My Friends Mistake When They Communicate Facts To Me With So Much
Pains.
Their presence, even their exaggerations and loose
statements, are equally good facts for me.
I have no respect for
facts even except when I would use them, and for the most part I
am independent of those which I hear, and can afford to be
inaccurate, or, in other words, to substitute more present and
pressing facts in their place.
The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and
generalizes their widest deductions.
The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and
systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the
unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any _mode_ of observation
will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.
Only let something be determined and fixed around which
observation may rally. How many new relations a foot-rule alone
will reveal, and to how many things still this has not been
applied! What wonderful discoveries have been, and may still be,
made, with a plumb-line, a level, a surveyor's compass, a
thermometer, or a barometer! Where there is an observatory and a
telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.
I should say that the most prominent scientific men of our
country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and
not pure science, or are performing faithful but quite
subordinate labors in particular departments. They make no
steady and systematic approaches to the central fact. A
discovery is made, and at once the attention of all observers is
distracted to that, and it draws many analogous discoveries in
its train; as if their work were not already laid out for them,
but they had been lying on their oars. There is wanting constant
and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and
discipline it.
But, above all, there is wanting genius. Our books of science,
as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness
and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature,
which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the
ancients. I am attracted by the slight pride and satisfaction,
the emphatic and even exaggerated style in which some of the
older naturalists speak of the operations of Nature, though they
are better qualified to appreciate than to discriminate the
facts. Their assertions are not without value when disproved.
If they are not facts, they are suggestions for Nature herself to
act upon. "The Greeks," says Gesner, "had a common proverb
() a sleeping hare, for a dissembler or
counterfeit; because the hare sees when she sleeps; for this is
an admirable and rare work of Nature, that all the residue of her
bodily parts take their rest, but the eye standeth continually
sentinel."
Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly
added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the
theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to
arrive at imperfect conclusions; but the power to perceive a law
is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little
on the number of facts observed. The senses of the savage will
furnish him with facts enough to set him up as a philosopher.
The ancients can still speak to us with authority, even on the
themes of geology and chemistry, though these studies are thought
to have had their birth in modern times. Much is said about the
progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the
useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had
been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for
posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding
experience. How can we _know_ what we are _told_ merely? Each
man can interpret another's experience only by his own. We read
that Newton discovered the law of gravitation, but how many who
have heard of his famous discovery have recognized the same truth
that he did? It may be not one. The revelation which was then
made to him has not been superseded by the revelation made to any
successor.
We see the _planet_ fall,
And that is all.
In a review of Sir James Clark Ross's Antarctic Voyage of
Discovery, there is a passage which shows how far a body of men
are commonly impressed by an object of sublimity, and which is
also a good instance of the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous. After describing the discovery of the Antarctic
Continent, at first seen a hundred miles distant over fields of
ice, - stupendous ranges of mountains from seven and eight to
twelve and fourteen thousand feet high, covered with eternal snow
and ice, in solitary and inaccessible grandeur, at one time the
weather being beautifully clear, and the sun shining on the icy
landscape; a continent whose islands only are accessible, and
these exhibited "not the smallest trace of vegetation," only in a
few places the rocks protruding through their icy covering, to
convince the beholder that land formed the nucleus, and that it
was not an iceberg; - the practical British reviewer proceeds
thus, sticking to his last, "On the 22d of January, afternoon,
the Expedition made the latitude of 74 degrees 20' and by 7h
P.M., having ground (ground! where did they get ground?) to
believe that they were then in a higher southern latitude than
had been attained by that enterprising seaman, the late Captain
James Weddel, and therefore higher than all their predecessors,
an extra allowance of grog was issued to the crews as a reward
for their perseverance."
Let not us sailors of late centuries take upon ourselves any airs
on account of our Newtons and our Cuviers; we deserve an extra
allowance of grog only.
We endeavored in vain to persuade the wind to blow through the
long corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight through
the woods, and were obliged to resort to our old expedient of
drawing by a cord.
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