The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, Thomas Henry Huxley [inspirational books to read txt] 📗
- Author: Thomas Henry Huxley
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There is yet another prefatory remark which it seems desirable I should make. It is that I think it proper to confine myself to the work done, without saying anything about the doers of it. Meddling with questions of merit and priority is a thorny business at the best of times, and unless in case of necessity, altogether undesirable when one is dealing with contemporaries. No such necessity lies upon me, and I shall, therefore, mention no names of living men, lest, perchance, I should incur the reproof which the Israelites, who struggled with one another in the field, addressed to Moses—'Who made thee a prince and a judge over us.'
Physical science is one and indivisible. Although, for practical purposes, it is convenient to mark it out into the primary regions of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and to subdivide these into subordinate provinces, yet the method of investigation and the ultimate object of the physical inquirer are everywhere the same.
The object is the discovery of the rational order which pervades the universe, the method consists of observation and experiment (which is observation under artificial conditions) for the determination of the facts of nature, of inductive and deductive reasoning for the discovery of their mutual relations and connection. The various branches of physical science differ in the extent to which at any given moment of their history, observation on the one hand, or ratiocination on the other, is their more obvious feature, but in no other way, and nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
All physical science starts from certain postulates. One of them is the objective existence of a material world. It is assumed that the phenomena which are comprehended under this name have a 'substratum' of extended, impenetrable, mobile substance, which exhibits the quality known as inertia, and is termed matter.[E] Another postulate is the universality of the law of causation; that nothing happens without a cause (that is, a necessary precedent condition), and that the state of the physical universe, at any given moment, is the consequence of its state at any preceding moment. Another is that any of the rules, or so-called 'laws of nature,' by which the relation of phenomena is truly defined, is true for all time. The validity of these postulates is a problem of metaphysics; they are neither self-evident nor are they, strictly speaking, demonstrable. The justification of their employment, as axioms of physical philosophy, lies in the circumstance that expectations logically based upon them are verified, or, at any rate, not contradicted, whenever they can be tested by experience.
Physical science therefore rests on verified or uncontradicted hypotheses; and, such being the case, it is not surprising that a great condition of its progress has been the invention of verifiable hypotheses. It is a favorite popular delusion that the scientific inquirer is under a sort of moral obligation to abstain from going beyond that generalisation of observed facts which is absurdly called 'Baconian' induction. But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.
The geocentric system of astronomy, with its eccentrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. Kepler was the wildest of guessers. Newton's corpuscular theory of light was of much temporary use in optics, though nobody now believes in it; and the undulatory theory, which has superseded the corpuscular theory and has proved one of the most fertile of instruments of research, is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an 'ether,' the properties of which are defined in propositions, some of which, to ordinary apprehension, seem physical antinomies.
It sounds paradoxical to say that the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors. But the subject-matter of physical science is furnished by observation, which cannot extend beyond the limits of our faculties; while, even within those limits, we cannot be certain that any observation is absolutely exact and exhaustive. Hence it follows that any given generalisation from observation may be true, within the limits of our powers of observation at a given time, and yet turn out to be untrue, when those powers of observation are directly or indirectly enlarged. Or, to put the matter in another way, a doctrine which is untrue absolutely, may, to a very great extent, be susceptible of an interpretation in accordance with the truth. At a certain period in the history of astronomical science, the assumption that the planets move in circles was true enough to serve the purpose of correlating such observations as were then possible; after Kepler, the assumption that they move in ellipses became true enough in regard to the state of observational astronomy at that time. We say still that the orbits of the planets are ellipses, because, for all ordinary purposes, that is a sufficiently near approximation to the truth; but, as a matter of fact, the centre of gravity of a planet describes neither an ellipse or any other simple curve, but an immensely complicated undulating line. It may fairly be doubted whether any generalisation, or hypothesis, based upon physical data is absolutely true, in the sense that a mathematical proposition is so; but, if its errors can become apparent only outside the limits of practicable observation, it may be just as usefully adopted for one of the symbols of that algebra by which we interpret nature, as if it were absolutely true.
The development of every branch of physical knowledge presents three stages which, in their logical relation, are successive. The first is the determination of the sensible character and order of the phenomena. This is Natural History, in the original sense of the term, and here nothing but observation and experiment avail us. The second is the determination of the constant relations of the phenomena thus defined, and their expression in rules or laws. The third is the explication of these particular laws by deduction from the most general laws of matter and motion. The last two stages constitute Natural Philosophy in its original sense. In this region, the invention of verifiable hypotheses is not only permissible, but is one of the conditions of progress.
Historically, no branch of science has followed this order of growth; but, from the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.
The progress of physical science, since the revival of learning, is largely due to the fact that men have gradually learned to lay aside the consideration of unverifiable hypotheses; to guide observation and experiment by verifiable hypotheses; and to consider the latter, not as ideal truths, the real entities of an intelligible world behind phenomena, but as a symbolical language, by the aid of which nature can be interpreted in terms apprehensible by our intellects. And if physical science, during the last fifty years, has attained dimensions beyond all former precedent, and can exhibit achievements of greater importance than any former such period can show, it is because able men, animated by the true scientific spirit, carefully trained in the method of science, and having at their disposal immensely improved appliances, have devoted themselves to the enlargement of the boundaries of natural knowledge in greater number than during any previous half-century of the world's history.
I have said that our epoch can produce achievements in physical science of greater moment than any other has to show, advisedly; and I think that there are three great products of our time which justify the assertion. One of these is that doctrine concerning the constitution of matter which, for want of a better name, I will call 'molecular;' the second is the doctrine of conservation of energy; the third is the doctrine of evolution. Each of these was foreshadowed, more or less distinctly, in former periods of the history of science; and, so far is either from being the outcome of purely inductive reasoning, that it would be hard to overrate the influence of metaphysical, and even of theological, considerations upon the development of all three. The peculiar merit of our epoch is that it has shown how these hypotheses connect a vast number of seemingly independent partial generalisations; that it has given them that precision of expression which is necessary for their exact verification; and that it has practically proved their value as guides to the discovery of new truth. All three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the whole physical cosmos. But, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, the first two grew, mainly, out of the consideration of physico-chemical phenomena; while the third, in great measure, owes its rehabilitation, if not its origin, to the study of biological phenomena.
In the early decades of this century, a number of important truths applicable, in part, to matter in general, and, in part, to particular forms of matter, had been ascertained by the physicists and chemists.
The laws of motion of visible and tangible, or molar, matter had been worked out to a great degree of refinement and embodied in the branches of science known as Mechanics, Hydrostatics, and Pneumatics. These laws had been shown to hold good, so far as they could be checked by observation and experiment, throughout the universe, on the assumption that all such masses of matter possessed inertia and were susceptible of acquiring motion, in two ways, firstly by impact, or impulse from without; and, secondly, by the operation of certain hypothetical causes of motion termed 'forces,' which were usually supposed to be resident in the particles of the masses themselves, and to operate at a distance, in such a way as to tend to draw any two such masses together, or to separate them more widely.
With respect to the ultimate constitution of these masses, the same two antagonistic opinions which had existed since the time of Democritus and of Aristotle were still face to face. According to the one, matter was discontinuous and consisted of minute indivisible particles or atoms, separated by a universal vacuum; according to the other, it was continuous, and the finest distinguishable, or imaginable, particles were scattered through the attenuated general substance of the plenum. A rough analogy to the latter case would be afforded by granules of ice diffused through water; to the former, such granules diffused through absolutely empty space.
In the latter part
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