Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/15

Rh reaction. He expects to get out of a stupid people the effects of intelligence, and to evolve from inferior citizens superior conduct.

But, while the prevalence of crude political opinions, among those whose conceptions about simple matters are so crude, might be anticipated, it is somewhat surprising that the class specially disciplined by scientific culture should bring to the interpretation of social phenomena methods but little in advance of those used by others. Now that the transformation and equivalence of forces is seen by men of science to hold not only throughout all inorganic actions, but throughout all organic actions; now that even mental changes are recognized as the correlatives of cerebral changes, which also conform to this principle; and now that there must be admitted the corollary that all actions going on in a society are measured by certain antecedent energies, which disappear in effecting them, while they themselves become actual or potential energies, from which subsequent actions arise; it is strange that there should not have arisen the consciousness that these highest phenomena are to be studied as lower phenomena have been studied—not, of course, after the same physical methods, but in pursuance of the same principles. And yet scientific men rarely display such a consciousness.

A mathematician, who had agreed or disagreed with the view of Prof. Tait respecting the value of Quaternions for pursuing researches in Physics, would listen with raised eyebrows were one without mathematical culture to express a decided opinion on the matter. Or, if the subject discussed was the doctrine of Helmholtz, that hypothetical beings, occupying space of two dimensions, might be so conditioned that the axioms of our geometry would prove untrue, the mathematician would marvel if an affirmation or a negation came from a man who knew no more of the properties of space than is to be gained by daily converse with things around, and no more of the principles of reasoning than the course of business taught him. And yet, were we to take members of the Mathematical Society, who, having severally devoted themselves to the laws of quantitative relations, know that, simple as these are intrinsically, a life's study is required for the full comprehension of them—were we to ask each of these his opinion on some point of social policy, the readiness with which he answered would seem to imply that in these cases, where the factors of the phenomenon are so numerous and so much involved, a general survey of men and things gives data for trustworthy judgment.

Or, to contrast more fully the mode of reaching a conclusion which the man of science uses in his own department, with that which he regards as satisfactory in the department of politics, let us take a case from a concrete science—say, the question, What are the solar spots, and what constitution of the Sun is implied by them? Of tentative answers to this question there is first Wilson's, adopted by Sir William