William Whewell

“ But in conceiving that all the myriads of successive species, which we find in the earth's strata, have come into being by a law which is now operating, we have nothing to start from. We have seen, and know of, no such change; all sober and skilful naturalists reject it, as a fact not belonging to our time. We have here to build a theory without materials;—to sum a series of which every term, so far as we know, is nothing;—to introduce into our scientific reasonings an assumption contrary to all scientific knowledge. ”

“ No one, with his contemplations calmed and filled and harmonized by the view of the known constitution of the universe, its machinery “wheeling unshaken” in the farthest skies and in the darkest cavern, its vital spirit breathing alike effectively in the veins of the philosopher and the worm;—no one, under the influence of such a train of contemplations, can possibly admit into his mind a persuasion which makes the moral part of our nature a collection of inconsistent and futile impressions, of idle dreams and warring opinions, each having the same claims to our acceptance. ”

“ When men merely repeat the terms of science, without attaching to them any clear conceptions;—when their apprehensions become vague and dim;—when they assent to scientific doctrines as a matter of tradition, rather than of conviction, on trust rather than on sight;—when science is considered as a collection of opinions, rather than a record of laws by which the universe is really governed;—it must inevitably happen, that men will lose their hold on the knowledge which the great discoverers who preceded them have brought to light. ”

“ Jupiter and his array of Moons, Saturn with his still larger host of Satellites, and with his wonderful Ring, and the other large and distant Planets, will lose nothing of their majesty, in our eyes, by being uninhabited; any more than the summer-clouds, which perhaps are formed of the same materials, lose their dignity from the same cause;—any more than our Moon, one of the tribe of satellites, loses her soft and tender beauty, when we have ascertained that she is more barren of inhabitants than the top of Mount Blanc. ”

“ We believe each appearance to come into existence,—we conceive every change to take place,—not only with something preceding it, but something by which it is made to be what it is. An effect without a cause;—an event without a preceding condition involving the efficacy by which the event is produced;—are suppositions which we cannot for a moment admit. That the connexion of effect with cause is universal and necessary, is a universal and constant conviction of mankind. It persists in the minds of all men, undisturbed by all the assaults of sophistry and skepticism ”

“ As soon as the leading term of a new theory has been pronounced and understood, all the phenomena change their aspect. There is a standard to which we cannot help referring them. We cannot fall back into the helpless and bewildered state in which we gazed at them when we possessed no principle which gave them unity. Eclipses arrive in mysterious confusion: the notion of a Cycle dispels the mystery. The Planets perform a tangled and mazy dance; but Epicycles reduce the maze to order. The Epicycles themselves run into confusion; the conception of an Ellipse makes all clear and simple. ”

“ The whole fabric of chemistry rests, even at the present day, upon the opposition of acids and bases: an acid was certainly at first known by its sensible qualities, and how otherwise, even now, do we perceive its quality? It was a great discovery of modern times that earths and alkalies have for their bases metals: but what are metals? or how, except from lustre, hardness, weight, and the like, do we recognize a body as a metal? And how, except by such characters, even before its analysis, was it known to be an earth or an alkali? ”

“ And as the infinite extent which we necessarily ascribe to space, allows us to find room, without any mental difficulty, for the vast distances which astronomy reveals, and even leaves us rather embarrassed with the infinite extent which lies beyond our farthest explorations; so the infinite duration which we, in like manner, necessarily ascribe to past time, makes it easy for us, so far as our powers of intellect are concerned, to go millions of millions of years backwards, in order to trace the beginning of the earth's existence,—the first step of terrestrial creation. ”

“ Now it is clear that certain individual objects are all called man, or all called tree, in virtue of some resemblance which they have. If we had not the power of perceiving in the appearances around us, likeness and unlikeness, we could not consider objects as distributed into kinds at all. The impressions of sense would throng upon us, but being uncompared with each other, they would flow away like the waves of the sea, and each vanish from our contemplation when the sensation faded. ”

“ In trying to make others understand them, they learnt to understand themselves. Their speculations were begun in twilight, and ended in the full brilliance of day. It was not easily and at once, without expenditure of labour or time, that men arrived at those notions which now form the elements of our knowledge; on the contrary, we have, in the history of science, seen how hard, discoverers, and the forerunners of discoverers, have had to struggle with the indistinctness and obscurity of the intellect, before they could advance to the critical point at which truth became clearly visible. ”

“ If we can conceive this care employed on a million of persons, on the population of a kingdom, of a city, of a street, there is no real difficulty in supposing it extended to every planet in the solar system, admitting each to be peopled as ours is; nor to every part of the universe, supposing each star the centre of such a system. Numbers are nothing in themselves; and when we reject the known, but unessential limits of our own faculties, it is quite as allowable to suppose a million millions of earths, as one, to be under the moral government of God. ”

“ To him it will appear natural and reasonable, that after journeying so long among the beautiful and orderly laws by which the universe is governed, we find ourselves at last approaching to a Source of order and law, and intellectual beauty:—that, after venturing into the region of life and feeling and will, we are led to believe the Fountain of life and will not to be itself unintelligent and dead, but to be a living Mind, a Power which aims as well as acts. To us this doctrine appears like the natural cadence of the tones to which we have so long been listening ”

