Charles Tappan Haviland

“ Like the famous German, who, instead of going to see the camel he was to describe, pursued the easier and more fascinating method of evolving him from his own inner consciousness, the Greek philosopher evolved the universe from his. ”

“ It must be ever borne in mind that the scientist, as a scientist, has nothing to do with the metaphysical or theological implications of the words he uses. He employs them, as we have endeavored to point out, simply and purely to designate the occurrence of phenomena in a certain order which, could we sufficiently magnify our powers of observation, would be presented to our sensation in unequivocal terms. When the scientist transcends these limits, and then only, he is going beyond the bounds of science. ”

“ Add to the productive period twenty centuries, and we embrace the whole. Think of the average life of fourscore men spanning the totality of human knowledge! Truly, science is in its infancy. What were the speculations of the men who existed a few centuries prior to our era, we have no record. After the dim poetical aspirations which compose the earliest known philosophy, there emerges a pseudo-scientific natural philosophy, which, disdaining the shackles that a constant reference to the phenomena of nature would impose upon its flights, attempts at once to solve the problem of the universe. ”

“ That one learns the boundlessness of knowledge only in proportion to his own acquirements is a saying famous only for its triteness. What are certainties to the ignorant are uncertainties to the intelligent. What are dogmas to the blind followers of a fanatical priesthood are for ever insoluble problems to the man of science. ”

“ Mind is his sole measure of nature. He looks nowhere else for an interpreter, and knows no other source of knowledge. He interprets natural phenomena by mental qualities, and this prepossession colors all his theories. The history of science is the history of the gradual demolition of this tendency. The mental distance from a savage that personifies the tree, the forest, and the stream, to a Kepler that conceives it necessary to place a guiding spirit in the planets to keep them in their courses, is, of course, immense, and each is indicative of the thought of his time ”

“ There would be no science of astronomy, no knowledge of the law of gravitation, none of physics, so far as it was dependent upon astronomy. The sciences so act and react on one another that it is difficult to say just how far the absence of one would affect the others, but we know it would greatly. Such suppositions as we have made may be more or less fully realized in other worlds, and we can thus see that their science may differ very widely from ours and still be no less correct. Science is everywhere relative to the facts with which it has to deal. ”

“ Ignorant of the vast ancestry of human experience, it is no wonder that men should have been ready to accept any but the true explanation of our belief in the laws of nature, and should have been unable to discern any relationship between those laws which to them appeared necessary and immutable and those newly discovered laws or sequences which they believed might be easily set aside. ”

“ The scientific tendency of thought, in which these men were pioneers, is now making havoc among the heirlooms of a past civilization. This tendency, which accepts nothing on mere assertion, and which forces every belief to produce its credentials, is now bringing its methods to bear upon the entities of metaphysics, and proving conclusively that they are of no nobler descent than the phenomena in which they originated. ”

“ Abstraction is necessary to all knowledge. As soon as we advance at all beyond the knowledge of concretes—as soon even as we begin to compare one thing with another, and note their resemblances and differences—so soon we commence the process of abstraction and generalization. This mental act is not only the foundation of all conscious classification, but it is itself the infancy of consciousness. ”

“ The diffuse light of mental theory must be concentrated to a small focus in order to produce any visible effect.
Knowledge is the concomitant of the progressive limitation of our powers. As long as man assumes that he contains within himself the premises of knowledge, so long will it elude his grasp. Not until experience has compelled him to doubt the validity of his mental concepts when applied to nature, and has forced him to have recourse to facts only, has man taken the first steps in the paths of science. ”

“ Viewed in the light of evolution, a law of nature is merely the most generalized expression for a particular occurrence of phenomena. Take, for instance, the law of the conservation of energy: observation, long continued, shows that with whatsoever objects we deal, and-however we may apparently destroy the energy contained in them, yet closer observation, with more accurate instruments, will discern that the energy previously visible has only disappeared to reappear in another form. ”

“ A modern writer, who certainly can not be accused of want of sympathy with a deductive philosophy, in comparing the relative merits of the a priori and a posteriori methods, observes that, although the latter may in general come somewhat nearer the facts of nature, yet, as it can never embrace all the phenomena in its inductions, it can never arrive at the whole truth; while the a priori method, if it chance to hit upon the right formula, has the whole universe, so to speak, at its fingers' ends. ”

“ Make the not very inconceivable supposition that our earth bore the same relation to the sun that the moon does to the earth—rotating once on its own axis to each revolution about the sun, and remaining nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic, thus always presenting the same side to the sun's rays—how would it have affected our knowledge of nature? ”

“ Early physical speculation, with hardly an exception, proceeds on the assumption that knowledge is derived primarily from the mind—thus completely inverting the true order. Would some of those persons who in our day attribute so much power to the unaided mind carefully peruse a history of science in the early centuries of our era and the centuries immediately preceding it, we think they would become convinced that purely mental speculation can never lead to any exact knowledge, but must, on the contrary, invariably be a source of obscurity and error. ”

“ We have seen every far-reaching theory become obsolete; and there is no reason to suppose that, at the present time, we shall be more successful. There is but one course that it is safe to pursue, namely, to be content to let insoluble problems remain as such—not attempting any mental theory concerning them—and confine ourselves to those problems that may offer some probability of solution, with the assurance that, however far the boundaries of knowledge may be extended, each successful solution will enlarge the horizon of the unknown beyond. ”

