Side-Lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science

by Simon Newcomb

Another well-known fact is that those applications of the forces of nature to the promotion of human welfare which have made our age what it is are of such comparatively recent origin that we need go back only a single century to antedate their most important features, and scarcely more than four centuries to find their beginning. It follows that the subject of our inquiry should be the commencement, not many centuries ago, of a certain new form of intellectual activity.

Having gained this point of view, our next inquiry will be into the nature of that activity and its relation to the stages of progress which preceded and followed its beginning. The superficial observer, who sees the oak but forgets the acorn, might tell us that the special qualities which have brought out such great results are expert scientific knowledge and rare ingenuity, directed to the application of the powers of steam and electricity. From this point of view the great inventors and the great captains of industry were the first agents in bringing about the modern era. But the more careful inquirer will see that the work of these men was possible only through a knowledge of the laws of nature, which had been gained by men whose work took precedence of theirs in logical order, and that success in invention has been measured by completeness in such knowledge. While giving all due honor to the great inventors, let us remember that the first place is that of the great investigators, whose forceful intellects opened the way to secrets previously hidden from men. Let it be an honor and not a reproach to these men that they were not actuated by the love of gain, and did not keep utilitarian ends in view in the pursuit of their researches. If it seems that in neglecting such ends they were leaving undone the most important part of their work, let us remember that Nature turns a forbidding face to those who pay her court with the hope of gain, and is responsive only to those suitors whose love for her is pure and undefiled. Not only is the special genius required in the investigator not that generally best adapted to applying the discoveries which he makes, but the result of his having sordid ends in view would be to narrow the field of his efforts, and exercise a depressing effect upon his activities. The true man of science has no such expression in his vocabulary as "useful knowledge." His domain is as wide as nature itself, and he best fulfils his mission when he leaves to others the task of applying the knowledge he gives to the world.

We have here the explanation of the well-known fact that the functions of the investigator of the laws of nature, and of the inventor who applies these laws to utilitarian purposes, are rarely united in the same person. If the one conspicuous exception which the past century presents to this rule is not unique, we should probably have to go back to Watt to find another.

From this view-point it is clear that the primary agent in the movement which has elevated man to the masterful position he now occupies is the scientific investigator. He it is whose work has deprived plague and pestilence of their terrors, alleviated human suffering, girdled the earth with the electric wire, bound the continent with the iron way, and made neighbors of the most distant nations. As the first agent which has made possible this meeting of his representatives, let his evolution be this day our worthy theme. As we follow the evolution of an organism by studying the stages of its growth, so we have to show how the work of the scientific investigator is related to the ineffectual efforts of his predecessors.

In our time we think of the process of development in nature as one going continuously forward through the combination of the opposite processes of evolution and dissolution. The tendency of our thought has been in the direction of banishing cataclysms to the theological limbo, and viewing Nature as a sleepless plodder, endowed with infinite patience, waiting through long ages for results. I do not contest the truth of the principle of continuity on which this view is based. But it fails to make known to us the whole truth. The building of a ship from the time that her keel is laid until she is making her way across the ocean is a slow and gradual process; yet there is a cataclysmic epoch opening up a new era in her history. It is the moment when, after lying for months or years a dead, inert, immovable mass, she is suddenly endowed with the power of motion, and, as if imbued with life, glides into the stream, eager to begin the career for which she was designed.

I think it is thus in the development of humanity. Long ages may pass during which a race, to all external observation, appears to be making no real progress. Additions may be made to learning, and the records of history may constantly grow, but there is nothing in its sphere of thought, or in the features of its life, that can be called essentially new. Yet, Nature may have been all along slowly working in a way which evades our scrutiny, until the result of her operations suddenly appears in a new and revolutionary movement, carrying the race to a higher plane of civilization.

It is not difficult to point out such epochs in human progress. The greatest of all, because it was the first, is one of which we find no record either in written or geological history. It was the epoch when our progenitors first took conscious thought of the morrow, first used the crude weapons which Nature had placed within their reach to kill their prey, first built a fire to warm their bodies and cook their food. I love to fancy that there was some one first man, the Adam of evolution, who did all this, and who used the power thus acquired to show his fellows how they might profit by his example. When the members of the tribe or community which he gathered around him began to conceive of life as a whole—to include yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow in the same mental grasp—to think how they might apply the gifts of Nature to their own uses—a movement was begun which should ultimately lead to civilization.

Long indeed must have been the ages required for the development of this rudest primitive community into the civilization revealed to us by the most ancient tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken language was developed, and after the rude representation of ideas by visible marks drawn to resemble them had long been practised, some Cadmus must have invented an alphabet. When the use of written language was thus introduced, the word of command ceased to be confined to the range of the human voice, and it became possible for master minds to extend their influence as far as a written message could be carried. Then were communities gathered into provinces; provinces into kingdoms, kingdoms into great empires of antiquity. Then arose a stage of civilization which we find pictured in the most ancient records—a stage in which men were governed by laws that were perhaps as wisely adapted to their conditions as our laws are to ours—in which the phenomena of nature were rudely observed, and striking occurrences in the earth or in the heavens recorded in the annals of the nation.

Vast was the progress of knowledge during the interval between these empires and the century in which modern science began. Yet, if I am right in making a distinction between the slow and regular steps of progress, each growing naturally out of that which preceded it, and the entrance of the mind at some fairly definite epoch into an entirely new sphere of activity, it would appear that there was only one such epoch during the entire interval. This was when abstract geometrical reasoning commenced, and astronomical observations aiming at precision were recorded, compared, and discussed. Closely associated with it must have been the construction of the forms of logic. The radical difference between the demonstration of a theorem of geometry and the reasoning of every-day life which the masses of men must have practised from the beginning, and which few even to-day ever get beyond, is so evident at a glance that I need not dwell upon it. The principal feature of this advance is that, by one of those antinomies of human intellect of which examples are not wanting even in our own time, the development of abstract ideas preceded the concrete knowledge of natural phenomena. When we reflect that in the geometry of Euclid the science of space was brought to such logical perfection that even to-day its teachers are not agreed as to the practicability of any great improvement upon it, we cannot avoid the feeling that a very slight change in the direction of the intellectual activity of the Greeks would have led to the beginning of natural science. But it would seem that the very purity and perfection which was aimed at in their system of geometry stood in the way of any extension or application of its methods and spirit to the field of nature. One example of this is worthy of attention. In modern teaching the idea of magnitude as generated by motion is freely introduced. A line is described by a moving point; a plane by a moving line; a solid by a moving plane. It may, at first sight, seem singular that this conception finds no place in the Euclidian system. But we may regard the omission as a mark of logical purity and rigor. Had the real or supposed advantages of introducing motion into geometrical conceptions been suggested to Euclid, we may suppose him to have replied that the theorems of space are independent of time; that the idea of motion necessarily implies time, and that, in consequence, to avail ourselves of it would be to introduce an extraneous element into geometry.

It is quite possible that the contempt of the ancient philosophers for the practical application of their science, which has continued in some form to our own time, and which is not altogether unwholesome, was a powerful factor in the same direction. The result was that, in keeping geometry pure from ideas which did not belong to it, it failed to form what might otherwise have been the basis of physical science. Its founders missed the discovery that methods similar to those of geometric demonstration could be extended into other and wider fields than that of space. Thus not only the development of applied geometry but the reduction of other conceptions to a rigorous mathematical form was indefinitely postponed.