SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE.
" KNOWLEDGE is power," writes the philosopher, with a flourish ; but ten to one, if you place before him the things about which he knows, and ask him to do with each that which ought to be done with it, he will tell you he does not know. He who exultingly applies to himself, with his encycloprediacal survey of things in general, the immortal maxim of Bacon's index-maker, proves in a hundred instances, when he comes to the business of life, that he does not know, and that he is impotent, or that the special know- ledge which he has confers none of the power of which he dis- courses. A statist will tell you that there are so many agricul- tural labourers in the country, and that they produce so much. He will describe a spade with accuracy, and probably know how many are exported ; but put a spade into his hand and ask him to produce an agricultural commodity, and he will look at you with a reproachful helplessness. Place before him the following ar- ticles— " One pound of meat daily, fresh and salt on alternate days ; one pound of good biscuit, or one pound and a half of fresh soft bread; daily ; from half a pound to a pound of fresh vegetables, or an equivalent quantity of pre- served vegetables, daily ; two ounces of rice or barley daily ; one ounce of coffee or one quarter ounce of tea daily, on alternate days ; one and three- quarters ounce of sugar daily ; two half-gills of rum daily, and one half-gill more when in the trenches, with lime-juice and additional sugar daily, given as an antiscorbutic, and sufficient to make half a gill of rum into good punch." —Ask the philosopher to cook or compound these excellent materials. He can tell you, no doubt, the chemical nature of the process involved in boiling or roasting; the superiority of boiled meat over baked, from the absence of empyreuma ; the antiscorbutic virtues of vegetables; the nutritive properties of rice or barley, and the restorative qualities of tea and coffee : but probably he can get no further than mixing the punch, if he can get so far. Yet these articles are the allowance of the British soldier on ser- vice, who is expected to be his own cook. If our knowing philo- sopher, who sees through all things, is so ignorant when it comes to business, how can we expect the ignorant classes to know any better ? As the community, so will the soldier be ; with a chance, in this country, that he will be a picked specimen of ignorance. The soldier should be a jack-of-all-trades—able to handle the spade or mattock, the axe, the saw, the hammer, the trowel ; to mend his own clothes and his shoes, to light his own fire. Our soldier can do nothing but fight; and Sir Yohn M'Neill attributes that lamentable singleness of idea to the very boast of our civilization- " The minute division of labour, which is a result of high civilization, has a tendency to carry men back to a condition analogous in some re- spects to a state of primitive barbarism. In many of our manufactories and handicrafts, men spend their lives in doing some very limited part of the work required to produce one article, and can do nothing else ; as some Russian musicians spend their lives in sounding only one note. The person, for example, who made the head or the point of a pin, could hardly do any- thing else. He could not handle a spade or a mattock, an axe or a saw, a hammer or a crowbar. He could not mend his own clothes or shoes, or shirts or stockings. He could not bake his own bread or cook his own food ; he was a bad hand at lighting his own fire, or even making his own bed. He could hardly turn his hand to anything under the sun except the head or the point of a pin, as the case might be. This was not peculiar to the pinmaker, though he had selected him as a familiar illustration. '
The analysis of this military helplessness is a strange revelation for an Englishman ; but we believe it to be perfectly accurate. In a military point of view it is interesting. The French are our greatest rivals while we are allies; at a time of discord they must necessarily be our most formidable and admirable enemies. Upon the whole, perhaps, the achievements of the two races have been pretty fairly divided. We have before us the means employed by the two in procuring their victories. We English contrive it by fighting and Wellingtonian organization pro re nata. The French excel us in the auxiliary arts which the private soldier should ex- ercise—as labourer, tailor, shoemaker, kitchen-builder, and cook : in mechanics and the application of practical art, how much of the victories which have fallen to the share of our great rival are due to those very qualities and attainments that we, a mechanical and useful-art people should have thought peculiarly our own! How much of the balance of victory could we secure for ourselves, if we made up lee-way in that branch of our soldiers' business!
