Carl von Littrow

“ There is no science which has not its æsthetic side, as there is no study of form which may not be advanced by having a basis in fact. Philologists and historians of late have been desirous of having their studies classed among inductive sciences; the investigator of Nature feels more and more every day that he has, perhaps, too long neglected the deductive method. And philosophy itself, the science of sciences, can it subsist without a fundamental knowledge of the grounds of all the sciences? ”

“ Without philosophy any high degree of intellectual development, in any direction whatever, is inconceivable. Even they who turn away with contempt from Philosophy are, in spite of themselves, compelled to have recourse to her. She alone brings clearness in thoughts upon the nature of one's chosen pursuit—thoughts from which there is no escape for whoever thinks!
Let it then he your firm resolve, students of the high-school par excellence, not to attend the lectures simply of one faculty, or of one branch of a faculty. ”

“ The senses, it is true, supply the material—the conscious, or mediate substructure—for the grandest systems of thought; but yet in their further development they must be subject to the action of the culture to which they themselves gave rise. Though at first they were our preceptors, now they are oftentimes our pupils. In seeing we have, perhaps, more need of the understanding than of the eye, just as in walking we could better dispense with strong legs than with sound lungs. ”

“ But then we are the descendants of generations of men who from infancy were taught to put their organs of sense to the sternest test, and to take note even of the faintest sense-impressions; our eyes have been schooled, and in this special instance of the Pleiades they are not so much dazzled by the brighter stars as guided by them to the stars in their neighborhood, for, in fact, more than one half of the fourteen stars are of a magnitude far below the commonly-accepted limit of vision for the naked eye. ”

“ The disciplined eye, though of feeble power, descries more objects difficult to be discerned than the strong but unpractised organ. This is true of the microscope and telescope as well as of the naked eye; and the student of Nature to-day, even with the imperfect instruments of his predecessors, sees much more than they. Who is there that has not innumerable times had experience of the dependence of the senses on the understanding, in the fact that, when he is intent on seeing a definite object, his eye becomes almost insensible to all other objects? ”

“ Every one knows of the clear skies which canopy the homes of the early civilizations—Italy, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Arabia. The purity of the atmosphere enjoyed by these regions is shown by the importance attached by the ancients to the knowledge of the rising and setting of certain stars. In our countries astronomy must have been precluded from taking the same direction by the fact that but rarely do we see the stars near the horizon, to say nothing of seeing them on the horizon, owing to the presence of haze, which in these regions nearly always narrows the field of view. ”

“ Hold in high esteem the ancients in all things wherein they were and still are our teachers. Despise not your less remote predecessors and your contemporaries the world over in matters wherein they alone are the authorities. ”

“ Again, is it not amazing that for thousands of years mankind should have been in presence of so frequent a phenomenon as the zodiacal light—a phenomenon which in southern latitudes is specially impressive—without considering it to be worthy of mention, or rather, let us say, without seeing it, until Childrey, in the middle of the seventeenth century, discovered it, if we may so speak? ”

“ The hypothesis of the Stoics, who affirmed the moon to be a globe of fire, on the surface of which rests the atmosphere, is rejected on the ground that in that case the moon would need some matter whereon to rest, and from which it might derive fuel for its fire. We are informed that, according to Pindar, the earth is propped up all round by pillars with bases of adamant, whereas, according to the Stoics, she has no need of supports, being situate in the centre of the universe toward which all things tend. ”

“ We have learned to observe, to choose favorable conditions, to know what is a really clear atmosphere; we know that small stars in the vicinity of bright ones are far more readily descried in twilight than in the depth of night, the brightness of the larger stars in the latter case obscuring the smaller. Hipparchus errs in saying that moonlight is a hinderance to such observation: keen eyes may, with a bright full moon shining, count as many as fifteen stars in the Pleiades. ”

“ The educated man is more than a virtuoso, than a specialist; his power does not lie in the exercise of one faculty alone. . . . The man who harmoniously combines within himself the largest number of diverse faculties is a leader of men, though he be surpassed by others in the development of individual faculties. Here we have the fruits of true humanism, of true culture, which is ever aiming at the establishing of an inward equilibrium in the individual as in the state. ”

“ We cite two or three further instances to show how the idealistic bias of the ancients, which culminated in Aristotelism, has almost down to our own times diverted men from simple but correct views of the world of sense.
The amazing progress of observational astronomy during the last two centuries is in great measure due to the hippy accident of our hemisphere containing a bright polar star. Sundry investigations can be made only with regard to stars near the pole, and all the more easily, of course, and with smaller instruments, the larger the star happens to be. ”

“ That in nearly every department of art—taking this terra in its widest sense—we are on the whole the miserable Epigoni of the ancients, is universally admitted, and the causes of our inferiority are well enough understood. On the contrary, the reasons of our own preëminence in the exact sciences are by no means so generally known. ”