“ One school of moral discipline, one theatre of moral action, one arena of moral contests for the highest prizes, is a sufficient centre for innumerable hosts of stars and planets, globes of fire and earth, water and air, whether or not tenanted by corals and madrepores, fishes and creeping things. So great and majestic are those names of Right and Good, Duty and Virtue, that all mere material or animal existence is worthless in the comparison. ”

“ We have spoken of the common opposition of Theory and Fact as important, and as involving what we have called the Fundamental Antithesis of Philosophy. But after all, it may be asked, Is this distinction of Theory and Fact really tenable? Is it not often difficult to say whether a special part of our knowledge is a Fact or a Theory? Is it a Fact or a Theory that the stars revolve round the pole? Is it a Fact or a Theory that the earth is a globe revolving on its axis? Is it a Fact or a Theory that the earth travels in an ellipse round the sun? ”

“ We may add, that it is, in addition to all that we have hitherto noticed, a constant source of utility and beauty in its effects on light. Without air we should see nothing, except objects on which the sun’s rays fell, directly or by reflection. It is the atmosphere which converts sunbeams into daylight, and fills the space in which we are with illumination.
The contemplation of the atmosphere, as a machine which answers all these purposes, is well suited to impress upon us the strongest conviction of the most refined, far-seeing, and far-ruling contrivance. ”

“ Art is progressive. Instinct is mute; it acts, but gives no rules for acting: Art can speak; she can lay down rules. But though Art is thus separate from Instinct, she is not essentially combined with Insight. She can see what to do, but she needs not to see why it is done. She may lay down Rules, but it is not her business to give Reasons. When man makes that his employment, he enters upon the domain of Science. Art takes the phenomena and laws of nature as she finds them: that they are multiplied, complex, capricious, incoherent, disturbs her not. ”

“ If you ask of them how they defend these monstrosities—how things do not fall away from the earth on that side—they reply, that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend towards the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the centre towards the heavens on all sides. Now I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another. ”

“ But the point for us to remark is, the immeasurable, the inconceivable length of time, if any length of time could be inconceivable, which is required of our thoughts, by this new assumption of the constant production of new species, as a law of creation. We might feel ourselves well nigh overwhelmed, when, by looking at processes which we see producing only a few feet of height or breadth or depth during the life of man, we are called upon to imagine the construction of Alps and Andes,—when we have to imagine a world made a few inches in a century. ”

“ How are we to learn that the colour of a rose arises from the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of its particles? Certainly our senses do not teach us this; and in what other way, on Locke’s principles, can we learn it? Reid’s statement is not more free from the same objection. How does it appear that our notion of Warmth is relative to our own sensations more than our notion of Solidity? And if we take Brown’s account, we may still ask whether our selection of certain qualities to form our idea and definition of Matter be arbitrary and without reason? ”

“ The sense of beauty both animates and refines his domestic tendencies; the love of art is a powerful instrument for raising him above the mere cravings and satisfactions of his animal nature; the expansion of mind which rises in us at the sight of the starry sky, the cloud-capt mountain, the boundless ocean, seems intended to direct our thoughts by an impressive though indefinite feeling, to the Infinite Author of All. ”

“ In passing from Astronomy to Mechanics we make a transition from the formal to the physical sciences;—from time and space to force and matter;—from phenomena to causes. Hitherto we have been concerned only with the paths and orbits, the periods and cycles, the angles and distances, of the objects to which our sciences applied, namely, the heavenly bodies. How these motions are produced;—by what agencies, impulses, powers, they are determined to be what they are;—of what nature are the objects themselves;—are speculations which we have hitherto not dwelt upon. ”

“ Though Priestley made some important steps in chemistry, he could not bring his mind to admit the doctrine of a general Principle of Oxidation. How many ingenious men in the last century rejected the Newtonian Attraction as an impossible chimera! How many more, equally intelligent, have, in the same manner, in our own time, rejected, I do not now mean as false, but as inconceivable, the doctrine of Luminiferous Undulations! To err in this way is the lot, not only of men in general, but of men of great endowments, and very sincere love of truth. ”

“ Indeed, in the course of human progress, and especially in recent times, and in our own country, man employs instead of, or in addition to the hand, innumerable instruments to make nature serve his needs and do his will. He works by Tools and Machinery, derivative hands, which increase a hundred-fold the power of the natural hand. Shall we try to ascend to a New Period, to imagine a New Creature, by supposing this power increased hundreds and thousands of times more, so that nature should obey man, and minister to his needs, in an incomparably greater degree than she now does? ”

“ We have to examine the structure and scheme, not of a shapeless mass of incoherent materials, of which we doubt whether it be a ruin or a natural wilderness, but of a fair and lofty palace, still erect and tenanted, where hundreds of different apartments belong to a common plan, where every generation adds something to the extent and magnificence of the pile. The certainty and the constant progress of science are things so unquestioned, that we are at least engaged in an intelligible inquiry, when we are examining the grounds and nature of that certainty, the causes and laws of that progress. ”