Similarly, the great law of metamorphosis in plants, "according to which the stamens, pistils, corollas, bracts, petals and so forth, of every plant, are simply modified leaves," was discovered not by an inductive investigator, but by a poet. "Guided by his brilliant imagination, his passion for beauty and his exquisite conception of form which supplied him with ideas," Germany's greatest poet, Goethe, by reasoning deductively, was able to generalize a law which lesser minds could never have arrived at except through the application of the inductive method.
So also was it in the science of crystallography. Its foundations were laid, not by a mineralogist nor a mathematician, as one would suppose, but by one of strong imagination and marked poetic temperament. Like Goethe, Haüy was led by his ideas of beauty and symmetry to work deductively on the problem before him. Descending from ideas to facts, he finally succeeded, after a long series of subsequent labors, in reading "the riddle which had baffled his able but unimaginative predecessors."
It is the possession of this deductive faculty, so characteristic of men of genius—their ability to reach conclusions directly, as great mathematicians perceive inferences which those less gifted reach only after pages of elaborate calculations—which enable women, "not indeed to make scientific discoveries, but to exercise the most momentous and salutary influence over the method by which scientific discoveries are made." For, as Buckle points out, men of science are too inclined to employ the inductive method to the exclusion of the deductive.[252] They have become slaves to the tyranny of facts, and, as such, are incompetent to further the progress of science as they would by using both methods instead of one. And their slavery would be still more complete and ignominious were it not for the great though unconscious service to science rendered by women who have kept alive the deductive habit of thought. "Their turn of thought, their habits of mind, their conversation, their influence, insensibly extending over the whole surface of society and frequently penetrating its intimate structure, have, more than all other things put together, tended to raise us up into an ideal world, lift us from the dust in which we are too prone to grovel, and develop in us those germs of imagination which even the most sluggish and apathetic understandings in some degree possess."
From the foregoing observations it is manifest that the best results to science are secured when men and women work together—men supplying the slow, logical reasoning power, women the vivid, far-reaching imagination; men generalizing from facts, women from ideas; men working chiefly by induction, women principally by deduction. For thus collaborating, each with his or her predominant faculties, the two combined possess in a measure the elements which go to make up a man or woman of genius and which enable them to achieve far more for the advancement of science than would otherwise be possible.
No one has ever given more eloquent expression to this truth than John Stuart Mill, who was as keen as an observer as he was profound as a thinker. Writing on the subject under discussion, he does not hesitate to say: "Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory and speculation who employs himself, not in collecting materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the companionship and under the criticism of a really superior woman. There is nothing comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real things and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction.... Women's thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men as men's thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even now women, compared with men, are at any disadvantage."[253]
We have already learned, from his own avowal, how much Mill was beholden to his wife for her active coöperation in the production of those works of his which have exerted so profound an influence on many phases of modern thought. A more striking illustration of the value of woman's assistance, but in the domain of biology, is found in the biography of the late Professor Huxley. By those who know this distinguished man of science—so remarkable for his intellectual vigor—only from his writings, the impression would be gleaned that he was one of the most independent of thinkers, and that his utterances on all subjects were absolutely personal and entirely unmodified by suggestion or criticism from any quarter.
How far this view is from being correct is found in the statement by his son that his father "invariably submitted his writings to the criticism of his wife before they were seen by any other eye. To her judgment was due the toning down of many a passage which erred by excess of vigor, and the clearing up of phrases which would be obscure to the public. In fact, if any essay met with her approval, he felt sure it would not fail of its effect when published."[254] She was not only his "help and stay for forty years; in his struggles ready to counsel, in adversity to comfort," but, over and above this, she was "the critic whose judgment he valued above almost any, and whose praise he cared most to win"—the other self who made his life work possible.[255]
An intelligent, sympathetic pair of this kind—and this, as we have seen, is but one of a multitude which illuminates and beautifies the history of science—are competent to achieve wonders. They are like "the two-celled heart beating with one full stroke"—
"Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
Of science, and the secrets of the mind."
The woman is then truly, as De Lamennais in Scriptural phrases has it, "Man's companion, man's assistant, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh," and, in her sublime and endearing character so complete in every relation of life, she fully answers to the beautiful characterization which Adam, in Paradise Lost, gives of his beloved Eve: