Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/644

 6o6 Readings in European History 496. The scientific advance in the eighteenth century. (Adapted from Taine.) Inorganic sciences. tissue of fables. . . . And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God, — pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of life- less matter, thus unconsciously confirming the divine decla- ration, 'When pride cometh, then cometh shame.' But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, alto- gether absurd though they are, should — since they borrow the mask of science — be refuted by true science." The truly astonishing advances in natural science which antedate the French Revolution, and upon which the discoveries of the nineteenth century were based, are thus summed up by a brilliant French writer. In pure mathematics we have infinitesimal calculus, discovered simultaneously by Leibnitz and Newton ; in astronomy, the series of calculations and observations which, from Newton to Laplace, transforms science into a problem of mechanics, explains and predicts the move- ments of the planets and of their satellites, indicates the origin and formation of our solar system, and, extending beyond this through the discoveries of Herschel, affords an insight into the distribution of the stellar archipelagoes and of the grand outlines of celestial architecture. In physics we have the decomposition of light and the principles of optics discovered by Newton, the velocity of sound, the form of its undulations, the primary laws of the radiation of heat, the experiments by which Du Fay, Franklin, and especially Coulomb explain, manipulate, and for the first time utilize, electricity. In chemistry the chief foundations of the science were laid : isolation of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, the composition of water, the theory of combustion, chemical nomenclature, quantitative analysis, the indestructibility of matter, — in short, the dis- coveries of Scheele, Priestley, Cavendish, Lavoisier.