Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/757

Rh themselves, the unfolding of their influence on human education, and, so far as they are a necessary element of this education, the healthiness of the future mental development of the people, depend on an insight being afforded to the educated classes, into the nature and the results of scientific investigation, such as is generally possible, without a personal engrossing occupation with these subjects.

And in proof that the need of such an insight is felt even by those who have grown up under the predominant linguistic and literary instruction, may be cited the large number of popular books of natural science annually published, and the eagerness with which lectures of a popular character on subjects in natural science are attended.

It lies in the nature of the case, however, that the essential part of this want, owing to the depth of its roots, is not easily satisfied. It is true that what science may have established and wrought out in solid results can, by intelligent compilers, be put together and brought into suitable form, so that a reader without previous knowledge of the subject may, with some perseverance and patience, understand it. But such a knowledge, limited to the actual results, is not properly that which we have in view. These books, indeed, compiled with the best intentions, often lead into devious paths. To prevent weariness, they must seek to rivet the attention of the reader by an accumulation of curiosities, whereby the image of science is rendered quite false. One often feels this when the reader begins from his own impulse to tell what he has considered important. Then there are the further objections that the book can give only word-descriptions, or, at the most, drawings representing more or less imperfectly the things and processes of which it treats; and that the reader's power of imagination is thereby subjected to a much greater strain, with much less satisfactory results, than that of the investigator or student who, in museum collections and laboratories, sees the things before him in their living reality. A portion of the difficulties named may readily be obviated in popular lectures, if, at least, some objects or experiments can be shown: the opportunities of doing so in Germany, hitherto, have been mostly very limited.

It appears to me, however, that it is not so much a knowledge of results of scientific investigations in themselves that the most intelligent and well-educated of the laity ask, but rather a perception of the mental activity of the investigator, of the individuality of his scientific procedure, of the aims at which he strives, of the fresh point of view which his work affords in reference to the great problems of human existence. There can hardly be any thing of all this in the properly scientific treatment of scientific objects; on the contrary, the severe discipline of the exact method requires that, in scientific treatises, only that be spoken of which is surely ascertained, hypotheses only where equivalent to the proposal of questions for further investigation, a certain answer to these appearing probable from the next