Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/176

164 its study is regarded as inferior in intellectual results to that of language or philosophy. It can not be denied, however, that the study of physical science gives a certain definiteness to our modes of thinking, even if it will not be granted that it affords a better method of intellectual training than philological study. It supplies a tonic which minds much accustomed, from the exclusive study of language, to take things for granted and to look no further than the grammar and dictionary stand much in need of, and also corrects a certain credulity and superstition which is rampant, even in our time, and to which it is well to devote a few words in connection with the subject of scientific training. There is a strong undercurrent of superstition and belief in supersensible or wonderful and not-to-be-explained marvels which makes its way beneath the crust of society. Occasionally it bursts forth in so-called manifestations of spiritualism and animal magnetism, or belief in mesmerism and clairvoyance. There is hardly a family of which some member has not applied to a clairvoyant for relief in diseases which the regular practitioner has failed to treat successfully. A literary education does not cope successfully with the insidious advances of this form of ignorance; for the very element of education which can do so is not generally cultivated among even so-called liberally educated persons. This lost element is the spirit of investigation. The students who come to a physical laboratory for the first time can be rapidly classified into three classes: 1. Those who can reason from A to B over what may be termed a straight line with considerable ease. 2. Those who naturally reverse their process of reasoning and test the way from B to A; this is a rarer class of minds. Copernicus was unable to explain the motions of the planets by supposing that all the visible stars revolved around the earth; he reversed his process of reasoning, and explained the facts by supposing the earth to turn and the stars to remain at rest. Kant, in his "Critique of Pure Reason," speaks of the revolution which he had brought about in philosophy, and likens it to the logical process which led Copernicus to his discovery. "Hitherto," he says, "it had been assumed that all our knowledge must regulate itself according to the objects; but all attempts to make anything out of them a priori, through notions whereby our knowledge might be enlarged, proved, under this supposition, abortive. Let us, then, try for once whether we do not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics, by assuming that the objects must regulate themselves according to our knowledge, a mode of viewing the subject which accords so much better with the desired possibility of a knowledge of them a priori, which must decide something concerning objects before they are given us." In practical matters this process of reversals is often exemplified; the inventor of the sewing-machine finds that his needle will not work with the eye at one end, and accordingly reverses its position and is successful. 3. The third class comprises those who may be said to think