Health and Education

by Charles Kingsley

This has happened too often. It is in the interest of superstition that it should happen again; and the best way to prevent it surely is to tell the masses—Scientific method is no peculiar mystery, requiring a peculiar initiation. It is simply common sense, combined with uncommon courage, which includes uncommon honesty and uncommon patience; and if you will be brave, honest, patient, and rational, you will need no mystagogues to tell you what in science to believe and what not to believe; for you will be just as good judges of scientific facts and theories as those who assume the right of guiding your convictions. You are men and women: and more than that you need not be.

And let me say that the man of our days whose writings exemplify most thoroughly what I am going to say is the justly revered Mr. Thomas Carlyle.

As far as I know he has never written on any scientific subject. For aught I am aware of, he may know nothing of mathematics or chemistry, of comparative anatomy or geology. For aught I am aware of, he may know a great deal about them all, and, like a wise man, hold his tongue, and give the world merely the results in the form of general thought. But this I know; that his writings are instinct with the very spirit of science; that he has taught men, more than any living man, the meaning and end of science; that he has taught men moral and intellectual courage; to face facts boldly, while they confess the divineness of facts; not to be afraid of Nature, and not to worship nature; to believe that man can know truth; and that only in as far as he knows truth can he live worthily on this earth. And thus he has vindicated, as no other man in our days has done, at once the dignity of Nature and the dignity of spirit. That he would have made a distinguished scientific man, we may be as certain from his writings as we may be certain, when we see a fine old horse of a certain stamp, that he would have made a first-class hunter, though he has been unfortunately all his life in harness. Therefore, did I try to train a young man of science to be true, devout, and earnest, accurate and daring, I should say—Read what you will: but at least read Carlyle. It is a small matter to me—and I doubt not to him—whether you will agree with his special conclusions: but his premises and his method are irrefragable; for they stand on the “voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatam”—on fact and common sense.

And Mr. Carlyle’s writings, if I am correct in my estimate of them, will afford a very sufficient answer to those who think that the scientific habit of mind tends to irreverence.

Doubtless this accusation will always be brought against science by those who confound reverence with fear. For from blind fear of the unknown, science does certainly deliver man. She does by man as he does by an unbroken colt. The colt sees by the road side some quite new object—a cast-away boot, an old kettle, or what not. What a fearful monster! What unknown terrific powers may it not possess! And the colt shies across the road, runs up the bank, rears on end; putting itself thereby, as many a man does, in real danger. What cure is there? But one; experience. So science takes us, as we should take the colt, gently by the halter; and makes us simply smell at the new monster; till after a few trembling sniffs, we discover, like the colt, that it is not a monster, but a kettle. Yet I think, if we sum up the loss and gain, we shall find the colt’s character has gained, rather than lost, by being thus disabused. He learns to substitute a very rational reverence for the man who is breaking him in, for a totally irrational reverence for the kettle; and becomes thereby a much wiser and more useful member of society, as does the man when disabused of his superstitions.

From which follows one result. That if science proposes—as she does—to make men brave, wise, and independent, she must needs excite unpleasant feelings in all who desire to keep men cowardly, ignorant, and slavish. And that too many such persons have existed in all ages is but too notorious. There have been from all time, goëtai, quacks, powwow men, rain-makers, and necromancers of various sorts, who having for their own purposes set forth partial, ill-grounded, fantastic, and frightful interpretations of nature, have no love for those who search after a true, exact, brave, and hopeful one. And therefore it is to be feared, or hoped, science and superstition will to the world’s end remain irreconcilable and internecine foes.

Conceive the feelings of an old Lapland witch, who has had for the last fifty years all the winds in a sealskin bag, and has been selling fair breezes to northern skippers at so much a puff, asserting her powers so often, poor old soul, that she has got to half believe them herself,—conceive, I say, her feelings at seeing her customers watch the Admiralty storm-signals, and con the weather reports in the ‘Times.’ Conceive the feelings of Sir Samuel Baker’s African friend, Katchiba, the rain-making chief, who possessed a whole housefull of thunder and lightning—though he did not, he confessed, keep it in a bottle as they do in England—if Sir Samuel had had the means, and the will, of giving to Katchiba’s Negros a course of lectures on electricity, with appropriate experiments, and a real bottle full of real lightning among the foremost.

It is clear that only two methods of self-defence would have been open to the rain-maker: namely, either to kill Sir Samuel, or to buy his real secret of bottling the lightning, that he might use it for his own ends. The former method—that of killing the man of science—was found more easy in ancient times; the latter in these modern ones. And there have been always those who, too good-natured to kill the scientific man, have patronised knowledge, not for its own sake, but for the use which may be made of it; who would like to keep a tame man of science, as they would a tame poet, or a tame parrot; who say—Let us have science by all means, but not too much of it. It is a dangerous thing; to be doled out to the world, like medicine, in small and cautious doses. You, the scientific man, will of course freely discover what you choose. Only do not talk too loudly about it: leave that to us. We understand the world, and are meant to guide and govern it. So discover freely: and meanwhile hand over your discoveries to us, that we may instruct and edify the populace with so much of them as we think safe, while we keep our position thereby, and in many cases make much money by your science. Do that, and we will patronise you, applaud you, ask you to our houses; and you shall be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously with us every day. I know not whether these latter are not the worst enemies which science has. They are often such excellent, respectable, orderly, well-meaning persons. They desire so sincerely that everyone should be wise: only not too wise. They are so utterly unaware of the mischief they are doing. They would recoil with horror if they were told they were so many Iscariots, betraying Truth with a kiss.

But science, as yet, has withstood both terrors and blandishments. In old times, she endured being imprisoned and slain. She came to life again. Perhaps it was the will of Him in whom all things live, that she should live. Perhaps it was His spirit which gave her life.

She can endure, too, being starved. Her votaries have not as yet cared much for purple and fine linen, and sumptuous fare. There are a very few among them who, joining brilliant talents to solid learning, have risen to deserved popularity, to titles, and to wealth. But even their labours, it seems to me, are never rewarded in any proportion to the time and the intellect spent on them, nor to the benefits which they bring to mankind; while the great majority, unpaid and unknown, toil on, and have to find in science her own reward. Better, perhaps, that it should be so. Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who guide the many. And so, I verily believe, the majority of scientific men think. There are those among them who have obeyed very faithfully St. Paul’s precept, “No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life.” For they have discovered that they are engaged in a war—a veritable war—against the rulers of darkness, against ignorance and its twin children, fear and cruelty. Of that war they see neither the end nor even the plan. But they are ready to go on; ready, with Socrates, “to follow reason withersoever it leads;” and content, meanwhile, like good soldiers in a campaign, if they can keep tolerably in line, and use their weapons, and see a few yards ahead of them through the smoke and the woods. They will come out somewhere at last; they know not where nor when: but they will come out at last, into the daylight and the open field; and be told then—perhaps to their own astonishment—as many a gallant soldier has been told, that by simply walking straight on, and doing the duty which lay nearest them, they have helped to win a great battle, and slay great giants, earning the thanks of their country and of mankind.