Frederick Joseph Bramwell

“ But out of this contemplation of Nature, and out of man's thought concerning her, there has in these later times arisen that conception of the constancy of Nature to which I have referred, and which at length has become the guiding conception of modern thought. It has ceased to be almost conceivable to any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should follow anything but the natural order of cause and effect. ”

“ Countless thousands of species of animals and plants, as perfectly recognizable as those which you meet with in museums at the present day, or as the shells and remains which you pick up upon the beach—countless thousands of species of these creatures have been imbedded in the sand or mud, or limestone, just as they are being imbedded now. They furnish us with a record, the general nature of which cannot be subject to any misinterpretation, as to the kind of things that have lived upon the surface of the earth during the time that is registered by this great thickness of stratified rock. ”

“ Suppose that a man tells you that he saw a person strike another and kill him; that is testimonial evidence of the fact of murder. But it is possible to have circumstantial evidence of the fact of murder; that is to say, you may find a man dying with a wound upon his head having exactly the form and character of the wound which is made by an axe, and, with due care to take surrounding circumstances into account, you may conclude with the utmost certainty that the man has been murdered—is dying in consequence of the violence inflicted by that implement. ”

“ WE live and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature, and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. ”

“ What will first strike you is, that that is an hypothesis which, whether true or false, is not capable of verification by evidence; for, in order to secure testimony to an eternity of duration, you must have an eternity of witnesses or an infinity of circumstances, and neither of these is attainable. It is utterly impossible that such evidence should be carried beyond a certain point of time, and all that could be said at most should be that there was nothing to contradict the hypothesis. ”

“ We have come to look upon the present as the child of the past and as the parent of the future; and, as we have excluded chance from any share or part in the order of things, so in the present order of Nature men have come to neglect, even as a possibility, the notion of any interference with that order. And, whatever may be men's speculative notions upon those points, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and the relation of cause to effect unchanged. ”

“ In fact, there is no belief which we entertain which has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. ”

“ It is such a man as this who, when semaphores were invented, would have said, "Don't suggest such a mode to me of transmitting messages; I am a practical man, sir, and I believe that the way to transmit a message is to write it on paper, deliver it to a messenger, and put him on horseback." ”

“ Cautious men will admit that such a change in the order of Nature may have been possible, just as a very candid thinker may admit that there may be a world in which two and two do not make four, and in which two straight lines do not inclose a space. ”

“ The appearances which were formerly interpreted that way have all been shown to be delusive as our knowledge has increased and as the blanks between the different formations have been filled up. It can now be shown that there is no absolute break between formation and formation, that there has been no sudden disappearance of all the forms of life at one time and replacement by another, but that everything has gone on slowly and gradually, that one form has died out and another has taken its place, and that thus by slow degrees one fauna has been replaced by another. ”

“ We are very much in the habit of considering circumstantial evidence as of less value than testimonial evidence, and it may be in many cases, where the circumstances are not perfectly clear and perfectly intelligible, that it is a dangerous and uncertain kind of evidence; but it must not be forgotten that in many cases it is quite as good as testimonial evidence, and that not unfrequently it is a great deal better than testimonial evidence. ”

“ The circumstantial evidence is better and more convincing than the testimonial evidence, for it is impossible, under the circumstances that I have mentioned, to suppose that the man had met his death from any cause but the violent blow of an axe wielded by another man. The circumstantial evidence in favor of a murder having been committed, in that case, is as complete and as convincing as evidence can be. It is evidence which is open to no doubt and no falsification. ”

“ His instinct revolts at the notion that you, a stranger, very likely his junior, and very probably, if the improvement be an original and radical one, a person not even connected with the trade to which that improvement relates, should dare to assert that you can inform him of something connected with his business that he did not know. It may be said that employers and the heads of manufactories are, as a rule, in these days, educated gentlemen, and that therefore it is wrong to impute to them the narrow-mindedness of the practical man. ”

“ For example, I have discarded the title of the hypothesis of creation, because my present business is not with the question as to how Nature has originated, as to the causes which have led to her origination, but as to the manner and order of the appearance of natural objects. Our present inquiry is not why the objects which constitute Nature came into existence, but when they came into existence, and in what order. ”

“ So that, within the whole of the immense period indicated by these stratified rocks, there is assuredly—leaving evolution out of the question altogether—not the slightest trace of any break in the uniformity of Nature's operations, not a shadow of indication that events have followed other than their natural and orderly sequence. ”

