Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/745

Rh our present mode of thinking, one single demand of the understanding. There is no science about our present homes, or how could they get filled with sewer-gas, be devoid of arrangements for ventilation, and have square chimneys. Architecture, so called, is not a science, but an imitative art, beautiful but blundering. Manufactures have, too often, been carried on with great disregard of science, with the result that either empiricism was, for the time, successful enough, or that the manufacture went simply out of existence. It is the same with commerce. These arts have worked by tradition, by prescription, by precedent. They all wait for an infusion of the scientific method, the method of principle based upon natural laws immutable and indestructible. While not often scientific themselves, these branches of human knowledge, administering all the time, for a consideration of gain to be paid by the recipient, to important human wants, have yet indirectly advanced science by either finding and bringing, or by producing some of its materials.

Antiquity, then, possessed no science, except alone the results of meditation, which have been termed metaphysics, and which, if allowed to include ethics and logic, have no doubt attained in the treatment of philosophers a high degree of development. The contemplation of Nature, however, in its inorganic and organized shape, and of the causes determining all motion and development, was not greatly developed. The power of distinction, the mother of all knowledge, was not applied to all things, and consequently they termed a process such as fire an element, and allowed some all-pervading material to exist under the name of the quintessence. Bodies fell to the ground because they possessed weight; but that the falling was a reciprocal action between the earth and the body falling upon it escaped their observation, and was only found by science.

Mere observation is not science, but only the beginning of science. When a person, sitting in the railway-train, beholds the traveling shadow, he makes an observation. He begins a scientific inquiry, when he asks whether the shadow travels as quickly as the train, so as to be in a line falling from the sun past the train or whether the shadow is not a little later. If once the question has arisen, it is immaterial where it is solved, whether upon the railway-train, or the satellites of Jupiter—the question must lead to the idea that light requires time for traveling; exact science determines this time by measuring space. Science began its development with the elucidation of celestial phenomena, and became astronomy, or the doctrine of the laws according to which heavenly bodies move. Copernicus is from this point of view the father, the creator of science. Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, reduced the observations of these phenomena to expressions of regularity which we call laws. The method once found was applied to other branches of knowledge; then arose the physiology of the animal and vegetable world, based upon anatomy as a science.