Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/215

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joys and above all that of doing good immediately to humanity and correcting evils without forcing the remedy to wait.

The scientist is accustomed to conquer truth only by degrees; for him all certainty should be bought by long hesitations, by perpetually feeling his way. He suspects what comes too easily, and accepts it only after submitting it to numerous and diverse proofs. The man who must act can not embarrass himself by such scruples. He cares little for a truth which must wait so long, because it may arrive too late, and after the moment for action has passed. He must make rapid conquests; sometimes these are not the most durable nor those we should esteem. He also has to avoid reefs which we know not, we for whom time does not count, and sometimes we are tempted to say a true scientist ought not to risk them; how much better on the contrary to congratulate ourselves that there are men skilful enough to avoid them.

Towards pure science his attitude was almost adoration. It is best set forth by extracts from his "Value of Science" and "Science and Method":

The search for truth should be the goal of our activity; it is the only end worthy of it. . . . When I speak here of truth doubtless I mean primarily scientific truth, but I wish to speak also of moral truth, one of whose aspects is what we call Justice. . . . To find one as well as to find the other, it is necessary to struggle to the utmost to free ourselves from the bonds of prejudice and passion, to attain absolute sincerity.

The best expression of the harmony of nature is Law. Law is one of the most recent conquests of the human mind. Man demands that his gods prove their existence by miracles, but the eternal marvel is that there are not miracles all the time. And the world is divine because it is harmonious. Were it ruled by caprices what could ever prove it due to aught but chance?

But does this harmony which the human intellect believes it finds in nature exist outside the intellect? Doubtless not; a reality completely independent of the mind that conceives it, sees it, feels it, is an impossibility. What we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinkers and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can be only the harmony expressed by mathematical laws.

So we conclude that this harmony is the sole objective reality, the sole truth we can ever attain, and if I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it becomes comprehensible how we should prize the slow and painful progress by which we learn little by little to know it.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because it pleases him, and it pleases him because it is beautiful. Were nature not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, life would not be worth living. I do not mean here, of course, that beauty which impresses the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I despise it—far from it; but that has nought to do with science; I mean that subtler beauty of the harmonious order of the parts which pure intellect appreciates. This it is which gives a body, a skeleton as it were, to the fleeting appearances that charm the senses, and without this support the beauty of these fugitive dreams would be but imperfect, because it would be unstable and evanescent. On the contrary intellectual beauty is self-sufficient and for its sake, rather than for the good of humanity, does the scientist condemn himself to long and tedious labors.