“ This is the truly practical man, about whom I have nothing to say except that which is most laudatory. But the practical man as commonly understood means a man who knows the practice of his trade, and knows nothing else concerning it; the man whose wisdom consists in standing by, seeing but not investigating the new discoveries which are taking place around him ”

“ We can say with certainty that such has not been the course of Nature. We can say with certainty that the present condition of things has existed for a comparatively short period; and that, so far as animal and vegetable nature are concerned, it has been preceded by a different condition of things. We can pursue this evidence until we reach the lowest of stratified rocks, in which we lose the indications of life altogether. The hypothesis of the eternity of the present condition of things may, therefore, be put out of court. ”

“ I placed before you in a few words, some little time ago, a statement of the sum and substance of Milton's hypothesis. Let me try now to put before you as briefly the effect of the circumstantial evidence as to the past history of the earth which is written without the possibility of mistake, with no chance of error, in the stratified rocks. What we find is, that that great series of formations represents a period of time of which our human chronologies hardly afford us a unit of measure. ”

“ But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our broadest generalizations are simply statements of the highest degrees of probability. ”

“ Bessemer, who was beset for years by difficulties of detail in his great scheme of improvement in the manufacture of steel. As long as he was so beset the practical men chorused, "He is a schemer; he is one of the schemers; it is a scheme." Supposing that these practical difficulties had beaten Mr. Bessemer, and that they had not been overcome to this day? The practical man would have derided him still as a schemer, although the theory and groundwork of his invention would have been as true under these circumstances as it now is. ”

“ I will, if you please, in the first place, state to you what are the views which have been entertained respecting the order of Nature in the past, and then I will consider what evidence is in our possession bearing upon these views, and by what light of criticism that evidence is to be interpreted. So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of Nature. ”

“ It is a species of profanation to suggest, but I must suggest it, for it is true, that Watt, Stephenson, Faraday, and almost every other name among the honored dead to whose inventive genius we owe the development that has taken place within the last century in all the luxuries, the comforts, even the bare necessities of our daily existence, would, in their day, and while struggling for success, have been spoken of as schemers, even in respect of those very inventions of which we are now enjoying the fruits. ”

“ And you will understand that what was meant by plants are plants which now live—the trees and shrubs which we now have. One of two things—either the existing plants have been the result of a separate origination of which we have no record or ground for supposition, or else they have arisen by process of evolution from the original stock. And, in the second place, it is clear that there was no animal life before the fourth day, and that on the fourth day marine animals and birds appeared. ”

“ I agree that in numerous instances this would he wrong; but the fact is that, in many cases—I think I may say in most cases—the head of the establishment, the moneyed man, the man who, by his commercial ability (that most necessary element in all establishments) , keeps the concern going by finding lucrative orders, is not intimately acquainted with the practice of the business carried on by his firm; he relies upon some manager or foreman, who, too commonly, is not the real, but the so-called practical man. ”

“ It has taken long ages of accumulated and often fruitless labor to enable man to look steadily at the. shifting scenes, phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that there has emerged the conception of a pervading order and a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature. ”

“ I think it becomes a scientific body like the British Association to laud the generous effort of the unsuccessful inventor, rather than to encourage the cold selfishness of the man who stands by and sees others endeavor to raise the structure of improvement without lending a hand to help, and even sneers at the builders, but, when the structure is fully raised and solidly established, claims to come in to inhabit, and, being in, probably essays, cuckoo-like, to oust the builders and to take possession for his own benefit. ”

“ Hutton imagined that something of the same kind may go on in the earth, although no one recognized more clearly than he the fact that the dry land is being constantly washed down by rain and rivers and deposited in the sea, and that thus in a certain length of time, greater or shorter, the inequalities of the earth's surface must be leveled, and its high lands brought down to the sea. ”

“ To them the title of practical man has most improperly been attributed, and it is on the advice of such men that the true heads of the firm too commonly regulate their conduct as to the management of their business, and as to the necessary changes to be made in the way of improvement.
As I have said, the practical man derides those who bring forward new inventions, and calls them schemers. No doubt, whatever they do scheme-and well it is for the country that there are men who do so-it also may be true that the majority of schemes prove abortive ”

“ In this great Carboniferous formation whence America has derived so vast a proportion of her actual and potential wealth, in that formation and in the beds of coal which are formed from the vegetation of that period, we find abundant evidence of the existence of terrestrial animals. ”

“ I am a practical man, and I believe in semaphores, which I can see working." In like manner when the Siemens' regenerative gas-furnace was introduced, what said the practical man? "Turn your coals into gas and burn the gas, and then talk of regeneration! ”