"The thing I am proudest of, Pearsall, is that I have never been found to be wrong," he could say in the early part of his scientific history without fear of contradiction. After his death A. de la Rive wrote, "I do not think that Faraday has once been caught in a mistake; so precise and conscientious was his mode of experimenting and observing." This is not absolutely true; but the extreme rarity of his mistakes, notwithstanding the immense amount of his published researches, is one of those marvels which can be appreciated only by those who are in the habit of describing what they have seen in the mist land that lies beyond the boundaries of previous knowledge.
Into this unknown region his mental vision was ever stretched. "I well remember one day," writes Mr. Barrett, a former assistant at the Royal Institution, "when Mr. Faraday was by my side, I happened to be steadying, by means of a magnet, the motion of a magnetic needle under a glass shade. Mr. Faraday suddenly looked most impressively and earnestly as he said, 'How wonderful and mysterious is that power you have there! the more I think over it the less I seem to know:'—and yet he who said this knew more of it than any living man."
It is easy to imagine with what wonder he would stand before the apples or leaves or pieces of meat that swung round into a transverse position between the poles of his gigantic magnet, or the sand that danced and eddied into regular figures on plates of glass touched by the fiddle-bow, or gold so finely divided that it appeared purple and when diffused in water took a twelvemonth to settle. It is easy, too, to imagine how he would long to gain a clear idea of what was taking place behind the phenomena. But it is far from easy to grasp the conceptions of his brain: language is a clumsy vehicle for such thoughts. He strove to get rid of such figurative terms as "currents" and "poles;" in discussing the mode of propagation of light and radiant heat he endeavoured "to dismiss the ether, but not the vibrations;" and in conceiving of atoms, he says: "As to the little solid particles ... I cannot form any idea of them apart from the forces, so I neither admit nor deny them. They do not afford me the least help in my endeavour to form an idea of a particle of matter. On the contrary, they greatly embarrass me." Yet he could not himself escape from the tyranny of words or the deceitfulness of metaphors, and it is hard for his readers to comprehend what was his precise idea of those centres of forces that occupy no space, or of those lines of force which he beheld with his mental eye, curving alike round his magnetic needle, and that mightiest of all magnets—the earth.
As he was jealous of his own fame, and had learnt by experience that discoveries could be stolen, he talked little about them till they were ready for the public; indeed, he has been known to twit a brother electrician for telling his discoveries before printing them, adding with a knowing laugh, "I never do that." He was obliged, however, to explain his results to Professor Whewell, or some other learned friend, if he wished to christen some new idea with a Greek name. One of Whewell's letters on such an occasion, dated Trinity College, Cambridge, October 14, 1837, begins thus:—
"My dear Sir,
"I am always glad to hear of the progress of your researches, and never the less so because they require the fabrication of a new word or two. Such a coinage has always taken place at the great epochs of discovery; like the medals that are struck at the beginning of a new reign, or rather like the change of currency produced by the accession of a new Sovereign; for their value and influence consists in their coming into common circulation."
During the whole time of an investigation Faraday had kept ample notes, and when all was completed he had little to do but to copy these notes, condensing or re-arranging some parts, and omitting what was useless. The paper then usually consisted of a series of numbered paragraphs, containing first a statement of the subject of inquiry, then a series of experiments giving negative results, and afterwards the positive discoveries. In this form it was sent to the Royal Society or some other learned body. Yet this often involved considerable labour, as the following words written to Miss Moore in 1850 from a summer retreat in Upper Norwood will show:—"I write and write and write, until nearly three papers for the Royal Society are nearly completed, and I hope that two of them will be good if they do justify my hopes, for I have to criticise them again and again before I let them loose. You shall hear of them at some of the next Friday evenings."
This criticism did not cease with their publication, for he endeavoured always to improve on his previous work. Thus, in 1832 he bound his papers together in one volume, and the introduction on the fly-leaf shows the object with which it was done:—
"Papers of mine, published in octavo, in the Quarterly Journal of Science, and elsewhere, since the time that Sir H. Davy encouraged me to write the analysis of caustic lime.
"Some, I think (at this date), are good, others moderate, and some bad. But I have put all into the volume, because of the utility they have been of to me—and none more than the bad—in pointing out to me in future, or rather after times, the faults it became me to watch and to avoid.
"As I never looked over one of my papers a year after it was written, without believing, both in philosophy and manner, it could have been much better done, I still hope the collection may be of great use to me.
"M. Faraday.
"August 18, 1832."