Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudichum

“ Even if it had been so originally, and the Latin word scientia had been merely the equivalent of the Saxon word knowledge, it would have to be admitted that the relations have changed by one of those conventions which are silent and convenient. We hold that the systemic enunciation of mere knowledge is doctrine; that science is a kind of knowledge, but that not all knowledge is science. ”

“ No serious person doubts now that the teachings of geology deserve the title of an exact science, and that compared to its coercing character upon the mind of man the convictions derived from written history are feeble in the extreme, and all contradictory writings, however old, mere nullities. The youngest of the sciences or branch of science is chemistry, founded by Lavoisier and Dalton; developed by thousands of clear heads and nimble hands, it has in half a century become a recognized power in the affairs of man. ”

“ Science did not progress until it rejected all innate ideas or phantasies, and applied itself deeply to its proper methods, to observation, to meditation on the correlation of forces, and to experiment. ”

“ There is no science about our present homes, or how could they get filled with sewer-gas, be devoid of arrangements for ventilation, and have square chimneys. Architecture, so called, is not a science, but an imitative art, beautiful but blundering. Manufactures have, too often, been carried on with great disregard of science, with the result that either empiricism was, for the time, successful enough, or that the manufacture went simply out of existence. ”

“ Kant's philosophy was great as long as it was based on the exact sciences, upon physics, and upon mathematics, but when he left that basis and went into the speculative philosophy he gradually went away from that basis which had made his early philosophy so sound and so full of meaning for the perfection of the human understanding. ”

“ The power of distinction, the mother of all knowledge, was not applied to all things, and consequently they termed a process such as fire an element, and allowed some all-pervading material to exist under the name of the quintessence. Bodies fell to the ground because they possessed weight; but that the falling was a reciprocal action between the earth and the body falling upon it escaped their observation, and was only found by science.
Mere observation is not science, but only the beginning of science. ”

“ Famines, epidemics, among men and cattle, and wars, are made possible or necessary only by the absence or faulty application of the principles taught by science. Science, by teaching that, and how, these evils are to be avoided, has a field in this generation, of which the past had not even a distant conception. Imitative learning shows itself mainly as art, buildings, sculptures, paintings; all the mass of temples and gods which fill the world's history and imagination are of this kind. There is no science about a Greek or Egyptian temple, simply because there is no value in it ”

“ When a person, sitting in the railway-train, beholds the traveling shadow, he makes an observation. He begins a scientific inquiry, when he asks whether the shadow travels as quickly as the train, so as to be in a line falling from the sun past the train or whether the shadow is not a little later. If once the question has arisen, it is immaterial where it is solved, whether upon the railway-train, or the satellites of Jupiter—the question must lead to the idea that light requires time for traveling; exact science determines this time by measuring space. ”

“ THE science of the present age is distinguishable from the learning of past ages by many important features. By these it has indeed somewhat altered the sense originally attributable to its name, and science has become a word of greater precision, and therefore of a less broad significance than what may be termed mere knowledge. This is so little understood, that when lately a great statesman and orator met some of his constituents in a southeastern suburb of this metropolis, he informed them, among other things, that science was merely another term for knowledge. ”

“ Such certainty is science; it consists of observation, meditation, knowledge of conditions, knowledge of their results, and therefore of the connection between results and causes; these being regular, immutable, within the time accessible to our perceptions, and coercing everything under their sway, are called natural laws.
Of science, it is allowed that no part comes out of the human brain alone, not even the ideas of God and Immortality, which Kant claimed as innate ideas, while allowing all others to be the result of observation and reflection. ”

“ If we cannot now inscribe their names and likenesses among the stars, and transfer them to an Olympian abode, yet we can honor them by admiring their works and lessons, by sharing and continuing their work, by, as it were, living their lives with them over again, and thus prolong their memory forward while we prolong our own in the inverse direction. We ought to honor them out of gratitude no less than out of the desire to benefit continuously man's estate. ”

“ While not often scientific themselves, these branches of human knowledge, administering all the time, for a consideration of gain to be paid by the recipient, to important human wants, have yet indirectly advanced science by either finding and bringing, or by producing some of its materials.
Antiquity, then, possessed no science, except alone the results of meditation, which have been termed metaphysics, and which, if allowed to include ethics and logic, have no doubt attained in the treatment of philosophers a high degree of development. ”

“ JUSTUS LIEBIG was born on the 12th of May, 1803, at Darmstadt, in the grand-duchy of Hesse. His father was what in this country (England) we should term a wholesale druggist and dry-salter, a trade which is in Germany designated by the name of materialist. There is no doubt that the opportunities which he had of collecting chemical reagents, and of witnessing the preparation of many products which were the objects of his father's trade, early excited in him that curiosity which soon became an insatiable thirst. ”

“ Science is that kind of knowledge the correctness and truth of which can be proved by evidence convincing to all healthy understandings. Science is a series of potentialized axioms, which when once mastered are as evident as the simple axioms in mathematics, which are said to be so self-evident as to require no proof. By this definition a very large amount of human knowledge or doctrine is at once excluded from the domain of science. The learning of past ages was mainly imitative, little observant of new phenomena. ”

