Positiveness and bumptiousness are also supposed to be our attributes. In the ‘New Republic’ the characters said to represent Huxley and Clifford are completely disguised by their pompous pretentiousness.
It is not difficult to describe the ideals of science, but it is only too easy to fall short of them. It is easy for instance to become a sectarian, to belong to a school, and to be literally incapable of fairness towards the opposition. This was plainly seen at the incoming of evolution, and it was one of the many glories of Sir Charles Lyell that he could accept the ‘Origin of Species,’ and that, in the words of Hooker, he could under-pin his work with an evolutionary foundation and find his edifice stronger than ever. But we need not consider the battles of giants; we are much more likely to be concerned with the mentally dwarfed or deformed—with the dangerous man who makes positive statements on insufficient data, or suffers from that other vice of not being able to confess ignorance. The only lectures which impressed me, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, were those of the late Sir George Humphry; and his most striking words were confessions of complete ignorance about many parts of physiology. Here is an instance of an opposite state of things, of a want of courage. An eminent chemist was asked why common salt thrown on the fire gives a blue flame. Now the chemist was a German, and having been brought up in that land of stoves, probably had not
performed an experiment so easily made in the home of open fires. So he rashly answered, “It does not burn blue, it is impossible, sodium-salts give a yellow flame.” On this my friend fetched the salt and threw a handful on to the glowing coals—with the result that the eminent chemist rose up and fled in silence from the room. He gave an admirable example of how not to behave. He ought not in the first place to have denied the fact a priori, and when he was convicted he should have been glad to learn.
It has been said that in scientific work accuracy is the most valuable quality and the hardest to attain. Accuracy alone may strike us as a dull quality to be so highly rated. When a given result has been obtained in eleven successive experiments, and fails on the twelfth occasion, it is the accurate-minded man who makes a wise use of the failure. It ought to arouse in us a flame of curiosity, lighting in us a whole posse of theories, which force us to vary our procedure and finally enable us to solve the difficulty.
Most of us are inclined to treat an unexpected result in a cavalier spirit, pushing it aside as “only an exception,” whereas it should be received as possibly a personage of distinction in disguise, and not as a rude disturber of our pet ideas.
A class of experimentalists exists from whom we all suffer—namely, cooks. How happy we should be if they possessed this lively desire to understand their own lapses from good cookery! It may be urged in excuse, that although the essence of cooking is the application of heat to food,
not one cook in a thousand has a thermometer in her oven. I hope that some of the ladies who have in these laboratories learned to believe in accuracy, will become missionaries among the ignorant and insist on this simple reform.
There is a type of accuracy of a very different kind which may become an actual vice. For instance, the desire to weigh things to 1–10 mg. which should only have been weighed to a centigram, measuring to 1–10 mm., and calculating averages to several places of decimals. In such a science as Botany this may be positive waste of time. Sachs, the great German botanist, in whose laboratory I worked, was never tired of complaining of this “sogenannte Genauigkeit,” (this so-called accuracy). I am told that Lord Rayleigh, whose physical inquiries demand in some cases excessive and minute accuracy, has a wonderful instinct for knowing when and where he may relax his methods.
I have been compelled to use the words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ because these terms have become firmly adherent to a group of subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Botany, etc., and cannot now be detached from them. Unfortunately ‘scientific’ is used in another sense as implying accuracy of experimental method and in deduction from results. So that in calling ourselves scientific men we run the risk of seeming to claim a monopoly of method, as though we pretended to be somehow superior to the trained workers in other branches. The current use of the word seems therefore to cast unjust suspicion on literature. I wish that
the word science could be restored to its original meaning of knowledge, or the art of knowing; but words (like organisms) are evolved, and against evolution the gods fight in vain. In any case I hope it will be believed that in speaking of knowledge I have taken instances from what is usually called science, not out of disrespect to literature, but like Dr. Johnson in a different affair—from ignorance.