William Benjamin Carpenter

“ The artist serves as the interpreter of Nature, not when he works as the mere copyist, delineating that which he sees with his bodily eyes, and which we could see as well for ourselves, but when he endeavors to awaken within us the perception of those beauties and harmonies which his own trained sense has recognized, and thus impart to us the pleasure he has himself derived from their contemplation. ”

“ But, it may be said, Is not this view of the material universe open to the imputation that it is "evolved out of the depths of our own consciousness"—a projection of our own intellect into what surrounds us—an ideal rather than a real world? If all we know of matter be an "intellectual conception," how are we to distinguish this from such as we form in our dreams, for these, as our Laureate no less happily than philosophically expresses it, are "true while they last." ”

“ Now, on the other hand, as we study scientific truth, we gain a certain point, and may feel satisfied we are right up to that point, though there may be something beyond; while the elevation we have gained enables us to look higher still. It is like ascending a mountain; the nearer we get to the top, the clearer and more extensive is the view. I think this is a far better discipline to the mind than that of digging down into the dark depths of the past, in the search for that which we cannot hope ever thoroughly to bring to light. ”

“ But, it may be urged, the very conception of these and similar great truths is in itself a typical example of intuition. The men who divined and enunciated them stand out above their fellows, as possessed of a genius which could not only combine but create, of an insight which could clearly discern what reason could but dimly shadow forth. Granting this freely, I think it may be shown that the intuitions of individual genius are but specially-exalted forms of endowments which are the general property of the race at the time, and which have come to be so in virtue of its whole previous culture. ”

“ The philosopher's interpretation of Nature seems less individual than that of the artist or the poet, because it is based on facts which any one may verify, and is elaborated by reasoning processes of which all admit the validity. He looks at the universe as a vast book lying open before him, of which he has in the first place to learn the characters, then to master the language, and finally to apprehend the ideas which that language conveys. ”

“ It has been asserted over and over again of late years, by a class of men who claim to be the only true interpreters of Nature, that we know nothing but matter and the laws of matter, and that force is a mere fiction of the imagination. May it not be affirmed, on the other hand, that, while our notion of matter is a conception of the intellect, force is that of which we have the most direct—perhaps even the only direct—cognizance? ”

“ All of you who have studied mechanics know very well what a "resultant" means. You know that when a body is acted on by two forces at the same time, one force carrying it in this direction, and another force in that direction, we want to know in what direction it will go, and how far it will go. To arrive at this we simply complete what is called the parallelogram of forces. In fact, it is just as if a body were acted on at two different times, by a force driving it in one direction, and then by a force driving it in the other direction. ”

“ If we were all like Dalton, we should see no difference, except in form, between ripe cherries hanging on a tree and the green leaves around them; if we were all affected with the severest form of color-blindness, the fair face of Nature would be seen by us as in the chiaro-scuro of an engraving of one of Turner's landscapes, not as in the glowing hues of the wondrous picture itself. ”

“ I feel perfectly satisfied of this, that the child of an educated stock has a much greater power of acquiring knowledge than the child of an uneducated stock; that the child that is the descendant of a race in which high moral ideas have been always kept before the mind, has a much greater tendency to act uprightly than the child that has grown up from a breed that has been living in the gutter for generations past. ”

“ What is the nature of this process which evolves, as it were, this result unconsciously to ourselves, when we have been either asleep, as in the case of the banker, or, as in the other familiar case I have cited, when we have been giving our minds to some other train of thought in the interval? What is it that brings up spontaneously to our consciousness a fact which we endeavored to recall with all the force of our will, and yet could not succeed? ”

“ While each takes his special direction, the general method of study is the same for all. And it is a testimony alike to the truth of that method and to the unity of Nature that there is an ever-increasing tendency toward agreement among those who use it aright—temporary differences of interpretation being removed, sometimes by a more complete mastery of her language, sometimes by a better apprehension of her ideas—and lines of pursuit which had seemed entirely distinct or even widely divergent being found to lead at last to one common goal. ”

“ Many of you have doubtless viewed with admiring interest that truly wonderful work of human design, the Walter printing-machine. You first examine it at rest; presently comes a man who simply pulls a handle toward him, and the whole inert mechanism becomes instinct with life—the blank paper, continuously rolling off the cylinder at one end, being delivered at the other, without any intermediate human agency, as large sheets of print, at the rate of 15,000 in an hour. ”

“ For, while the deep-seated instincts of humanity and the profoundest researches of philosophy alike point to mind as the one and only source of power, it is the prerogative of science to demonstrate the unity of the power which is operating through the limitless extent and variety of the universe, and to trace its continuity through the vast series of ages that have been occupied in its evolution. ”

“ And, when we move our open hand through air at rest, we are still conscious of a resistance, our sense of it being augmented by an extension of the surface moved, as in the act of fanning; while, if the air is in motion, we feel its pressure on the sail of a boat by the "pull" of the sheet we hold in our hand, or on the sails of a windmill by the rotation it imparts, the force of which we can estimate by the effort we must put forth to resist it. Attenuate any kind of air or gas as we may, its resistance can still be made apparent by the like communication of its own motion to solid bodies. ”