But the subject is interesting in something more than a military point of view : it teaches us here at home. If pins and other pro- ducts of the useful arts were the only objects of life, we might not so much care ; but even in that regard our system would not be complete. It happens too, that besides pins, steam-machinery, &c., it concerns us that the human beings which compose the com- munity should be in the best possible condition for securing their own happiness and the happiness of those around them by acting together. We isolate the men in order that they may produce the parts of pins in perfection, or out files with a sharpness and irre- gularity essential to that tool; and the result is that they can do no more. The spinner whose fingers years have hardened may be out of work in the prime of life ; the file-cutter cannot long sur- vive the tedium of his occupation, and the debauchery that diver- sifies tedium ; the pinmaker is unavailable surplus if the practical statistics of his craft are a little overdone. We have spoiled the men in making them tools. They revenge themselves on society. There are so many things in which they could help, but we have not taught them how. However, as we have not deprived them of their stomachs, and as wages are their only nexus to society, they feel the revulsion when the nexus is torn away ; and having nothing else to do, they enter into knob-stick combinations, bread riots, and other recreations with which the reserve of the labouring army amuses its leisure. Is it only the ignorant classes who are ignorant ? Is it only philosophical Dominic Sampson that is the blunderer at the things which he can name in his encyclopedia ? No, your scientific men are cut off from large fields of science ; and there is no man makes such gross blunders as your practical engineer. If there is a man who ought to know the properties of iron under manual treatment, it should be a great iron manufacturer—a Nasmyth. Accordingly, Nasmyth is an authority when he tells us that he can construct a gigantic steel gun. He attempts it, and in the very attempt he stumbles upon a property in the metal which for- bids its being worked in great masses. Like the flying philoso- pher, he has courted the exhibition of his own ludicrous failure; only, instead of having Prince Raaselas for his spectator, he has done it in the face of the Allied armies and of the scientific world. The fact is, that your scientific people are grossly ignorant of scientific facts and broad scientific truths. Here is another grand division of employments. The great masses of accumulated fact, which are unfamiliar to our scientific men, are as familiar as his own tools or the hands that touch them to the working man. This admirable subject is opened up with congenial earnestness by the writer of another paper in the North British _Renew. We all of us know something of the innumerable substances that con- tribute to our comforts, safety, health, and pleasure—the metals, perfect and imperfect, the clays, slates, marbles, stones; the bones, skins, tendons, horns, hoofs, intestines, and secretions of animals ; the woods, barks, roots, foliages, fruits, gums, resins, spirits, aro- mas, and endless riches of the vegetable world. But how few of us know the dozen, twenty, perhaps hundred of other substances, mineral, metal, or organic, which have brought each article to the hands of the consumer ? It is the workman that has the handling of all these substances and their auxiliaries.
"In the use of metals for mechanical or manufacturing purposes, frequent instances occur in which the only metallic product which will satisfy the conditions of a difficult operation, or a peculiar structure or movement, is an alloy of definite proportions ; and not only so, but the mixture must have been effected with the most exact regard to the point of fusion, and even to the state of the weather. Look, for instance, to some processes in the art of gilding, or look at the endless intricacies that are involved in those arts the object of which is to produce brilliant, permanent, and peculiar tints. The craft of the potter embraces many such niceties ; and so does that of the worker in enamel ; and so, especially, does that of the calico- printer. *
"In those dull hours of those dull weeks, months, years, which the work- man spends at his bench, or stooping over the steaming cauldron, or sweat- ing in the fierce front of the raging furnace, or stirring the crusted mixture of a vat—in those monotonous hours, at moments few and far between, awful Nature, who through thousands of years has veiled herself prudishly from the eyes of sages, stands revealed before the astounded workman, and sheds a momentary splendour through the dungeon-like vault in which he labours. It is not often that the workman himself comprehends the revela- tion of which he has been the witness ; but nevertheless he notes the re- sult, and he finds opportunity to turn it to excellent account; and so, in- wardly exulting in the thought of his treasure, he is led to hold cheap, though he does not quite contemn, what the professor of science may know of things beyond his sphere."
The intelligent workman keeps his discovery, to himself as a " secret of trade." Take his class as a whole, and Nature displays before it in thousands or millions of instances the facts which the scientific professor in his amateur wanderings stumbles upon by accident, and carries as a precious discovery to the lecture-room or the scientific conference. The workman is untaught to generalize and to extract guiding principles for his business; the professor, unendowed with the abundance of the workman in observed facts, generalizes on imperfect data, or " discovers" later than he might otherwise have done. The two classes remain comparatively use- less to each other—the workman, ignorant of the reasoning of his craft, the reasoner ignorant of the substance and working of the craft. At the present day many are " educated" until the very breadth and complexity of the acquired knowledge render it a burden and an obstruction; we learn so much, that we cannot learn the very things that we want to know. An intelligent peer suddenly wakes up out of the erudite dream, and discovers that " the time has arrived," as the Chartists say, when we ought to teach " common things " ; thus realizing the satire of the poet Whose genius goes star-gazing, and, ignorant of his own footing, stumbles and falls. Knowledge is power when knowledge is com- plete : but our system keeps our knowledge fragmentary. A race of one-idea'd students produces one-idea'd soldiers—a fighting, but not a cooking, a tailoring, a shoemaking, or a knowing animal. In the midst of our intellectual greatness, an able reviewer, familiar with the manufacturing districts, discovers for the first time the advantage of placing science in relation with practical experience, and of teaching practical experience sci- entific principles. Perhaps we may apply this idea to cri- minals, who at present, in the division of employments, are only taught their own special calling—say picking pockets—as the soldier is taught fighting. Perhaps the root of the evil lies in our educational idea—a college curriculum—a dash at the encyclo- pedia. After all, it is an imperfect idea of the division of labour. We ought to divide employments and combine the labour, with a comprehensive knowledge of the whole combination. It is a com- mon moral, that as surely as ever a nation begins to boast, it is betraying the very point where its wisdom stops short. We boast of our intellectual progress, our division of employments, our practical science; and see how we really stand!
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