Scientific culture

“ The culture of man through the study of truth is the work of science in the future. And scientific research derives incalculably greater value from the fact that it affords material for scientific culture than because it may add to national or individual power, or become a means of increasing our store of material wealth. ”

“ We find, then, that even for this remaining division of human activities, scientific culture is the proper preparation. We find that aesthetics in general are necessarily based upon scientific principles; and can be pursued with complete success only through an acquaintance with these principles. We find that for the criticism and due appreciation of works of art, a knowledge of the constitution of things, or in other words, a knowledge of science, is requisite. ”

“ If, however, as scientific men, ye proceed with science as the labourers with the tasks which the exigencies of life impose upon them, what will become of a culture which must await the hour of its birth and its salvation in the very midst of all this agitated and breathless running to and fro—this sprawling scientifically? ”

“ That these great truths are as important an element of scientific culture as experimental skill, the author has also endeavored to illustrate, and he has added brief notices of the lives of two noble men of science which may add force to the illustrations. ”

“ So also in science, no amount of book-learning constitutes what we have called scientific culture rightly understood. For example, the ability to pass an examination on the facts and principles of science is no test whatever of the form of culture we are advocating. ”

“ We have all of us known eminent men, possessing in a very high degree the power of investigating Nature, who have been wholly unable to state clearly the knowledge they have themselves discovered. Great harm has been done to the cause of scientific culture by attempting to adapt the well-tried methods of literary scholarship to scientific subjects: for, as I have said in another place, competitive examinations are no test of real attainment in physical science. ”

“ Of science itself, of its hypotheses, methods, and results, they have never known anything. Science was at one time the fashion. The daily press of that date said, ‘We live in a scientific age’; the news of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists; the feuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin; the inventors of elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their productions ‘Evolution Essence’ or ‘Selection Canes’; those who [115] affected culture took themselves seriously for the pioneers of progress and enlightenment. ”

“ It has been thus assumed that scientific culture can not supply such a basis, and in this whole discussion the value of the study of Nature in education, except in so far as this study may yield a fund of useful knowledge, has been entirely ignored by the advocates of the old system. ”

“ The more serious and methodical studies of literature demand, in some measure, a scientific habit of mind, in the largest sense of that expression; such a habit is necessary, for instance, in the study of history, in the scientific study of language and in the 'higher criticism.' Nor, again, does any one question that the studies of the natural sciences are instruments of intellectual culture of the highest order. The powers of observation and of reasoning are thereby disciplined in manifold ways; and the scientific habit of mind so formed is in itself an education. ”

“ There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and 95 me as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science, to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. ”

“ Having so fully examined, in the preceding instances, the nature of the progress of thought which science implies, both among the peculiar cultivators of science, and in that wider world of general culture which receives only an indirect influence from scientific discoveries, we shall not find it necessary to go into the same extent of detail with regard to the other provinces of human knowledge. ”

“ Prominent attention has been also devoted to those various sciences which help to a better understanding of the nature of man, to the bearings of science upon the questions of society and government, to scientific education, and to the conflicts which spring from the progressive nature of scientific knowledge. ”

“ In our universities and centers of learning he will find the exponents of the science still discussing whether it can ever have any laws, and even whether it should be founded on fact or romance. Let him take down any volume of history from its shelf, and endeavor to find any scientific clue therein to the natural laws underlying and controlling the majestic process of life which has unfolded itself in our western civilization, or to the natural laws that have directed the development of other social systems contemporaneous with it, or anterior to it. ”

“ The general aspect in which scientific research is viewed by many persons in this country, is that of a refined intellectual pursuit, which may be encouraged and honoured for the purpose of maintaining the tone of society. ”

“ Natural science, in all its speculations and extensions and increase of scientific truth, extension of scientific methods—all that, no doubt, constitute the central activities, the intellectual activities, of England and Europe during the last forty years of his life—to all that he was not entirely opened. ”

“ Without descending to the minute interdependence of the different branches of any one science or art, is it not evident that among the different sciences, as well as among most of the arts, there exists such a connection, that if the state of any one well-marked division of them is sufficiently known to us, we can with real scientific assurance infer, from their necessary correlation, the contemporaneous state of every one of the others? ”

“ Give us science, too, but give, first of all and last of all, the science that ennobles life and makes it generous.... Many-sidedness of culture makes your vision clearer and keener in particulars. For, after all, the noblest definition of Science is that breadth and impartiality of view which liberates the mind from specialties, and enables it to organize whatever we learn, so that it becomes real Knowledge by being brought into true and helpful relation with the rest. ”

