Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/301

Rh crush, not only Socialists, but anti-Socialists, who would impose on her a yoke which she refuses to bear.

In close connection with these utterances of Helmholtz, I place another utterance not less noble, which I trust was understood and appreciated by those to whom it was addressed:

"If" (said the President of the British Association in his opening address in Dublin) "we could lay down beforehand the precise limits of possible knowledge, the problem of physical science would be already half solved. But the question to which the scientific explorer has often to address himself is not merely whether he is able to solve this or that problem, but whether he can so far unravel the tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal as to weave them into a definite problem at all. . . . If his eye seem dim, be must look steadfastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreath themselves into definite forms. If his ear seem dull, he must listen patiently and with sympathetic trust to the intricate whisperings of Nature—the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices—until here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage-ground; if at such a moment, after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well defined objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond; if he should depict possibilities which seem opening to his view; if he should explain why he thinks this a mere blind alley and that an open path—then the fault and the loss would be alike ours if we refused to listen calmly, and temperately to form our own judgment on what we hear; then assuredly it is ice who would he committing the error of confounding matters of fact with matters of opinion, if we failed to discriminate between the various elements contained in such a discourse, and assumed that they had been all put on the same footing."

While largely agreeing with him, I cannot quite accept the setting in which Prof. Virchow places the confessedly abortive attempts to secure an experimental basis for the doctrine of spontaneous generation. It is not a doctrine "so discredited" that some of the scientific thinkers of England accept "as the basis of all their views of life." Their induction is by no means thus limited. They have on their side more than the "reasonable probability" deemed sufficient by Bishop Butler for practical guidance in the gravest affairs, that the members of the solar system which are now discrete once formed a continuous mass: that in the course of untold ages, during which the work of condensation went on through the waste of heat in space, the planets were detached; and that our present sun is the residual nucleus of the flocculent or gaseous ball from which the planets were successively separated. Life, as we define it, was not possible for æons subsequent to this separation. When and how did it appear? I have already pressed this question, but have received no answer. If, with Prof. Knight, we