“ Nature strives in the dynamical sphere necessarily to absolute indifference, not by magnetism nor by electricity is represented the totality of the dynamical process, but only by the chemical process. ”

“ Through the recommendations of Humboldt and Gay-Lussac, both of which were addressed directly to the Grand-duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, Liebig was, at the age of twenty-one years, by the supreme will and absolute power of the grand-duke, appointed first Professor of Chemistry in the University of Giessen. A new chair was established for him, and as a laboratory he received a room, as he expresses it, with four walls. Great was the opposition against this new professor; for what was chemistry? Chemistry was no science, nobody knew anything of chemistry, nobody would have it. ”

“ Water contains just the same as iron, but in absolute indifference as yonder in relative indifference, carbon and nitrogen, and thus all true polarity of the earth is reduced to an original south and north which are fixed in the magnet. ”

“ An apothecary in Germany is a more scientific person than perhaps many would believe. He has had a thorough training, he has passed examinations, and he represents, therefore, the scientific side of chemistry, pharmacy, and the science of drugs in perfection. To such an apothecary, residing at Heppenheim, near Darmstadt, Liebig went, and remained there about ten months, but in that occupation as an apprentice his mind soon became wearied, he saw that he could not attain his object ”

“ These arts have worked by tradition, by prescription, by precedent. They all wait for an infusion of the scientific method, the method of principle based upon natural laws immutable and indestructible. ”

“ Kastner, and he also studied the other natural sciences and some languages, and, what is very characteristic of his great genius and perseverance, he formed a society among the students for the purpose of teaching one another, and for discussing subjects connected with chemistry and physics. Kastner being called to Erlangen, Liebig followed him there, and we are told that there he read all the new chemical publications, established another students' society for the same object as the first, and made many friends among the students, of whom several continued that friendship up to their death. ”

“ You know that Ludwig had made it his life-business to restore art in Germany and raise it to a high footing in Bavaria, and Maximilian now wished to do the same thing for science in general, and he therefore endeavored to collect from all parts of Germany the best men whom he could attract. One of these was Liebig, the king having made him president of the Academy, with the condition that he should undertake no laboratory teaching; that he should deliver lectures only, and at the same time be the Curator of the Botanical Gardens. ”

“ Liebig also made the acquaintance of Bischof, the botanist, and of Engelhard, later Professor of Chemistry at Nuremberg. He went in for the severe study of what at that time was called philosophy, that is, he listened to the lectures on metaphysics and philosophy in general, of the then great Schelling. Now, let me give you the words of Liebig on that period of his life. He says: "I myself studied for some time in a university where the greatest philosophers and metaphysicians of the century carried the studying youths away to admiration and imitation. ”

“ Thus the celebrated poet, Count Platen, corresponded with him to the time of his death in 1830, and of this friendship we can see many congenial influences in the writings of Liebig, for there is no doubt that, in his "Familiar Letters on Chemistry," the language, although always prose, frequently rises to the highest beauty, such as can only be produced by a mind of a poetical turn. ”

“ Under these circumstances no science could progress, and there was not in the whole of Prussia a single establishment, laboratory, or teaching-room where a man could learn practical or even theoretical chemistry. ”

“ Now, in order that you may believe that he did not merely speak of an admixture or impurity of carbon or nitrogen, but that he meant to say that it was the essence of water, and that it was really composed of these two elements, and not of any other, he goes on to say: "The animal is in organic Nature the iron; the plant is the water, for Nature begins with the relative separation of the sexes, and then ends in this separation. ”

“ Science began its development with the elucidation of celestial phenomena, and became astronomy, or the doctrine of the laws according to which heavenly bodies move. Copernicus is from this point of view the father, the creator of science. ”

“ If electricity was the broken magnetism, because the opposite poles are independent bodies upon which the positive and negative electricity is distributed, and if the point of indifference is the explosion of an indifferent light by itself, then is the chemical process, on the other hand, the totality of the shaping. We have two independent bodies which belong more to the one or the other extreme ”

“ The celebrated joke, that, if an Englishman and a German were asked to produce a camel each, the Teuton would evolve one out of his inner consciousness while the Briton would produce a camel of flesh and bone, is a good satire upon innate ideas. ”

“ The animal decomposes the iron, the plant decomposes the water. The female and the male sex of the plant is the carbon and the nitrogen of the water." These are two examples of the philosophy of Schelling, which was believed at that time to be the science by which Germany could be regenerated, by which the generation which had then only just recovered its independence would be put on a firm mental basis. ”

“ In Nature itself there is one and inseparate, what is separated for the purpose of speculation." That is almost enough, but I will give you another passage which will be more striking because of the contrary itself being known to you. ”

“ Chevreul is the only one of these celebrated men who now lives, and he has lately published, in the Comptes Rendus, a very remarkable paper on the changes which are produced in the power of thinking and observing by age. ”