Woman in Science / With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind

by J. A. Zahm

While recounting the achievements of women who directly or indirectly contributed to our knowledge of the earth and what it contains we cannot forget what the world owes to the gracious and glorious Isabella of Castile. For it is to her probably as much as to Columbus that a new continent was discovered at the close of the fifteenth century. For, while the doctors of Salamanca—most of whom were what Galileo called "paper philosophers," men who fancied that a correct knowledge of the physical universe was to be obtained by a collation of ancient texts—were denouncing the great navigator as an idle dreamer, and quoting the ill-founded notions of Pliny and Aristotle to prove the impossibility of his carrying out his project, Isabella was quietly revolving in her own mind the reasons which Columbus had adduced in favor of his great enterprise. Having satisfied herself that his views were sufficiently probable to justify action, she was prepared to make any sacrifices to have his plans executed. The result of her decision is but another illustration of the value of woman's quick intuition, as against the slow reasoning processes of philosophers and men of science.

Again, while considering what women have accomplished for the advancement of science by inspiration and collaboration, we must not lose sight of what they have done by suggestion. For, as John Stuart Mill well observes: "It no doubt often happens that a person who has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject has by natural sagacity a happy intuition which he can suggest but cannot prove, which yet, when matured, may be an important addition to knowledge: but, even then, no justice can be done to it until some other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect; but they are mostly lost for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before the world; and, even when they are brought before it, they usually appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many of the original thoughts put forth by male writers belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out? If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed."[250]

Nor should we forget those active and energetic women—and their number is much greater than is ordinarily supposed—whose husbands, although often endowed with genius of the highest order, were indolent by temperament and disorderly and unmethodical by nature. Such men would, in the majority of cases, have run to seed had not their genius been given special force and impulse by their vigorous and methodical helpmates. Sir William Hamilton, the most learned philosopher of the Scottish school, is a striking instance in point; for it was due almost entirely to the stimulation he received from his ever active wife that he was always kept keyed up to his fullest working capacity as a philosopher and became recognized the world over as one of the commanding intellects of his age.

"Lady Hamilton," writes Professor Veitch in his Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, "had a power of keeping her husband up to what he had to do. She contended wisely against a sort of energetic indolence which characterized him, and which, while he was always laboring, made him apt to put aside the task actually before him, sometimes diverted by subjects of inquiry suggested in the course of study on the matter in hand, sometimes discouraged by the difficulty of reducing to order the immense mass of materials he had accumulated in connection with it. Then her resolution and cheerful disposition sustained and refreshed him, and never more so than when, during the last twelve years of his life, his bodily strength was broken and his spirit, though languid, yet ceased not from mental toil. The truth is that Sir William's marriage, his comparatively limited circumstances, and the character of his wife supplied to a nature that would have been contented to spend its mighty energies in work that brought no reward but in the doing of it, and that might never have been made publicly known or available, the practical force and impulse which enabled him to accomplish what he actually did in literature and philosophy. It was this influence, without doubt, which saved him from utter absorption in his world of rare, noble and elevated but ever-increasingly unattainable ideas. But for it the serene sea of abstract thought might have held him becalmed for life; and, in the absence of all utterance of definite knowledge of his conclusions, the world might have been left to an ignorant and mysterious wonder about the unprofitable scholar."[251]

What has been so far said, important as it is, does not tell the whole story of woman's influence on men of science, and consequently on the progress of science. We should not have an adequate conception of women as inspirers and collaborators if we did not advert to certain faculties which they usually possess in a more eminent degree than the most of men. It is a well-known fact that in many of the affairs of life women are more practical, have more tact, and possess keener and quicker perceptions than men. They are, too, more ideal, more romantic and more enthusiastic.

Men of science in their investigations usually proceed by the slow and laborious process of collecting facts and collating phenomena, either by observation or experiment, or both, and, from the observed facts and phenomena, they formulate a law which explains and correlates them. This is known as induction, a method which proceeds from facts to ideas.

Women, on the contrary, are rather disposed to proceed from ideas to facts; to explain phenomena from ideas which already exist in the mind, without having recourse to the slow process of induction. This is the deductive method, and is the very reverse of that employed by the average man of science. It would, however, be a mistake to maintain that the inductive method is always employed, for such is not the case. More than a half a century ago the historian, Buckle, in a notable lecture delivered in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, directed attention to the fact that some of the greatest scientific discoveries had been made by the deductive method.

One of these was Newton's epoch-making discovery of universal gravitation. While sitting in a garden he saw an apple fall, and this simple fact caused him to advance from idea to idea, and to be carried, by what Tyndall loved to call "the scientific use of the imagination," into the distant realms of space. And, heedless of the operations of nature, neither observing nor experimenting, the great philosopher, by pure a priori reasoning, "completed the most sublime and majestic speculation that it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive." "It was," as Buckle well observes, "the triumph of an idea. It was the audacity of genius." It was also the triumph of the deductive method in the solution of a problem that one not a genius could have worked out only by the long and toilsome process of induction.