The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The founders of the schools of the Middle Ages included astronomy, along with geometry, arithmetic, and music, as one of the four branches of advanced education; and, in this respect, it is only just to them to observe that they were far in advance of those who sit in their seats. The schoolmen considered no one to be properly educated unless he were acquainted with, at any rate, one branch of physical science. We have not, even yet, reached that stage of enlightenment.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles, as much as Bacon had underestimated it.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The progress of physical science has been effected neither by Baconians nor by Cartesians, as such but by men like Galileo and Harvey, Boyle and Newton, who would have done their work just as well if neither Bacon nor Descartes had ever propounded their views respecting the manner in which scientific investigation should be pursued.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

In considering the causes which considering hindered the progress of physical knowledge in the schools of Athens and of Alexandria, it has often struck me that where the Greeks did wonders was in just those branches of science, such as geometry, astronomy, and anatomy, which are susceptible of very considerable development without any, or any but the simplest, appliances.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It is a curious speculation to think what would have become of modern physical science if glass and alcohol had not been easily obtainable; and if the gradual perfection of mechanical skill for industrial ends had not enabled investigators to obtain, at comparatively little cost, microscopes, telescopes, and all the exquisitely delicate apparatus for determining weight and measure and for estimating the lapse of time with exactness, which they now command.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It has become obvious that the interests of science and of industry are identical; that science cannot make a step forward without, sooner or later, opening up new channels for industry; and, on the other hand, that every advance of industry facilitates those experimental investigations, upon which the growth of science depends.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

We may hope that, at last, the weary misunderstanding between the practical men who professed to despise science, and the high and dry philosophers who professed to despise practical results, is at an end.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The great steps in its [science's] progress have been made, are made, and will be made, by men who seek knowledge simply because they crave for it.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting. Men of moderate capacity have done great things because it animated them; and men of great natural gifts have failed, absolutely or relatively, because they lacked this one thing needful.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them. And, in scientific inquiry, at any rate, it is to that one or two that we must look for light and guidance.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

So far as physical science is concerned, the days of Admirable Crichtons have long been over, and the most indefatigable of hard workers may think he has done well if he has mastered one of its minor subdivisions. Nevertheless, it is possible for anyone, who has familiarised himself with the operations of science in one department, to comprehend the significance, and even to form a general estimate of the value, of the achievements of specialists in other departments.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

By a happy chance, the first edition of Whewell's 'History of the Inductive Sciences' was published in 1837, and it affords a very useful view of the state of things at the commencement of the Victorian epoch.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

I may hope... that my chance of escaping serious errors is as good as that of anyone else, who might have been persuaded to undertake the somewhat perilous enterprise in which I find myself engaged.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Physical science is one and indivisible. ...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 Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The validity of these postulates [of science] 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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Physical science... 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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Kepler was the wildest of guessers.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

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 Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The development of every branch of physical knowledge presents three stages which, in their logical relation, are successive.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The first [stage of physical knowledge] 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 Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

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 intellect.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

I think that there are three great products of our time... 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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Each of these [above doctrines] was foreshadowed more or less distinctly in former periods of the history of science... 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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

All three doctrines are intimately connected, and each is applicable to the whole physical cosmos. But... 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.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The doctrine of specific heat originated in the eighteenth century. It means that the same mass of a body, under the same circumstances, always requires the same quantity of heat to raise it to a given temperature, but that equal masses of different bodies require different quantities.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Another immense service rendered by Dalton, as a corollary of the new atomic doctrine, was the creation of a system of symbolic notation, which not only made the nature of chemical compounds and processes easily intelligible and easy of recollection, but, by its very form, suggested new lines of inquiry. The atomic notation was as serviceable to chemistry as the binomial nomenclature and the classificatory schematism of Linnæus were to zoölogy and botany.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Here, again, hypothesis proved to be of great value; not only was the search for evidence of diversity of molecular structure successful, but the study of the process of taking to pieces led to the discovery of the way to put together; and vast numbers of compounds, some of them previously known only as products of the living economy, have thus been artificially constructed.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It is largely because the chemical theory and practice of our epoch have passed into this deductive and synthetic stage, that they are entitled to the name of the 'New Chemistry' which they commonly receive.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

If this ether is a continuous substance... we have got back from the hypothesis of Dalton to that of Descartes. But there is much reason to believe that science is going to make a still further journey, and, in form, if not altogether in substance, to return to the point of view of Aristotle.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

