SIR JAMES PAGET'S CONFESSION ON BEHALF OF SCIENCE.
SIR JAMES PAGET was truly eloquent this day week in the praise of science and of the happiness which know- ledge gives ; but he made one confession which he evidently felt to be humiliating, when he said that though science is full of wonders, scientific men completely lose their sense of wonder in their every-day occupation with those wonders. "They looked," he said, "at a machine so perfect in construction, so exact for the purpose for which it was built, made with such foresight and such precision that the mind of the inventor really seemed to be in it ; it seemed to be working by mind ; and there stood the workman by the side of that machine, but his sense of wonder had long since passed away. He knew what was going
on, he knew how all was to come to pass, and to him, that which they thought to be a wonder was a common experience of every-day life." Is that the reason why literary culture is generally thought to have the advantage of scientific culture in quickening the mental life? Bacon, we know, who of all men test appreciated the eager craving of the scientific temperament for the satisfaction of the higher kinds of curiosity, did not scruple to say that "a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure." "Doth any man doubt," he adds, in the same essay, the essay on Truth, "that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, fall of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves ?" Sir James Paget seems in some measure to agree with this theory when he boasts that "science would supply the life of men with wonders uncounted," only that the man of science stands by with steady eye enumerating all these wonders without a single thrill of awe or even astonishment, though he uses the marvels he has discovered for his own purpose, whether that be to deter- mine the constitution of a sun separated from us by billions of miles, or to count the rate at which one such sun is approaching or separating from another. The men of science lose the sense of wonder almost in the very act of achieving the feats by which it ought to be excited, because their main object is not the kindling of feeling, but the mastery of a new instrument, by the help of which they may serve some useful purpose. Directly they invent their instruments, they set to work to use them, and you can no more be constantly engaged in using an instrument, however wonderful, and yet continue to overflow with wonder at its delicacy and strength, than you can emulate Dickens's inimitable hypocrite in eating and drinking chiefly in order
-that you may realise how great "a benefactor to his race"
is he who winds up and sets going the very beautiful and wonderful digestive apparatus contained in his own body. The sense of wonder collapses before the practical habit of use, and reserves itself for those attitudes of the mind in which, as in all great literary effects, we are contemplating final results on which the mind loves to rest, and not merely instruments by which it hopes to attain to some ulterior end. And this is the great dif- ference, surely, between scientific and literary culture,—that the one is a culture in the apt choice of means to ends beyond them- selves, the other a culture in the appreciation of what is intrin- sically interesting, interesting for its own sake. When Bacon spoke of minds shrinking in an atmosphere of mere truth, for want of the vain opinions, flattering hopes, and false valuations without which man is hardly able to live, he was certainly unjust to the human intellect. It is not mere truth but mere knowledge which is insufficient for man. The possession of truth means something much more than the possession of knowledge; it means the possession of knowledge of a kind high enough to satisfy the human affections,—in other words, of the knowledge of anything and everything which can be contemplated with actual delight. For example, to take what is by no means the highest type of such knowledge,—the knowledge of what is intrinsically beau- tiful satisfies, for a time at least, the craving of man's heart, and therefore fills him with an emotion which pure scientific know- ledge is incapable of exciting. So the knowledge of the wonderful and subtle ways of the human heart, which is the main subject of literature, is a kind of knowledge which it satisfies the heart to contemplate without even pressing further to its issues. Bat you cannot contemplate the law of reflec- tion or refraction, or the laws which govern the structure of the human body, or the laws which govern the associa- tion of ideas, or any other of the skeleton methods upon which the physics and metaphysics of Nature are built up, with any sense of final satisfaction ; you are always spurred on to discover what the method leads to, what use can be made of it, what locks it will open, what knots it will untie.
This is the real difference, as it seems, between scientific and literary culture. The former is full of discipline in the various directions to which Sir James Paget referred. It teaches vigilance in observing. It teaches accuracy in recording and measuring. It teaches immeasurable patience in disentangling difficulties. It teaches fertility of resource, as well as still greater patience, in conceiving what may be the secret of the whole process, and in comparing the guess with the facts till all the erroneous guesses are excluded. And it teaches, above all, the limitless self-control which is needed for all these pro- cesses alike. Literary culture teaches some of these habits of mind as well as science, and some of them mach less well. It teaches a very different kind of vigilance in observa- tion,—vigilance in noticing the significance of expression rather than vigilance in noticing the traces of agency or cause. It teaches accuracy, again, in rendering the shade of meaning expressed in one language into the nearest equivalent in a different language. It teaches patience in tracking out the various traces of association which words and gestures convey. And it stimulates to the effort of imagination necessary to form a full conception of the purpose with which a great poet or thinker was possessed, in the construction of any of his great works. But the two cultures differ in this. The scientific culture never inclines one to rest in any of its achieve- ments; it reveals at best a method which is always urging on the mind that grasps it to apply it, and finds hardly any satis- faction in it except so far as the application yields a further mastery over Nature. The literary culture leads to real satisfac- tions that do not, like the treadmill, compel the inquirer to push further, and deaden him to the wonder of what he has achieved. The literary culture which exhibits Isaiah or Homer, or .1Eschylus or Virgil, or Goethe or Shakespeare, in his full grandeur, gives the mind a resting-place as well as a discipline. The scientific culture which exhibits a physical, or geological, or biological, or psychological method. of investigation, gives a discipline but not a resting-place,—rather, indeed, a spur to the elaboration of new methods. For scientific culture is the piercing of a path through a never-ending wilderness, which, however useful, always insists on being pursued farther. Literary culture is the piercing of a path through a wilderness which leads to view after view in which you would willingly rest and even live. The one deals with means that only suggest new means; the other, with ends that too often satisfy without urging on to further ends.
And this is why science so often benumbs the imaginations of her devotees. The curiosity to which she ministers is an insatiable hunger which is only whetted by what it feeds on. There is hardly any food for love in the wonders which she reveals, only food for a triumph which immediately goads the mind to seek a farther triumph. The domain which has been once annexed by science never seems to yield any further harvest of gratification after the first conquest, or after the first full appreciation of the conquest achieved by others. The domain which has been annexed by literature never ceases to afford fresh delight; it is one in which the mind is only too disposed to rest, for it is one in which there is some satisfaction for the higher affections of man as well as for his higher reason. Here it is, and here alone, that, in our opinion, Sir James Paget under- estimates the culture of the literary school, when he regards, as we understand him to regard, scientific culture as its equal, if not its superior.
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