Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/746

726 Harvey made physiology a science, and so on in all branches of knowledge.

Now, let us see what was the method by which these results were obtained. Meditation had of course the inciting share, but furnished no materials. Observation accumulated the materials of which reflection might weave a tissue, the test was experiment. If from a knowledge of conditions a result can be predicted, then there is certainty. Such certainty is science; it consists of observation, meditation, knowledge of conditions, knowledge of their results, and therefore of the connection between results and causes; these being regular, immutable, within the time accessible to our perceptions, and coercing everything under their sway, are called natural laws.

Of science, it is allowed that no part comes out of the human brain alone, not even the ideas of God and Immortality, which Kant claimed as innate ideas, while allowing all others to be the result of observation and reflection. The celebrated joke, that, if an Englishman and a German were asked to produce a camel each, the Teuton would evolve one out of his inner consciousness while the Briton would produce a camel of flesh and bone, is a good satire upon innate ideas. Science did not progress until it rejected all innate ideas or phantasies, and applied itself deeply to its proper methods, to observation, to meditation on the correlation of forces, and to experiment. Work, work, and again work, were the three main features of its success. The search for the philosopher's stone, for the medicine that should make young, healthy, happy, and rich, was also work, enormous in amount and extension, but it was not based upon observation. It left results which science gathered, the main result being that we cannot prolong our lives forward, but we can, as Kopp has beautifully said, prolong them backward indefinitely, and see the changes of enormous spaces of time pass before our admiring eyes and minds.

There are three kinds of history, that of our planetary system in the theory of Laplace, that of our earth in geology, that of living things in the theory of Darwin. No serious person doubts now that the teachings of geology deserve the title of an exact science, and that compared to its coercing character upon the mind of man the convictions derived from written history are feeble in the extreme, and all contradictory writings, however old, mere nullities. The youngest of the sciences or branch of science is chemistry, founded by Lavoisier and Dalton; developed by thousands of clear heads and nimble hands, it has in half a century become a recognized power in the affairs of man. It has materially improved his estate, and enlarged his mind to conceptions of an elevating nature; it has become a ready test of his reasoning and working power. It has become the handmaid of almost all the elder sisters of astronomy, teaching the composition of distant star; of geology, teaching the composition and changes of strata and minerals; of physiology, vegetable and animal, teaching about food,