Scientific Culture, and Other Essays / Second Edition; with Additions

by Jr. Josiah P. Cooke

I.

SCIENTIFIC CULTURE.

An Address delivered July 7, 1875, at the Opening of the Summer Courses of Instruction in Chemistry, at Harvard University.

You have come together this morning to begin various elementary courses of instruction in chemistry and mineralogy. As I have been informed, most of you are teachers by profession, and your chief object is to become acquainted with the experimental methods of teaching physical science, and to gain the advantages in your study which the large apparatus of this university is capable of affording.

In all this I hope you will not be disappointed. You, as teachers, know perfectly well that success must depend, first of all, on your own efforts; but, since the methods of studying Nature are so different from those with which you are familiar in literary studies, I feel that the best service I can render, in this introductory address, is to state, as clearly as I can, the great objects which should be kept in view in the courses on which you are now entering.

By your very attendance on these courses you have given the strongest evidence of your appreciation of the value of chemical studies as a part of the system of education, and let me say, in the first place, that you have not overvalued their importance. The elementary principles and more conspicuous facts of chemistry are so intimately associated with the experience of every-day life, and find such important applications in the useful arts, that no man at the present day can be regarded as educated who is ignorant of them. Not to know why the fire burns, or how the sulphur trade affects the industries of the world, will be regarded, by the generation of men among whom your pupils will have to win their places in society, as a greater mark of ignorance than a false quantity in Latin prosody or a solecism in grammar.

Moreover, I need not tell you that physical science has become a great power in the world. Indeed, after religion, it is the greatest power of our modern civilization. Consider how much it has accomplished during the last century toward increasing the comforts and enlarging the intellectual vision of mankind. The railroad, the steamship, the electric telegraph, photography, gaslights, petroleum oils, coal-tar colors, chlorine bleaching, anæsthesia, are a few of its recent material gifts to the world; and not only has it made one pair of hands to do the work of twenty, but it has so improved and facilitated the old industries that what were luxuries to the fathers of our republic have become necessities to our generation.

And when, passing from these material fruits, you consider the purely intellectual triumphs of physical science, such as those which have been gained with the telescope, the microscope, and the spectroscope, you can not wonder at the esteem in which these branches of study are held in this practical age of the world.

Now, these immense results have been gained by the application to the study of Nature of a method which was so admirably described by Lord Bacon in his "Novum Organon," and which is now generally called the experimental method. What we observe in Nature is an orderly succession of phenomena. The ancients speculated about these phenomena as well as ourselves, but they contented themselves with speculations, animating Nature with the products of their wild fancies. Their great master, Aristotle, has never been excelled in the art of dialectics; but his method of logic applied to the external world was of very necessity an utter failure. It is frequently said, in defense of the exclusive study of the records of ancient learning, that they are the products of thinking, loving, and hating men, like ourselves, and it is claimed that the study of science can never rise to the same nobility because it deals only with lifeless matter. But this is a mere play on words, a repetition of the error of the old schoolmen.

Physical science is noble because it does deal with thought, and with the very noblest of all thought. Nature at once manifests and conceals an Infinite Presence: her methods and orderly successions are the manifestations of Omnipotent Will; her contrivances and laws the embodiment of Omniscient Thought. The disciples of Aristotle so signally failed simply because they could see in Nature only a reflection of their idle fancies. The followers of Bacon have so gloriously succeeded because they approached Nature as humble students, and, having first learned how to question her, have been content to be taught and not sought to teach. The ancient logic never relieved a moment of pain, or lifted an ounce of the burden of human misery. The modern logic has made a very large share of material comfort the common heritage of all civilized men.