Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/344

328 natural phenomena. It personified them; it made realistic beings of them, constructed in its own semblance—that is, souls and gods. Such is, in fact, the universal tendency, as has been established by travelers among savages. Our own children, too, are prompt to transform their joys and their fears into superhuman phantoms. The images of dreams serve them as guides in this respect. In a word, observation shows that men are drawn by a spontaneous inclination to give objectivity to the products of their own thought, in order to create personalities and symbols, to which they shortly assign an absolute character, autonomous and divine. In this way, at the origin of the civilizations, every invention, every organism, was attributed to celestial revelations. The most intelligent and best instructed men founded their domination on such prepossessions, which they shared in, too, and when the temples rose at Memphis and Babylon, all knowledge was concentrated around their altars. The same persons, protected by their sacred character, then represented science and religion. The two orders of ideas were confused into a common dogmatism. A similar condition was reproduced at the beginning of the middle ages, after the destruction of the ancient civilization by the barbarians.

Hence the singular character of these primitive sciences, like astrology and alchemy, in which positive results were associated with the dreams of magic, and in which the efficacy of experimental practices had to be assured by the use of formulas and incantations, intended to control the will of the gods and command their assistance. Miracle was then obligatory upon the divinity, and independent of all moral notions. The Greek philosophers first tried to disengage true science from this alliance and render it purely rational. They, too, were at first accused of impiety—an accusation which has not ceased to be sounded for two thousand years, and which has cost the lives, from Socrates down, of the purest and most disinterested men. Yet, Greek genius, with all its power, never reached a clear apprehension of the scientific method, as we apply it now in the study of the world and of man. That method was not distinctly separated from pure and established logic till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which period the experimental sciences and the sciences of observation—physics, astronomy, mechanics, chemistry, physiology, and natural history—were definitely constituted. The method has been since extended to the historical and sociological sciences, in place of the old systems—the issue of the theology of the middle ages. We add, finally, that it is only in our own time that the scientific method, which looks to the relative and excludes the absolute, has begun to be fully applied and extended to ideas of every order.