“ The science of modern times, however, has taken a more special direction. Fixing its attention exclusively on the order of Nature, it has separated itself wholly from theology, whose function it is to seek after its cause. In this, science is fully justified, alike by the entire independence of its objects, and by the historical fact that it has been continually hampered and impeded, in its search for the truth as it is in Nature, by the restraints which theologians have attempted to impose upon its inquiries. ”

“ Turning, now, to that other great portal of sensation, the sight, through which we receive most of the messages sent to us from the universe around, we recognize the same truth. Thus it is agreed, alike by physicists and physiologists, that color does not exist as such in the object itself; which has merely the power of reflecting or transmitting a certain number of millions of undulations in a second; and these only produce that affection of our consciousness, which we call color, when they fall upon the retina of the living percipient. ”

“ When, however, we carefully examine the foundation of that assurance, we find reason to distrust its security; for it can be shown to be no less true of the scientific conception of Nature than it is of the artistic or the poetic, that it is a representation framed by the mind itself out of the materials supplied by the impressions which external objects make upon the senses, so that, to each man of science, Nature is what he individually believes her to be. ”

“ The Psychologist who neglects such phenomena as these, merely because the inferences drawn from them by the Physiologist have a dangerous flavor of "materialism," seems to me just as blameworthy as the Physiologist who ignores the facts of consciousness, when they do not happen to fit in with his own conclusions. The true Psychologist is he who lays the foundations of his science broad and deep in the whole constitution of the individual man, and his relations to the World external to him ”

“ Should we not think it absurd on the part of any one who possesses in the use of his hands the means of detecting the error of his visual perceptions, if he were to base a superstructure of reasoning—still more to found a whole system of philosophy—upon the latter alone? Yet such appears to me to be the position of those who deny our direct cognition of force. ”

“ So, again, we find that there are states in which, from some defect in the physical condition of the body, or it may be from some great shock which has affected the mind and weakened for a time the power of the will, very slight impulses—just like the slight things that will make a horse shy—will disturb us unduly; and we feel that our emotions are excited in a way that we cannot account for, and we wonder why such a little thing should worry and vex us in the way that it does. ”

“ For what love of the truth, as it is in Nature, was ever more conspicuous than that which Kepler displayed in his abandonment of each of the conceptions of the planetary system which his imagination had successively devised, so soon as it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by observation? ”

“ But holding it as equally certain, because the fact is capable of verification by every one as often as he chooses to make the experiment, that, in the performance of every volitional movement, that physical force is put in action, directed, and controlled by the individual personality or ego, I deem it just as absurd and illogical to affirm that there is no place for a God in nature, originating, directing, and controlling its forces by his will, as it would be to assert that there is no place in man's body for his conscious mind.—Modern Review. ”

“ If it be replied that we have no proof that the movement of the ball we strike is produced by the force which we consciously exert in striking it, I simply rejoin that we have as much proof of it as we have of anything which rests upon universal experience, and which we can verify experimentally as often as we choose to try—quite as much as we have of the existence of anything whatever that is external to ourselves. ”

“ The discoveries of science; the greater tendency to take rational and sober views of religion; the general habit of referring things to principles; and a number of influences which I cannot stop particularly to describe, have so operated on the public mind, that every generation is raised, I believe, not merely by its own culture, but by the acquired result of the experience of past ages; for I believe that every generation is born, I will not say wiser, but with a greater tendency to wisdom. ”

“ After a magnet had been repeatedly drawn along the arm of one of these subjects, she would feel a pricking, streaming, or shooting sensation; she would smell odors proceeding from it; or she would see a small volcano of flame issuing from its poles when gazing at them, even in broad daylight. As in the magnetic sleep light is often seen by the somnambule to issue from the operator's fingers, so the odylic light was discerned in the dark by Von Reichenbach's "sensitives," issuing not only from the hands, but from the head, eyes, and mouth, of powerful generators of this force. ”

“ Thus, as it seems to me, an analysis of those physical experiences on which all our cognitions of the physical universe around us are really based irresistibly lands us in the conclusion that, as Herbert Spencer expresses it, "All the sensations through which the external world is known to us are explicable by us only as resulting from certain forms of force"; the direct derivation of our conception of force from our own experience of muscular tension (or, as I should myself say, from our own sense of effort) being "a fact which no metaphysical quibbling can set aside." ”

“ We may in proportion I believe to our honesty in the search for truth—in proportion as we discard all selfish considerations and look merely at this grand image of truth, so to speak, set before us, with the purpose of steadily pursuing our way toward it—in proportion as we discard all low and sensual feelings in our love of beauty, and especially in proportion to the earnestness of the desire by which our minds are pervaded always to keep the right before us in all our judgments—so I believe will our minds be cleared in their perception of what are merely prudential considerations. ”

“ In a large number of other cases, moreover, our scientific interpretations are clearly matters of judgment; and this is eminently a personal act, the value of its results depending in each case upon the qualifications of the individual for arriving at a correct decision. The surest of such judgments are those dictated by what we term "common-sense," as to matters on which there seems no room for difference of opinion, because every sane person comes to the same conclusion, although he may he able to give no other reason for it than that it appears to him "self-evident." ”