doctor of laws and a fellow of the Royal Society, was a treatise on electricity, published in 1767. It was a long step from that book to the one in which the Danish physicist Oersted, in 1820, demonstrated the intimate correlation between electricity and magnetism, thus preparing the way for Faraday's great discovery of magneto-electric induction in 1831. By the middle of our century the work in these various departments of physics had led to the detection of the deepest truth in science, – the law of correlation and conservation, which we owe chiefly to Helmholtz, Mayer, and Grove. It was proved that light and heat, and the manifestations of force which we group together under the name of electricity, are various modes of undulatory motion transformable one into another; and that, in the operations of nature, energy is never annihilated, but only changed from one form into another. This generalization includes the indestructibility of matter, and thus lies at the bottom of all chemistry and physics and of all science.

Returning to that chemistry with which we started, we may recall two laws that were propounded early in the century, one of which was instantly adopted, while the other had to wait for its day. Dalton's law of definite and multiple proportions has been ever since 1808 the corner stone of chemical science, and the atomic theory by which he sought to explain the law has exercised a profound influence upon all modern speculation. The other law, announced by Avogadro in 1811, that, "under the same conditions of pressure and temperature, equal volumes of all gaseous substances, whether elementary or compound, contain the same number of molecules," was neglected for nearly fifty years, and then, when it was taken up and applied, it remodelled the whole science of chemistry, and threw a flood of light upon the internal constitution of matter. In this direction a new world of speculation is opening up before us, full of wondrous charm. The amazing progress made since Priestley's day may be summed up in a single contrast. In 1781 Cavendish ascertained the bare fact that water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen; within ninety years from that time Sir William Thomson was able to tell us that "if the drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth, the constituent atoms would be larger than peas, but not so large as billiard balls." Such a statement is confessedly provisional, but, allowing for this, the contrast is no less striking.

Concerning the various and complicated applications of physical science to the arts, by which human life has been so profoundly affected in the present century, a mere catalogue of them would tax our attention to little purpose. As my object in the present sketch is simply to trace the broad outlines of advance in pure science, I pass over these applications, merely observing that the perpetual interaction between theory and practice is such that each new invention is liable to modify the science in which it originated, either by encountering fresh questions or by suggesting new methods, or in both these ways. The work of men like Pasteur and Koch cannot fail to influence biological theory as much as medical practice. The practical uses of electricity are introducing new features into the whole subject of molecular physics, and in this region, I suspect, we are to look for some of the most striking disclosures of the immediate future.

A word must be said of the historical sciences, which have witnessed as great changes as any others, mainly through the introduction of the comparative method of inquiry. The first two great triumphs of the comparative method were achieved contemporaneously in two fields of inquiry very remote from one another: the one was the work of Cuvier, above mentioned; the other was the founding of the comparative philology of the Aryan languages by Franz Bopp, in 1816. The work of Bopp exerted as powerful an influence throughout all the historical fields of study as Cuvier exerted in biology. The young men whose minds were receiving their formative impulses between 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, and other such great leaders, began themselves to come to the foreground as leaders of thought about 1860: on the one hand, such men as Darwin, Gray, Huxley, and Wallace; on the other hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher, Maine, Maurer, Mommsen, Freeman, and Tylor. The point of the comparative method, in whatever field it may be applied, is that it brings before us a great number of objects so nearly alike that we are bound to assume for them an origin and general history in common, while at the same time they present such differences in detail as to suggest that some have advanced further than others in the direction in which all are travelling; some, again, have been abruptly arrested, others perhaps even turned aside from the path. In the attempt to classify such phenomena, whether in the historical or in the physical sciences, the conception of development is presented to the student with irresistible force. In the case of the Aryan languages, no one would think of doubting their descent from a common original: just side by side is the parallel case of one sub-group of the Aryan languages, namely, the seven Romance languages which we know to have been developed out of Latin since the Christian era. In these cases we can study the process of change resulting in forms that are more or less divergent from their originals. In one quarter a form is retained with little modification; in another it is completely blurred, as the Latin metipsissimus becomes medesimo in Italian, but mismo in Spanish, while in modern French there is nothing left of it but même. So in Sanskrit and in Lithuanian we find a most ingenious and elaborate system of conjugation and declension, which in such languages as Greek and Latin is more or less curtailed and altered, and which in English is almost completely lost. Yet in Old English there are quite enough vestiges of the system to enable us to identify it with the Lithuanian and Sanskrit.

