History of science

“ I understand the word science in its old acceptation; a deep rational research into the first principles of things and the origin of our knowledge. At no epoch of history, I dare to say, has this research been carried on by more passionate lovers, by more powerful intelligences, by more magnanimous hearts, than the Mendicant monks of the thirteenth century. ”

“ The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified. ”

“ Science has been recognized as a powerful instrument of civilization.—Through scientific discoveries there has been a wonderful accession to material wealth, invention has been stimulated, and progress has been made in all directions. The spirit of investigation has been fostered, old theories and superstitions have been abandoned, and truth has been established upon their ruins. In this direction more has been done by science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than during the whole previous history of the world. ”

“ I have been compelled to use the words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ because these terms have become firmly adherent to a group of subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Botany, etc., and cannot now be detached from them. Unfortunately ‘scientific’ is used in another sense as implying accuracy of experimental method and in deduction from results. So that in calling ourselves scientific men we run the risk of seeming to claim a monopoly of method, as though we pretended to be somehow superior to the trained workers in other branches. ”

“ We only give single examples by way of illustration, for the history of the progress of science in the United States, and of institutions for its promotion, during the present generation, would demand a volume. It is enough for our purpose that science is understood and valued, and the right methods of prosecuting it are known, and the time is at hand when its moral and intellectual use will be as obvious as its physical applications. ”

“ For the conclusions stated in the present work, respecting knowledge and discovery, are drawn from a connected and systematic survey of the whole range of Physical Science and its History; whereas, hitherto, philosophers have contented themselves with adducing detached examples of scientific doctrines, drawn from one or two departments of science. ”

“ Although the limitations which modern men of science perceive to be put upon their labours may seem at first sight calculated to confine our understanding within a narrow field of things which can be seen, or in some way distinctly proved to exist, the effect of this limitation has been to make science what it is—a realm of things known as distinct from things which may be imagined. All the difference between ancient science and modern consists in the fact that in modern science inquirers demand a businesslike method in the interpretation of Nature. ”

“ In the field of physical science particularly, and also in the field of biological science to a lesser degree, an extensive revision of fundamental conceptions has largely corrected this tendency towards narrow and specialised attention, but there has not been the same recasting of fundamentals in historical study. ”

“ In mechanics we should be led to analogous conclusions, and should see that the principles of this science, though more directly based on experiment, still partake of the conventional character of the geometric postulates. Thus far nominalism triumphs; but now we arrive at the physical sciences, properly so called. Here the scene changes; we meet another sort of hypotheses and we see their fertility. Without doubt, at first blush, the theories seem to us fragile, and the history of science proves to us how ephemeral they are; ”

“ This characteristic of scientific knowledge is not always recognised. I mean the profound difference between what we know and what we are told. When science began to flourish at Cambridge in the ’seventies, and the University was asked to supply money for buildings, an eminent person objected and said, “What do they want with their laboratories?—why can’t they believe their teachers, who are in most cases clergymen of the Church of England?” This person had no conception of what the word ‘knowledge’ means as understood in science. ”

“ It is easy to point out instances in which science has failed to advance, in consequence of the absence of one or other of these requisites; indeed, by far the greater part of the course of the world, the history of most times and most countries, exhibits a condition thus stationary with respect to knowledge. ”

“ Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of many of the foremost scientific investigators, became a student in university lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer in scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men of science at home and abroad. As a result, he came to the conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one which explains various leading facts in natural science. ”

“ What we know as science began when man commenced to compare one fact with another, to classify phenomena, and to arrange his knowledge systematically. Order, method, system, are basic principles of science. The best description would, therefore, appear to be systematized knowledge of any kind which had been gained and verified by exact observation and correct thinking. The whole field of human knowledge is now methodically formulated and arranged into rational systems. Modern science may, therefore, be said to embrace all our exact knowledge. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the analogy of the natural sciences has indirectly helped the tendency towards a scientific rigour in the provinces of scholarship at which we have glanced. The whole atmosphere of our century has been charged with the influences of science—the science which has made this age so memorable in the history of material progress ”

“ In the light of this it has seemed well to try to show in terms of present-day science some of the important reflections with regard to such problems of natural history, as magnetism, the composition of matter, and the relation of things physical to one another, which we now include under the name science, some of the thoughts that these scholars of the Thirteenth Century were thinking and were developing for the benefit of the {37} enthusiastic students who flocked to the universities. ”