“ And yet, as it seems to me, the greatest value of this institution as an educational factor in science—as a biological lever of progress—does not depend so much upon the tangible revelations of fact that have come out of its laboratories as upon other of its influences. Scientific ideas, like all other forms of human thought, move more or less in shoals. ”

“ Thus science as an activity is marked off by its method and its intent rather than by its subject-matter. As a method it is characterized by thoroughness, persistency, completeness, generality, and system. As regards its intent, it is characterized by its freedom from partiality or prejudice, and its interest in discovering what the facts are, apart from personal expectations and desires. In the scientific mood we wish to know what the nature of things is. ”

“ But much as we may value this influence of modern science upon practical life, still it must, estimated from a higher and more general point of view, stand most assuredly below the enormous influence which the theoretical progress of modern science will have on the entire range of human knowledge, on our conception of the universe, and on the perfecting of man’s culture. ”

“ That same science which fills our cabinets and herbariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones and shells and plants and dead birds and insects—that same science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description—that same science that anatomises the physical frame with microscopic nicety,—in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that which had most need of science ”

“ In the subjects of heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemistry, vegetable and animal physiology, psychology and morality, and the more concrete subjects depending upon them, such as politics, trade, commerce, government, &c., our ideas have equally advanced, in consequence of scientific research ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sum total of all these researches forms a scientific patrimony, which needs to be known to us, in order that our own conclusions may serve to complete those of other investigators, who have preceded us, and thus form a contribution to science. ”

“ Essays on the Result of Scientific Research, as witnessed by the civilization of the Nineteenth Century, which derives so much of its strength and moral excellence from the Steam-engine, the Electric Telegraph, and other applications of scientific principles. ”

“ Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals some well-known scientific phrase. If society is thus prepared to receive all kinds of scientific doctrines, it is our part to provide for the diffusion and cultivation, not only of true scientific principles, but of a spirit of sound criticism, founded on an examination of the evidences on which statements apparently scientific depend. ”

“ The noblest enthusiasm, both for the search after truth and for applying it to its highest uses, pervades those writers." "In cultivating, therefore," science as an essential ingredient in education, "we are all the while laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical culture." ”

“ We gladly recognise that such specialists are doing invaluable service, in their several lines, to the cause of knowledge; but we may also wish that the desire to be scientific was more uniformly tempered by a regard for the nature of the materials with which all scholarship has to deal. Those materials are the creations of the human intellect, whether as seen in the evolution of language, or of literature, or of art. ”

“ I make bold to say that the greatest want of the day, from a purely practical point of view, is the more general introduction of the scientific method and the scientific spirit into the discussion of those political and social problems which we encounter on our road to a higher plane of public well being. ”

“ Again, as we can in some measure trace the progress of Arts from nation to nation and from age to age, we can also pursue a similar investigation with respect to the progress of Mythology, of Poetry, of Government, of Law. Thus the philosophical history of the human race, viewed with reference to these subjects, if it can give rise to knowledge so exact as to be properly called Science, will supply Sciences belonging to the class I am now to consider. ”

“ The influence of the scientific spirit is now rapidly spreading in every field of human activity. Social progress, it is felt, must be guided and accompanied by accurate knowledge,—knowledge which is, in many departments, not yet open to the English reader. ”

“ It has surely often struck you as strange that the sciences are divided into two great groups; that the so-called humanistic sciences, belonging to the so-called "higher education," are placed in almost a hostile attitude to the natural sciences. ”

“ It was thought that the temper of the really scientific man, so patient in research, so accurate and conscientious, so slow to dogmatize, so deferential to others, might be fostered by experimental science in the schools, acquiring "knowledge at first hand," making experiments, looking with great respect at balances, weighing and measuring, and giving an account of results. ”

“ Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past ages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucial experiments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented by another,—these have been the steps by which Science has grown and established its authority and enlarged its dominion. ”

“ Books dealing with science as with history, say, should be of a literary character, and we should probably be more scientific as a people if we scrapped all the text-books which swell publishers’ lists and nearly all the chalk expended so freely on our blackboards. ”

“ It seems to us that science is only then real science when a man in a laboratory pours liquids from one jar into another, or analyses the spectrum, or cuts up frogs and porpoises, or weaves in a specialised, scientific jargon an obscure network of conventional phrases—theological, philosophical, historical, juridical, or politico-economical—semi-intelligible to the man himself, and intended to demonstrate that what now is, is what should be. ”

“ At the present moment civilized society stands at a point in the development of the applications of science to human interests, at which the thing of the highest importance is the subjection of societal phenomena to scientific investigation, together with the elimination of metaphysics from this entire domain. ”