Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/691

Rh elements and really inquire into their secrets, lias been hurriedly introduced to all of those available, and has been left to struggle as best he could with their multitudinous compounds. The result has been to confuse, and in many cases finally to disgust. Chemistry—and I do not wonder at it—has been voted "dry" by the majority of college boys.

This result has come about because the science has been unscientific. The meaning of science is to know, but one knows very little from such a gallop among the varied forms of matter. If one knows thoroughly two or three typical gases, two or three typical liquids, and two or three typical solids, he knows chemistry. He may not be worth much as a reference-book; but then encyclopedias are nearly always available, while thoughtful men are rare. Further, the quality of such knowledge deserves attention. It has become a part of the man himself, for he has learned it the way children learn things. It is no longer simply a fact of chemistry; it is a fact of life, a part of the oft-repeated experiences which go to make up his intelligence. Imagine for a moment the amusement of a bright boy were he asked whether he remembered if stones are hard, or lead heavy, or glass brittle. His answer will be that of course he does not; he knows that they are. It is knowledge of a similar definiteness that the scientific method strives to cultivate. Studied in this way, chemistry ceases to be a matter of simple memory, and becomes almost exclusively a branch of pure reasoning. It passes from the objective to the subjective world, and becomes a valuable means of mental development as well as a study now well worth pursuing for its own sake.

One of the first requisites, then, in the proper presentation of chemistry seems to be the entire banishment of that alien element which makes it a thing by itself, and the insistence upon its recognition as a purely natural extension of common knowledge. Any experience in life will form a suitable starting-point. It may readily be analyzed into its components; the chemical element can not well be missed. If the occurrence be such as we commonly call accidental, or, more strictly speaking, if it be devoid of human agency, it will resolve itself into two terms, conveniently expressible by the words matter and motion. If the occurrence be voluntarily producible, a third element is involved—that of will. It would be foreign to the present purpose to enter the vexed discussion of whether this third element, this unknown something which makes the distinction between conscious and unconscious existence, is the cause or the result of those reactions in matter and force with which will, as we know it, seems to be indissolubly connected. It will be sufficient for the present to call it $$x$$, a designation involving neither issues nor compromises.