“ The completeness of historical view which belongs to such a design, consists, not in accumulating all the details of the cultivation of each science, but in marking the larger features of its formation. The historian must endeavor to point out how each of the important advances was made, by which the sciences have reached their present position ”

“ This pregnant fact has excited little notice hitherto; but when the scientific history of the first half of the nineteenth century shall come to be reviewed by those who succeed us, and reap the fruits of such advancement as we now aim at, it will not be overlooked as an evidence of the exoteric character of much of the overestimated science of the age. ”

“ But besides the sciences thus formed by the aid of special experience, the conditions which flow from those more comprehensive ideas first mentioned, Space, Time, and Number, constitute a body of science, applicable to objects and changes of all kinds, and deduced without recurrence being had to any observation in particular. These sciences, thus unfolded out of ideas alone, unmixed with any reference to the phenomena of matter, are hence termed Pure Sciences. ”

“ According to the plan which I have pursued, the history of each science forms a whole in itself, divided into distinct but connected members, by the Epochs of its successive advances. If I have satisfied the competent judges in each science by my selection of such epochs, the scheme of the work must be of permanent value, however imperfect may be the execution of any of its portions. ”

“ The series as planned should cover in outline the whole sphere of human knowledge.
¶ Science is to be viewed as a product of human endeavor and mental discipline, rather than taken in its purely objective reference to facts. The essential purpose has been to present as far as practicable the historical origins of important discoveries, also to indicate the practical utility of the sciences to human life. ”

“ It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. ”

“ In the absence of such a Classification, it is only by viewing departments of the Universe with reference to the Method or Process employed in the investigation of their Phenomena, that we are able to estimate their present relations to Science, and to ascertain proximately their Scientific or Unscientific character. We proceed, then, to examine the connection of History, in its present development, with Science, a task to which the foregoing brief and incomplete consideration of the subject of Method has been a necessary preliminary. ”

“ To this question, the history and analogy of science, I conceive, teach us to reply as follows:—All palætiological sciences, all speculations which attempt to ascend from the present to the remote past, by the chain of causation, do also, by an inevitable consequence, urge us to look for the beginning of the state of things which we thus contemplate; but in none of these cases have men been able, by the aid of science, to arrive at a beginning which is homogeneous with the 569 known course of events. ”

“ Finally, we must review, but more briefly, the subsequent history of what has so often been called after its founder, “Silliman’s Journal.”
The nineteenth century, and particularly the hundred years in which we are now interested, must always stand out in the history of the world as the period which has 14combined the greatest development in all departments of science with the most extraordinary industrial progress. It was not until this century that scientific investigation used to their full extent the twin methods of observation and experiment. ”

“ Zoologists maintain that the embryonic development of an animal recapitulates in brief the whole history of its ancestors throughout geologic time. It seems it is the same in the development of minds. The teacher should make the child go over the path his fathers trod; more rapidly, but without skipping stations. For this reason, the history of science should be our first guide. ”

“ The confused arrangement also, which mars its utility as a compendium of knowledge, may be due in great measure to the indefinite state of science at the time, to the gaps in its affinities which the discovery of so many new sciences has helped to fill up, and the consequent mingling together of branches which are separate and distinct. ”

“ Yet they show an interest in nature and its problems; they are drawing the line between science and religion; they make some progress in mathematics, geography, physics and chemistry; they not only talk about experimental method, they actually make some inventions and discoveries of use in the future advance of science. ”

“ INTRODUCTION. IN order to the acquisition of any such exact and real knowledge of nature as that which we properly call Physical Science, it is requisite, as has already been said, that men should possess Ideas both distinct and appropriate, and should apply them to ascertained Facts. ”

“ But if scientific method, operating in the region of history, of philology, of archaeology, in the course of the last thirty or forty years, has become thus formidable to the theological dogmatist, what may not be said about scientific method working in the province of physical science? ”

“ “The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. ”

“ This much, however, follows from what has now been said:—History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise from such facts to Primeval History, or to argue how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,—is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics. ”

“ The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method—the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically—the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts. ”

“ Thus, if Ethics and History are to have their subject-matter, there must be some science which describes the processes of human life and conduct in terms of teleological relation to an end. Now, to what science can we go for such descriptions? From our previous examination of the postulates of physical science, it is clear that the requisite material cannot 306be afforded by any branch of physical science which remains rigidly consistent with its own postulates. ”

“ To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance. ”

“ For the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the foundations of our modern science were being rapidly laid, a considerable list might be given of early publications of similar scientific bodies. ”