If the material units of the existing order of nature are specialised portions of a relatively homogeneous materia prima—which were originated under conditions that have long ceased to exist and which remain unchanged and unchangeable under all conditions, whether natural or artificial, hitherto known to us—it follows that the speculation that they may be indefinitely altered, or that new units may be generated under conditions yet to be discovered, is perfectly legitimate.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Theoretically, at any rate, the transmutability of the elements is a verifiable scientific hypothesis; and such inquiries as those which have been set afoot, into the possible dissociative action of the great heat of the sun upon our elements, are not only legitimate, but are likely to yield results which, whether affirmative or negative, will be of great importance.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It seems safe to prophesy that the hypothesis of the evolution of the elements from a primitive matter will, in future, play no less a part in the history of science than the atomic hypothesis, which, to begin with, had no greater, if so great, an empirical foundation.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

In the old philosophy, a curious conjunction of ethical and physical prejudices had led to the notion that there was something ethically bad and physically obstructive about matter. Aristotle attributes all irregularities and apparent dysteleologies in nature to the disobedience, or sluggish yielding, of matter to the shaping and guiding influence of those reasons and causes which were hypostatised in his ideal 'Forms.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It was not until 1843, that clear and unquestionable experimental proof was given of the fact that there is a definite relation between mechanical work and heat; that so much work always gives rise, under the same conditions, to so much heat, and so much heat to so much mechanical work. Thus originated the mechanical theory of heat, which became the starting-point of the modern doctrine of the conservation of energy.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Molar motion had appeared to be destroyed by friction. It was proved that no destruction took place, but that an exact equivalent of the energy of the lost molar motion appears as that of the molecular motion, or motion of the smallest particles of a body, which constitutes heat.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

In so far as matter may be conceived to exist in a purely passive state, it is, imaginably, older than motion.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Newton expressly repudiated the notion of the existence of attractive forces, in the sense in which that term is ordinarily understood; and he refused to put forward any hypothesis as to the physical cause of the so-called 'attraction of gravitation.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The doctrine of the conservation of energy which I have endeavored to illustrate is thus defined by the late Clerk Maxwell: 'The total energy of any body or system of bodies is a quantity which can neither be increased nor diminished by any mutual action of such bodies, though it may be transformed into any one of the forms of which energy is susceptible.'

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Energy, like matter, is indestructible and ingenerable in nature.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

The phenomenal world, so far as it is material, expresses the evolution and involution of energy, its passage from the kinetic to the potential condition and back again.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Wherever motion of matter takes place, that motion is effected at the expense of part of the total store of energy.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

As the phenomena exhibited by living beings, in so far as they are material, are all molar or molecular motions, these are included under the general law [of the conservation of energy].

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

That a particular molecular motion does give rise to a state of consciousness is experimentally certain; but the how and why of the process are just as inexplicable as in the case of the communication of kinetic energy by impact.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

When dealing with the doctrine of the ultimate constitution of matter, we found a certain resemblance between the oldest speculations and the newest doctrines of physical philosophers. But there is no such resemblance between the ancient and modern views of motion and its causes, except in so far as the conception of attractive and repulsive forces may be regarded as the modified descendant of the Aristotelian conception of forms.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the Italians and of Hutton; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Those who still repeat the once favorible objection that Darwin's 'Origin of Species' is nothing but a new version of the 'Philosophie zoologique' will find that so late as 1844, Whewell had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main theorem, even as a logical possibility. In fact, the publication of that theorem by Darwin and Wallace, in 1859, took all the biological world by surprise.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Two centuries ago England was devastated by the plague; cleanliness and common sense were enough to free us from its ravages. One century since, small-pox was almost as great a scourge; science, though working empirically, and almost in the dark, has reduced that evil to relative insignificance. ...sooner or later it will deal in the same way with diphtheria, typhoid and scarlet fever.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

There is no reasonable ground for believing that the oldest remains yet obtained carry us even near the beginnings of life. The impressive warnings of Lyell against hasty speculations, based upon negative evidence, have been fully justified; time after time, highly organised types have been discovered in formations of an age in which the existence of such forms of life had been confidently declared to be impossible.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

Geology is, as it were, the biology of our planet as a whole. In so far as it comprises the surface configuration and the inner structure of the earth, it answers to morphology; in so far as it studies changes of condition and their causes, it corresponds with physiology; in so far as it deals with the causes which have effected the progress of the earth from its earliest to its present state, it forms part of the general doctrine of evolution.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

It should never be forgotten that what we call 'catastrophes,' are, in relation to the earth, changes, the equivalents of which would be well represented by the development of a few pimples, or the scratch of a pin on a man's head.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century

There is no study better fitted than that of geology to impress upon men of general culture that conviction of the unbroken sequence of the order of natural phenomena, throughout the duration of the universe, which is the great, and perhaps the most important, effect of the increase of natural knowledge.

— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century