Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays

by Thomas Henry Huxley; George F. Barker; E. D. Cope; James Hutchison Stirling; John Tyndall

From the first we see in history a slow advance as knowledge gained by the accumulation of tradition and by improvements in habit based on experience; but how slow was this advance while the use of the metals was still unknown! The iron age brought with it not only new conveniences, but increased means of future progress; and here we have an acceleration in the rate of advance. With the introduction of letters this rate was increased many fold, and in the application of steam we have a change equal in utility to any that has preceded it, and adding more than any to the possibilities of future advance in many directions. By its power, knowledge and means of happiness were to be distributed among the many.

The uses to which human intelligence has successively applied the materials furnished by nature have been—First, subsistence and defence: second, the accumulation of power in the shape of a representative of that labor which the use of matter involves; in other words, the accumulation of wealth. The possession of this power involves new possibilities, for opportunity is offered for the special pursuits of knowledge and the assistance of the weak or undeveloped part of mankind in its struggles.

Thus, while the first men possessed the power of speech, and could advance a little in knowledge through the accumulation of the experiences of their predecessors, they possessed no means of accumulating the power of labor, no control over the activity of numbers—in other words, no wealth.

But the accumulation of knowledge finally brought this advance about. The extraction and utilization of the metals, especially iron, formed the most important step, since labor was thus facilitated and its productiveness increased in an incalculable degree. We have little evidence of the existence of a medium of exchange during the first or stone period, and no doubt barter was the only form of trade. Before the use of metals, shells and other objects were used: remains of money of baked clay have been found in Mexico. Finally, though in still ancient times, the possession of wealth in money gradually became possible and more common, and from that day to this avenues for reaching this stage in social progress has ever been opening.

But wealth merely indicates a stage of progress, since it is but a comparative term. All men could not become rich, for in that case all would be equally poor. But labor has a still higher goal; for, thirdly, as capital, it constructs and employs machinery, which does the work of many hands, and thus cheapens products, which is equivalent in effect to an accumulation of wealth to the consumer. And this increase of power may be used for the intellectual and spiritual advance of men, or otherwise, at the will of the men thus favored. Machinery places man in the position of a creator, operating on Nature through an increased number of “secondary causes.”

Development of intelligence is seen, then, in the following directions: First, in the knowledge of facts, including science; second, in language; third, in the apprehension of beauty; and, as consequences of the first of these, the accumulation of power by development—First, of means of subsistence; and second, of mechanical invention.

Thus we have two terms to start with in estimating the beginning of human development in knowledge and power: First, the primary capacities of the human mind itself; second, a material world, whose infinitely varied components are so arranged as to yield results to the energies of that mind. For example, the transition points of vaporization and liquefaction are so placed as to be within the reach of man’s agents; their weights are so fixed as to accord with the muscular or other forces which he is able to exert; and other living organizations are subject to his convenience and rule, and not, as in previous geological periods, entirely beyond his control. These two terms being given, it is maintained that the present situation of the most civilized men has been attained through the operation of a law of mutual action and reaction—a law whose results, seen at the present time, have depended on the acceleration or retardation of its rate of action; which rate has been regulated, according to the degree in which a third great term, viz., the law of moral or (what is the same thing) true religious development has been combined in the plan. What it is necessary to establish in order to prove the above hypothesis is—

I. That in each of the particulars above enumerated the development of the human species is similar to that of the individual from infancy to maturity.

II. That from a condition of subserviency to the laws of matter, man’s intelligence enables him, by an accumulation of power, to become in a sense independent of those laws, and to increase greatly the rate of intellectual and spiritual progress.

III. That failure to accomplish a moral or spiritual development will again reduce him to a subserviency to the laws of matter.