“ While, on the one hand, the principle of the division of labor, without which human progress is inconceivable, restricts the functions of the individual within a comparatively narrow province: on the other hand, he only can wisely elect to labor in such a province, and can work the field profitably, who does not lack comprehensiveness. ”

“ Not till after the invention of the telescope could Sir Christopher Heyden, in 1610, write as follows, showing the power of the new instrument: "I see with my telescope eleven stars in the Pleiades, though never before were more than seven distinguished." But how stands the case to-day? At present they who discern these eleven stars with the naked eye are considered anything but prodigies; indeed, I am acquainted with persons—not professional astronomers, but laymen—who can make out from fourteen to sixteen stars in this group. ”

“ To account for this backwardness in the investigation of a subject which certainly possessed at least as much interest for the ancients as for ourselves, by declaring it to be the result of their superficiality, were an injustice to the olden time, seeing that in other respects it commands our unconditional admiration for its arduous achievements. ”

“ The sudden arrival at a truth from all sides—a thing so frequent in the history of the sciences, which often makes it hard to decide to whom the honor of new discoveries properly belongs—of itself shows that cultivated minds in general have grasped the idea. The human race might be compared to a traveler in unexplored countries. ”

“ The third opinion combated by Plutarch is to the effect that the moon is a mixture of air and of a mild kind of fire; as sometimes during a perfect calm the surface of a body of water becomes ruffled—a thing itself to be demonstrated—so too does the air assume a blackish color: thus is explained the appearance as of a human face in the moon. ”

“ We have in German a term which very happily expresses the faculty, possessed by the most eminent of scientific geniuses, of discovering the important phases of ordinary phenomena: such men are said to have "Blick." Have we not an instance of a higher visual faculty, exalted not only by genius, but also by comprehensive knowledge, when a Gauss was led by the glistening of the windows of a church-tower which he was observing with his telescope to the idea of his heliotrope—an instrument without which no accurate triangulation is nowadays ever thought of ”

“ By way of antithesis to a generally-received proverb, we may with more justice, though less poetry, declare that the simplicity of the child's understanding dwells on what is unimportant, but commonly passes by unnoticed what is really of moment. ”

“ The objection that the spots on the moon are too large to be thus accounted for is met with the noteworthy proposition that it is the remoteness of the light from the body casting the shadow, and not the size of the body, that makes a shadow large ”

“ Coming back to the principal question under discussion, the solitary interlocutor in this dialogue maintains that, even granting the impossibility of ponderous, earth-like bodies moving in the heavens, it does not follow thence that the moon is not another earth, but only that it happens to be in a region to which it does not by its nature belong. Man, for example, in like manner has his ponderous, earth-like parts in the upper region of his body, in the head, and the warm, fire-like parts in the lower ”

“ That what they needed was to have their senses trained to this kind of work, and that, although they had keen appreciation of art, they never learned to look at things with the eye of the investigator of Nature, will be better understood from a statement of what they knew about individual celestial objects than of what they knew about the entire firmament. ”

“ Over and above the studies special to your future calling, do not fail to acquire as liberal an education as possible. Postpone purely specialist studies to the time when you will not only have to receive, but also to give—to produce. ”

“ Mankind had to observe this star for thousands of years before they saw, what any child may see when its attention is directed to the object, that here are two stars (one of the third and one of the fourth magnitude) so close together as to coalesce into one when hastily viewed. Again, it was the Arabians who noted this circumstance. ”

“ For only a little over a hundred years have we been following the right path. We have enlarged the capacities of our organs to an extraordinary degree; we have learned to warn our senses of the veils with which preconceived philosophical ideas were wont to blindfold them; we prize the good-fortune which places in our hands any important clew to the working of Nature ”

“ As the booty he brings home is rich in proportion to the extent of his own intellectual acquirements, which enable him to distinguish what is new from what is hackneyed, so mankind has need of schooling in order to understand what is of importance in the events occurring round about. ”

“ This last opinion is declared to be untenable, because the earth, whose surface is so broken with elevations and depressions, must then be considered as spherical, and that would imply the existence of antipodes clambering up and down the earth's sides like lizards. ”

“ We must the more expect them to describe things hardly visible to us as our present division of the northern heavens into constellations dates, as far as its main features are concerned, from at least 2,000 years ago, and the firmament formed an object of studious contemplation even then. Add to this the fact that, as early as the year 130 b. c., Hipparchus began to draw up a complete catalogue of all the fixed stars ”

“ The defectiveness of their observations can be more easily understood from the fact that for instance they reckoned 474 stars of the fourth magnitude, only 271 of the fifth, and finally only 49 of the sixth magnitude; whereas the fact is, that the number of stars increases so rapidly in the order of magnitudes that each succeeding class embraces a much larger number than all the classes that precede it. ”