Science is different.
The relative, which governs it, leaves its mark on it; and these successive stamps of the relative, more and more resembling the real, constitute the movable certainty of man.
In science, certain things have been masterpieces which are so no more. The hydraulic machine of Marly was a chef-d'œuvre.
Science seeks perpetual movement. She has found it; it is itself perpetual motion.
Science is continually moving in the benefit it confers.
Everything stirs up in science, everything changes, everything is constantly renewed. Everything denies, destroys, creates, replaces everything. That which was accepted yesterday is put again under the millstone to-day. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is everlastingly thirsting for improvement, which the absolute ignores. Vaccination is a problem, the lightning-rod is a problem. Jenner may have erred, Franklin may have deceived himself; let us go on seeking. This agitation is grand. Science is restless around man; it has its own reasons for this restlessness. Science plays in progress the part of utility. Let us worship this magnificent servant.
Science makes discoveries, art composes works. Science is an acquirement of man, science is a ladder; one savant overtops the other. Poetry is a lofty soaring.
Do you want examples? They abound. Here is one,—the first which occurs to our mind.
Jacob Metzu, scientifically Metius, discovers the telescope by chance, as Newton did gravitation and Christopher Columbus, America. Let us open a parenthesis: there is no chance in the creation of "Orestes" or of "Paradise Lost." A chef-d'œuvre is the offspring of will. After Metzu comes Galileo, who improves the discovery of Metzu; then Kepler, who improves on the improvement of Galileo; then Descartes, who, although going somewhat astray in taking a concave glass for eyepiece instead of a convex one, fructifies the improvement of Kepler; then the Capuchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of objects; then Huyghens, who makes a great step by placing the two convex glasses on the focus of the objective; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to 1659, during the short interval which separates the "Nuncius Sidereus" of Galileo from the "Oculus Eliæ et Enoch" of Father Reita, behold the original inventor, Metzu, obliterated. And it is constantly the same in science.
Vegetius was Count of Constantinople; but that is no obstacle to his tactics being forgotten,—forgotten like the strategy of Polybius, forgotten like the strategy of Folard. The pig's-head of the phalanx and the pointed order of the legion have for a moment re-appeared, two hundred years ago, in the wedge of Gustavus Adolphus; but in our days, when there are no more pikemen as in the fourteenth century, nor lansquenets as in the seventeenth, the ponderous triangular attack, which was in other times the base of all tactics, is replaced by a crowd of Zouaves charging with the bayonet. Some day, sooner perhaps than people think, the charge with the bayonet will be itself superseded by peace, at first European, by-and-by universal, and then a whole science—the military science—will vanish away. For that science, its improvement lies in its disappearance.