What this nation badly requires, is not less experimental research, but more. When famines result from insufficiency of Solar heat, instead of investigating the conditions of the Sun's surface to enable us to predict their occurrence and provide accordingly, we allow them to come upon us in our unprepared state and produce their fearful effects. When contagious disease overtakes us, what do we do? Instead of previously employing and paying scientific investigators to make experiments in physiological and chemical science, to enable us to combat it successfully, we vainly attempt to apply our present stock of chemical and physiological knowledge to ward off the difficulty. When high price of fuel intervenes, instead
of previously giving discoverers the means of finding new principles relating to heat, and to chemical, and electrical action, we ineffectually endeavour by means of invention, to economise fuel. These are the pottering, short-sighted, and ignorant ways in which "the great English nation" temporises with great evils, and permits national welfare to be sacrificed to private gain, instead of employing for the discovery of new knowledge some of that superfluous wealth which in many instances is a curse to its possessors.
CHAPTER II.
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The Scientific Basis of Mental and Moral Progress.[[12]]
It is not highly necessary after what has been already said in these pages, to adduce much evidence to show that scientific discoveries, either directly or through the medium of the inventions based upon them, have been a great cause of mental and moral progress. As however there are many persons who do not perceive the dependence of such progress, and especially of moral advance, upon science, a few of the chief relations of those subjects to each other may be pointed out.
The dependence of mental progress upon science may be rendered manifest in several ways:—1st. By showing that new scientific knowledge is continually extending and modifying our views of existing things. 2nd. That inventions based upon scientific discoveries have aided and extended our mental powers:—3rd. That mental phenomena may be made the subject of experiment, observation, analysis, and
inference:—4th. That the criteria of truth, and the mental powers and processes employed for discovering and detecting truth, are the same in mental as in physical science, and, 5th. That mental action is subject to the great principles and laws of science. And moral progress may be proved to have a scientific basis:—1st. By shewing that moral actions are a class of mental actions, and therefore subject to the same fundamental laws and influences:—2nd. That the discovery of new scientific knowledge, and the use of inventions based upon it, often conduce to morality:—3rd. That moral phenomena may be made the subject of experiment, observation, analysis, and inference:—4th. That the criteria of truth, and the mental faculties and processes employed, in discovering truth, are the same in moral as in physical science:—5th. That the fundamental rules of morality are subject to the great principles of science:—6th. That moral improvement follows in the wake of scientific advance:—and 7th. By showing the moral influence of experimental research in imparting "the scientific spirit;" promoting a love of truth; dispelling ignorance and superstition; detecting error; imparting certainty and accuracy to our knowledge; inculcating obedience to law; producing uniformity of belief; aiding economy and cleanliness, promoting humanity, &c, &c. Each of these will be treated with extreme brevity.