Clearly, then, "Science" does not properly belong to "scientific" men, unless they happen also to be wise ones; not more to them than honey to bees, or books to printers. The bee may, certainly, feed on the honey he has made, and the printer read the books he has put in type. But Vos non vobis is the rule. "Science" is knowledge, it is true, but knowledge disarticulated and parcelled out among certain specialists, like Truth in Milton's glorious comparison. He who can restore each part to its true position, and orient the lesser whole in its relations to the universe, he it is to whom science belongs. He must range through all time and follow Nature to her farthest bounds. Then he can dissect beetles like Straus Derekheim, without becoming a myope. But even this is not enough. Let us see what qualities would go to make up the ideal model of the truly wise student of Nature.
He must have, in the first place, as the substratum of his faculties, the power of observation, with the passion that keeps it active and the skilful hand to serve its needs. Secondly, a quick eye for resemblances and differences. Thirdly, a wide range of mental vision. Fourthly, the coordinating or systematizing faculty. Fifthly, a large scholarship. Lastly, and without which all these gifts fall short of their ultimate aim, an instinct for the highest forms of truth,—a centripetal tendency, always seeking the idea behind the form, the Deity in his manifestations, and thence working outward again to solve those infinite problems of life and its destinies which are, in reality, all that the thinking soul most lives for.
It is as easy to find all these qualities separate as it is to turn beneath the finger one of the letters of a revolving padlock. But they must all be brought together in line before the grand portals of Nature's hypaethral temple will open to her chosen student. How incomplete the man of science is with only one or two of these endowments may be seen by a few examples.
The power and instinct of observation combined with the most consummate skill do not necessarily make a great philosophical naturalist. Leeuwenhoek had all these. They bore admirable fruits, too. We cannot but read the old man's letters to the Royal Society, written, if we remember right, after the age of eighty, with delight and admiration. Those little lenses in their silver mountings, all ground and set and fashioned by his own hand, showed him the blood-globules, and the "pipes" of the teeth, which Purkinje and Retzius found with their achromatic microscopes a century later. We honor his skill and sagacity as they deserve; but a little trick of Mr. Dollond's, applied to the microscopic object-glass, has left all his achievements a mere matter of curious history.
Few have been more remarkable for perceiving resemblances and differences than Oken. This is the poetical side of the scientific mind; and he shares with Goethe the honor of that startling and far-reaching discovery, the vertebral character of the bones of the cranium. At this very time the four vertebral cranial bones recognized by Owen are the same Oken has described. But notwithstanding the generous tribute of Mr. Agassiz to his great merits, the writer who assigns special colors to the persons in the Trinity, (red, blue, and green,) and then allots to Satan a constituent of one of these, (yellow,) has drifted away from the solid anchorage of observation into the shoreless waste of the inane, if not amidst the dark abysses of the profane.
If the widest range of mental vision, joined, too, with great learning, could make a successful student of Nature, Lord Bacon should have stood by the side of Linnaeus. But open the "Sylva Sylvarum" anywhere and see what Bacon was as a naturalist. "It was observed in the Great Plague of the last yeare, that there were scene in divers Ditches and low Grounds about London, many Toads that had Tailes, two or three inches long, at the least: Whereas Toads (usually) have no Tailes at all. Which argueth a great disposition to Putrefaction in the Soile and Aire." This in that "great birth of time," the "Instauration of the Sciences"!
The systematizing or coordinating power is worse than nothing, unless it be supported by the other qualities already mentioned. Darwin had it, and something of what is called genius with it; but where is now the "Zoönomia"?
And what is erudition without the power to correct errors by appealing to Nature, to arrange methodically, to use wisely? It would be a shame to mention any name in illustration of its insignificance. Our shelves bend and crack under the load of unwise and learned authorship. There are two stages in every student's life. In the first he is afraid of books; in the second books are afraid of him. For they are a great community of thieves, and one finds the same stolen patterns in all their pockets. Though often dressed in sheep's clothing, they have the maw of wolves. When the student has once found them out, he laughs at the pretensions of erudition, and strides gayly up and down great libraries, feeling that the most blustering folio of them all will turn as pale as if it were bound in law-calf, if he only lay his hand on its shoulder.
Nor, lastly, can any elevation of aim, any thirst for the divine springs of knowledge, enable a man to dispense with the sober habits of observation and the positive acquirements that must give him the stamina to attempt the higher flights of thought. The eagle's wings are nothing without his pectoral muscles. It is not Swedenborg and his disciples that legislate for the scientific world; they may suggest truth, but they rarely prove it, and never bring it into such systematic forms as narrow-minded Nature will insist on laying down.
That all these qualities which go to make up our ideal should exist in absolute perfection in any single man of mortal birth is not to be expected. But there are names in the history of Science which recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that, comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time, we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for twenty years, and trained the boy of Macedon to whatever wisdom he possessed,—whose life was set by destiny between the greatest of thinkers and the greatest of conquerors,—seems to have borrowed the intellect of the one and the universal aspirations of the other. But because he invaded every realm of knowledge, it must not be thought he dealt with Nature at second-hand. He was a collector and a dissector. He could display the anatomical structure of a fish as well as write a treatise on the universe or on rhetoric, or government or logic, or music or mathematics. Dethroned we call him; and yet Mr. Agassiz quotes his descriptions with respect, and confesses that the systematic classification of animals makes but one stride from Aristotle to Linnaeus.