I say, then, that our long-established and time-honored system of liberal education ... does not tend to form original investigators of nature’s truths....
Among the great promoters of scientific progress ... how large is the number who may, in strict propriety, be said to have educated themselves? Take, for illustration, such familiar names as those of William Herschel, and Franklin, and Rumford, and Rittenhouse, and Davy, and Faraday, and Henry. Is it not evident that nature herself, to those who will follow her teachings, is a better guide to the study of her own phenomena than all the training of our schools? And is not this because nature invariably begins with the training of the observing faculties?
The moral of this experience is, that mental culture is not secured by pouring information into passive recipients; it comes from stimulating the mind to gather knowledge for itself.... If we would fit man properly to cultivate nature ... our earliest teachings must be things and not words.
Doctor John William Draper, the world-renowned American investigator of the laws of radiation from hot bodies, said:
Nowhere in the world are to be found more imposing political problems than those to be settled here; nowhere a greater need of scientific knowledge. I am not speaking of ourselves alone, but also of our Canadian friends on the other side of the St. Lawrence. We must join together in generous emulation of the best that is done in Europe.... Together we must try to refute what De Tocqueville has said about us, that communities such as ours can never have a love of pure science.
Andrew White, President of Cornell, said:
I will confine myself to the value, in our political progress, of the spirit and example of some of the scientific workers of our day and generation. What is the example which reveals that spirit? It is an example of zeal, zeal in search for the truth ... of thoroughness—of the truth sought in its wholeness ... of bravery, to brave all outcry and menace ... of devotion to duty without which no scientific work can be accomplished ... of faith that truth and goodness are inseparable.
The reverence for scientific achievement, the revelation of the high honors which are in store for those who seek for truth in science—the inevitable comparison between a life devoted to the great pure search, on the one hand, and a life devoted to place-hunting or self-grasping on the other—all these shall come to the minds of thoughtful men in lonely garrets of our cities, in remote cabins of our prairies, and thereby shall come strength and hope for higher endeavor.
Tyndall responded in part as follows:
It would be a great thing for this land of incalculable destinies to supplement its achievements in the industrial arts by those higher investigations from which our mastery over nature and over industrial art itself has been derived.... To no other country is the cultivation of science, in its highest form, of more importance than to yours. In no other country would it exert a more benign and elevating influence.... Let chairs be founded, sufficiently but not luxuriously endowed, which shall have original research for their main object and ambition.... The willingness of American citizens to throw their fortunes into the cause of public education is, as I have already stated, without parallel in my experience. Hitherto their efforts have been directed to the practical side of science.... But assuredly among your men of wealth there are those willing to listen to an appeal on higher grounds.... It is with the view of giving others the chance that I enjoyed,[I cannot find a reason for this comma, it results in a pause where there should not be one] among my noble and disinterested German teachers, that I propose, after deducting, with strict accuracy, the sums which have been actually expended on my lectures, to devote every cent of the money which you have so generously poured in upon me to the education of young American philosophers in Germany.
JOHN TYNDALL (1820–1893)
From a photograph taken about 1885