Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/760

740. But it can only advance where the other has already, in some measure, opened up the region, i. e., given an inductive knowledge of the laws, at least, for some groups of the phenomena belonging to it, and the point is merely the testing and clearing up of the already-found laws, the passage from them to the last and most general laws of the region in question, and the complete unfolding of their consequences. This other way leads to a rich knowledge of the behavior of natural substances and forces, in which at first the law-element is recognized only in the form in which artists perceive it, through vivid sensuous contemplation of the type of its action, in order to a later working out of it in the pure form of an idea. These two sides of the physicist's work are never quite separate from each other, though sometimes the diversity of individual gifts will adapt one man for mathematical deduction, another for the inductive activity of experimentation. Should the first method, however, become wholly divorced from actual observations, it falls into the danger of laboriously building castles in the air, on unstable foundations, and of not finding the points at which it may verify the agreement of its deductions with fact. The second, on the other hand, would lose sight of the proper aim of science, if it did not work toward ultimately bringing its observations into the precise form of the idea.

The first discovery of laws of Nature previously unknown, that is, of new forms of likeness in the course of apparently unconnected phenomena, is a matter of sense (taking the word in its widest meaning), and must nearly always be accomplished only by comparison of numerous sensuous perceptions. The perfection and purification of that which has been found fall afterward under the working of the deductive method of thinking, and preferentially of mathematical analysis, as the final question is ever about equality of quantities.

Now, Mr. Tyndall is par excellence an experimenter; he forms his generalizations from extensive observations of the play of natural forces, and carries over what he has seen, in some cases to the greatest, in others to the smallest relations of space (as appeared in the lecture referred to). It is quite a mistake to consider what he calls imagination as mere fancy (Phantasterei). It is exactly the opposite that is meant—full sensuous contemplation. To this mode of working is evidently to be attributed the clearness of his lectures on physical phenomena, as also his success as a popular lecturer.