SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITIES.
He had, at an earlier date, declined to be appointed as examiner in the University. He had previously declined the professorship of chemistry in University College; and he had also declined the chemical chair in the University of Edinburgh. This was not, however, from any want of sympathy with university work, or failure to appreciate the ideal of a university as a seat of learning. Writing to Tyndall, in 1851, about another university—that at Toronto—he said: “I trust it is a place where a man of science and a true philosopher is required, and where, in return, such a man would be nourished and cherished in proportion to his desire to advance natural knowledge.”
At the same time he had an exceeding repugnance to the custom of expecting candidates for professorial chairs to produce “testimonials” of their qualifications. When his intimate friend Richard Phillips was a candidate for the very chair which Faraday refused at University College, Faraday declined on principle to give a testimonial. “I should indeed have thought,” he added, “his character had been known to be such that it would rather have been degraded than established by certificates.”
Similarly, in 1851, he told Tyndall, then an applicant for the Chair of Physics at Toronto, that he had in every case refused for many years past to give any on the application of candidates. “Nevertheless,” he added, “I wish to say that when I am asked about a candidate by those who have the choice or appointment, I never refuse to answer.”
SCIENCE IN EDUCATION.
On general education, Faraday’s ideas were much in advance of his time. From the epoch when as a young man he lectured to the City Philosophical Society on the means of obtaining knowledge and on mental inertia, down to the close of his career, he consistently advocated the cultivation of the experimental method and the use of science as a means of training the faculties. A concise account of his views is to be found in the lecture he gave in 1854 before the Prince Consort on “Mental Education,” a lecture which prescribes the self-educating discipline of scientific study and experiment as a means of correcting deficiency of judgment. It included a powerful plea for suspense of judgment and for the cultivation of the faculty of proportionate judgment. In 1862 he was examined at some length by the Royal Commissioners upon Public Schools. With them he pleaded strongly for the introduction of science into the school curricula; and when asked at what age it might be serviceable to introduce science-teaching, replied: “I think one can hardly tell that until after experience for some few years. All I can say is this that at my juvenile lectures at Christmas time I have never found a child too young to understand intelligently what I told him; they came to me afterwards with questions which proved their capability.”
One passage from the close of a lecture given in 1858 deserves to be recorded for its fine appreciation of “the kind of education which science offers to man”:—
It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the small beginnings—they precede of necessity all great things.... It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us, first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past. Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces.
All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.
ON MATHEMATICS.