Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/247

Rh, they hoped to attain the three sensuous conditions of human enjoyment, gold, health, and immortality. By the end of the fifteenth century many important manufactures were founded by empirical experiment, with only the uncertain guidance of science. Among these were the compass, printing, paper, gunpowder, guns, watches, forks, knitting-needles, horseshoes, bells, wood-cutting and copper-engraving, wire-drawing, steel, table-glass, spectacles, microscopes, glass mirrors backed by amalgams of tin and lead, windmills, crushing and saw mills. These important manufactures arose from an increased knowledge of facts, around which scientific conceptions were slowly concreting. Aristotle defines this as science when he says, "Art begins when, from a great number of experiences, one general conception is formed which will embrace all similar cases." Such conceptions are formed only when culture develops the human mind and compels it to give a rational account of the world in which man lives, and of the objects in and around it, as well as of the phenomena which govern their action and evolution. Though the accumulation of facts is indispensable to the growth of science, a thousand facts are of less value to human progress than is a single one when it is scientifically comprehended, for it then becomes generalized in all similar cases. Isolated facts may be viewed as the dust of science. The dust which floats in the atmosphere is to the common observer mere incoherent matter in a wrong place, while to the man of science it is all-important when the rays of heat and light act upon its floating particles. It is by them that clouds and rains are influenced; it is by their selective influence on the solar waves that the blue of the heavens and the beauteous colors of the sky glorify all Nature. So, also, ascertained though isolated facts, forming the dust of science, become the reflecting media of the light of knowledge, and cause all Nature to assume a new aspect. It is with the light of knowledge that we are enabled to question Nature through direct experiment. The hypothesis or theory which induces us to put the experimental question may be right or wrong; still, prudens questio dimidium scientiæ est—it is half-way to knowledge when you know what you have to inquire. Davy described hypothesis as the mere scaffolding of science, useful to build up true knowledge, but capable of being put up or taken down at pleasure. Undoubtedly a theory is only temporary, and the reason is, as Bacon has said, that the man of science "loveth truth more than his theory." The changing theories which the world despises are the leaves of the tree of science drawing nutriment to the parent stems, and enabling it to put forth new branches and to produce fruit; and, though the leaves fall and decay, the very products of decay nourish the roots of the tree and reappear in the new leaves or theories which succeed.

When the questioning of Nature by intelligent experiment has raised a system of science, then those men who desire to apply it to industrial inventions proceed by the same methods to make rapid