So the student who applies the comparative method to the study of human customs and institutions is continually finding usages, beliefs, or laws existing in one part of the world that have long since ceased to exist in another part; yet where they have ceased to exist they have often left unmistakable traces of their former existence. In Australasia we find types of savagery ignorant of the bow and arrow; in aboriginal North America, a type of barbarism familiar with the art of pottery, but ignorant of domestic animals or of the use of metals; among the earliest Romans, a higher type of barbarism, familiar with iron and cattle, but ignorant of the alphabet. Along with such gradations in material culture we find associated gradations in ideas, in social structure, and in deep-seated customs. Thus, some kind of fetishism is apt to prevail in the lower stages of barbarism, and some form of polytheism in the higher stages. The units of composition in savage and barbarous societies are always the clan, the phratry, and the tribe. In the lower stages of barbarism we see such confederacies as those of the Iroquois; in the highest stage, at the dawn of civilization, we begin to find nations imperfectly formed by conquest without incorporation, like aboriginal Peru or ancient Assyria. In the lower stages we see captives tortured to death, then at a later stage sacrificed to the tutelar deities, then later on enslaved and compelled to till the soil. Through the earlier stages of culture, as in Australasia and aboriginal America, we find the marriage tie so loose and paternity so uncertain that kinship is reckoned only through the mother; but in the highest stage of barbarism, as among the earliest Greeks, Romans, and Jews, the more definite patriarchal family is developed, and kinship begins to be reckoned through the father. It is only after that stage is reached that inheritance of property becomes fully developed, with the substitution of individual ownership for clan ownership, and so on to the development of testamentary succession, individual responsibility for delict and crime, and the substitution of contract for status. In all such instances – and countless others might be cited – we see the marks of an intelligible progression, a line of development which human ideas and institutions have followed. But in the most advanced societies we find numerous traces of such states of things as now exist only among savage or barbarous societies. Our own ancestors were once polytheists, with plenty of traces of fetishism. They were organized in clans, phratries, and tribes. There was a time when they used none but stone tools and weapons; when there was no private property in land, and no political structure higher than the tribe. Among the forefathers of the present civilized inhabitants of Europe are unmistakable traces of human sacrifices, and of the reckoning of kinship through the mother only. When we have come to survey large groups of facts of this sort, the conclusion is irresistibly driven home to us that the more advanced societies have gone through various stages now represented here and there by less advanced societies; that there is a general path of social development, along which, owing to special circumstances, some peoples have advanced a great way, some a less way, some but a very little way; and that by studying existing savages and barbarians we get a valuable clue to the interpretation of prehistoric times. All these things are to-day commonplaces among students of history and archæology; sixty years ago they would have been scouted as idle vagaries. It is the introduction of such methods of study that is making history scientific. It is enabling us to digest the huge masses of facts that are daily poured in upon us by decipherers of the past, – monuments, inscriptions, pottery, weapons, ethnological reports, and all that sort of thing, – and to make all contribute toward a coherent theory of the career of mankind upon the earth.

In the course of the foregoing survey one fact stands out with especial prominence: it appears that about half a century ago the foremost minds of the world, with whatever group of phenomena they were occupied, had fallen, and were more and more falling, into a habit of regarding things, not as having originated in the shape in which we now find them, but as having been slowly metamorphosed from some other shape through the agency of forces similar in nature to forces now at work. Whether planets, or mountains, or mollusks, or subjunctive moods, or tribal confederacies were the things studied, the scholars who studied them most deeply and most fruitfully were those who studied them as phases in a process of development. The work of such scholars has formed the strong current of thought in our time, while the work of those who did not catch these new methods has been dropped by the way and forgotten; and as we look back to Newton's time we can see that ever since then the drift of scientific thought has been setting in this direction, and with increasing steadiness and force.

Now, what does all this drift of scientific opinion during more than two centuries mean? It can, of course, have but one meaning. It means that the world is in a process of development, and that gradually, as advancing knowledge has enabled us to take a sufficiently wide view of the world, we have come to see that it is so. The old statical conception of a world created all at once in its present shape was the result of very narrow experience; it was entertained when we knew only an extremely small segment of the world. Now that our experience has widened, it is outgrown and set aside forever; it is replaced by the dynamical conception of a world in a perpetual process of evolution from one state into another state. This dynamical conception has come to stay with us. Our theories as to what the process of evolution is may be more or less wrong and are confessedly tentative, as scientific theories should be. But the dynamical conception, which is not the work of any one man, be he Darwin or Spencer or any one else, but the result of the cumulative experience of the last two centuries, – this is a permanent acquisition. We can no more revert to the statical conception than we can turn back the sun in his course. Whatever else the philosophy of future generations may be, it must be some kind of a philosophy of evolution.

Such is the scientific conquest achieved by the nineteenth century, a marvellous story without any parallel in the history of human achievement. The swiftness of the advance has been due partly to the removal of the ancient legal and social trammels that beset free thinking in every conceivable direction. It is largely due also to the use of correct methods of research. The waste of intellectual effort has been less than in former ages. The substitution of Lavoisier's balance for Stahl's a priori reasoning is one among countless instances of this. Sound scientific method is a slow acquisition of the human mind, and for its more rapid introduction, in Priestley's time and since, we have largely to thank the example set by those giants of a former age, Galileo and Kepler, Descartes and Newton.

The lessons that might be derived from our story are many. But one that we may especially emphasize is the dignity of Man whose persistent seeking for truth is rewarded by such fruits. We may be sure that the creature whose intelligence measures the pulsations of molecules and unravels the secret of the whirling nebula is no creature of a day, but the child of the universe, the heir of all the ages, in whose making and perfecting is to be found the consummation of God's creative work.

May, 1896.