“ Sounds inaudible to us are heard by insects, and odors that we can not distinguish are smelled by animals. So we might go through the whole category of sensations and resulting ideas, and show their variation under different conditions; and yet, whatever may be the theory of knowledge we espouse, it is from these sensations and ideas that we form our conception of nature. ”

“ As long as there was no direct reference to experience, it appeared by no means improbable that a machine might be so constructed that, when once set in motion, it would never stop. Any one, who has had any experience with a class in mechanics, knows how crude are the notions they possess with reference to the very elements of physics. It is safe to assert that today not one person in ten possesses a thorough certainty of belief in the validity of the third law of motion, namely, that action and reaction are always equal ”

“ It is just here that the idea of necessity asserts its power. Take the most fundamental law of mechanics, or even (for the supposed necessity in each case arises in the same way) one of the primary axioms of mathematics, and, by an analysis of the genesis of these conceptions, we shall, with the aid of the light that the theory of evolution sheds into those obscure recesses of the mind where consciousness is coming into being, be enabled to perceive there the process of the growth of this mental necessity in direct correspondence with the evolution of the organism. ”

“ No psychological theory has greater probability than that which bases the units of knowledge in experience. Since the time of Locke and Hume, the drift of speculation has been steadily in the direction of a more or less modified empiricism. The more far-sighted of the intuitionists cast aside everything they thought could embarrass their theory, and were content to allow that the matter of thought was based upon experience, while reserving as the province of intuition the mental forms by which knowledge was possible. ”

“ Increasing the power of our senses artificially by the use of instruments has given us a vastly enlarged conception of nature; but every increase in knowledge shows us more clearly the limitation of the knowledge we possess. Truly, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
Science is continually teaching us the lesson that the universe is larger and more complex than formerly supposed. Old geographers, guided by an egoistic impulse, placed their own country in the center of the known earth ”

“ Mechanics went on inventing "perpetual motions," but, however plausible they looked, somehow or other they wouldn't work. Do away with friction to the greatest possible extent; overcome one obstacle here and another there; increase the time the machine would run indefinitely—still, to a state of equilibrium would it come at last. From these empirical observations mechanics learned, what philosophers might have learned years ago, that experience affords the only sure test of the validity of our notions. ”

“ It can not be too strongly impressed upon the minds of all that science has nothing to do with such conceptions. As science consists in the observation of phenomena and the deduction of the laws of their orderly occurrence, and as scientific hypothesis consists in the prediction of the order of the future occurrence of phenomena and the linking together of diverse phenomena under an assumed order, we see that there is no place where these realistic conceptions can enter. ”

“ Suction was explained by the famous principle that Nature abhors a vacuum, and, had it not been discovered that the abhorrence ceased at certain fixed limits, this explanation would probably have done service even to our day, for that class of philosophers for whom the kindred principle of vitality is a sufficient explanation of the various phenomena of life.
The few examples that have been cited give a fair sample of the science of the middle ages. During that long period the men imbued with a spirit of scientific research could be counted on one's fingers. ”

“ The fundamental difference between the scientific and religious conception of nature consists almost wholly in the manner of regarding abstract terms. Causes—efficient and final—mind, life, and the whole category of vast abstract entities, are to the religionist the most real of all existences; to the scientist they are merely generalized expressions, binding together a large class of phenomena.
The term science does not, like the name of a religious sect, denote the belief in a set dogmatic formula, nor the acceptance of a certain class of ideas. ”

“ Turning back to the early progress of human speculation, especially so far as it has reference to material objects, we see that all the first attempts at physical knowledge consisted, principally, of deductions from mental notions, with but little, if any, reference to phenomena. Beginning with the theories of the universe propounded by the Greek philosophers, we see that whatsoever progress was made in scientific acquisition was only in proportion to the occasional reactions from the excessive subjectivity that mostly prevailed. ”

“ In this brief sketch of past thought, we have seen that it was only as man has been content to acquire knowledge patiently, slowly, and arduously, by what are now known as scientific methods, that his knowledge has been of any practical value. ”

“ Force, cause, matter, and science itself are abstract terms, and when analyzed into their concretes will assume a meaning very different from that often given them. All that we scientifically know of force is, that it connotes the presence of motion (i. e., things moving) under different conditions. These we separate into actual and potential motion, and the cause of the motion into actual and potential force or energy. Here the necessity of the use of these abstract terms is at once apparent, as we can scarcely make an assertion without employing them. ”

“ All the recent advances in ethnology teach us that man, as far back as we can trace his beliefs, explained the universe by the only power that he knew—that which he was himself conscious of possessing. ”

“ We can not expect to be more fortunate ourselves. The principal objection to the development theory has been on the ground of its opposition to preconceived notions as to the reality of the mental conception "species," and to certain beliefs in vogue concerning the genesis of man, rather than to its assumed opposition to the facts of nature. Every theory has to run the gantlet of this extra-scientific criticism, and only when it is shown to have no possible bearing upon preconceived notions is it allowed to be settled simply upon its merits and by scientific methods. ”

“ It is a striking fact in the history of man that, out of the many centuries he has inhabited the earth, so few have been productive of any useful knowledge. Throw away everything that had been done previous to the fifteenth century, and the loss would have been by no means irreparable. ”