Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/758

738 progress of the research. A natural prudence recommends great rigor in this connection. For it is pretty much the same to the greater number even of the instructed hearers whether a man of science says "I know," or "I suppose;" they only ask after the result and the authority by which it is supported, not the grounds or the doubts. It is thus not to be wondered at if earnest investigators do not willingly shock the confidence of their readers in what the former may think true and demonstrable, by the enumeration of ideas of the correctness of which they do not feel themselves quite secure. These may be very probable, and may be expressed with ever so much prudence and careful guardedness; they still expose him who utters them to the danger of vexatious misrepresentation.

It is, further, not to be overlooked, that the peculiar discipline of scientific thought which is necessary for the most abstract and rigorous grasp possible of newly-found ideas and laws, and for the purification from all accidents of the sensuous order of phenomena, along with the habitual residence of the mind among a circle of ideas far removed from general interest, is not a quite favorable preparative for a popular intelligible exposition of the insights obtained, to hearers who have not had the like discipline. For this task there is rather required an artistic talent of exposition, a certain kind of eloquence. The lecturer or writer must find generally accessible stand-points from which he may call forth new representations with the most vivid distinctness, and then allow the abstract principle, which he seeks to make intelligible, to derive from these concrete life. This is almost an opposite mode of treatment to that which obtains in scientific treatises, and it can readily be understood that the men are rare who are equally fitted for both these kinds of intellectual labor.

Owing to all these circumstances, a sort of dividing wall is raised between the men of science and the laity who might obtain instruction and guidance from them. That many, and indeed some of the most able, investigators have the qualities and peculiarities belonging to abstract work is natural, and will, in each individual case, be at once willingly excused. I have here merely to guard against the reversal of this relation, as if the defects named were necessary, or at all constituted a prerogative.

The compilers can give no help in those directions where the original thinkers have neglected or avoided expressing themselves. So much the more gratifying is it, I consider, in such a state of things, when, among those who have shown the highest ability for original scientific work, there is found, at times, a man like Tyndall, full of enthusiasm for the problem of making the newly-acquired insights and outlooks of his science available for the wider circle of the people, and, at the same time, endowed with other qualities which are the necessary conditions of success toward this end, eloquence and the gift of lucid exposition.