Part 11 (1/2)

She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the civilised man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crus.h.i.+ng than his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.

He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many--if not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world. If she turn against him--she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day by day--what harm can she not, may she not do?

And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?

Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day. Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous of all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints enough to show that it, like all other superst.i.tions, is the child--the last born and the ugliest child--of blind dread of the unknown.

SCIENCE: A lecture delivered at the Royal Inst.i.tution.

I said, that Superst.i.tion was the child of Fear, and Fear the child of Ignorance; and you might expect me to say ant.i.thetically, that Science was the child of Courage, and Courage the child of Knowledge.

But these genealogies--like most metaphors--do not fit exactly, as you may see for yourselves.

If fear be the child of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear; the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, the less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It is dangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old--”I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted.” And why should they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she does not destroy them. So as ignorance bred fear, fear breeds fresh and willing ignorance.

And courage? We may say, and truly, that courage is the child of knowledge. But we may say as truly, that knowledge is the child of courage. Those Egyptian priests in the temple of Isis would have told you that knowledge was the child of mystery, of special illumination, of reverence, and what not; hiding under grand words their purpose of keeping the ma.s.ses ignorant, that they might be their slaves. Reverence?

I will yield to none in reverence for reverence. I will all but agree with the wise man who said that reverence is the root of all virtues. But which child reverences his father most? He who comes joyfully and trustfully to meet him, that he may learn his father's mind, and do his will: or he who at his father's coming runs away and hides, lest he should be beaten for he knows not what? There is a scientific reverence, a reverence of courage, which is surely one of the highest forms of reverence. That, namely, which so reveres every fact, that it dare not overlook or falsify it, seem it never so minute; which feels that because it is a fact, it cannot be minute, cannot be unimportant; that it must be a fact of G.o.d; a message from G.o.d; a voice of G.o.d, as Bacon has it, revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying them, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence; a reverence which is growing, thank G.o.d, more and more common; which will produce, as it grows more common still, fruit which generations yet unborn shall bless.

But as for that other reverence, which shuts its eyes and ears in pious awe--what is it but cowardice decked out in state robes, putting on the sacred Urim and Thummim, not that men may ask counsel of the Deity, but that they may not? What is it but cowardice, very pitiable when unmasked; and what is its child but ignorance as pitiable, which would be ludicrous were it not so injurious? If a man comes up to Nature as to a parrot or a monkey, with this prevailing thought in his head--Will it bite me?--will he not be pretty certain to make up his mind that it may bite him, and had therefore best be left alone? It is only the man of courage--few and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite, in the hope of teaching the parrot to talk, or the monkey to fire off a gun. And it is only the man of courage--few and far between--who will stand the chance of a first bite from Nature, which may kill him for aught he knows--for her teeth, though clumsy, are very strong--in order that he may tame her and break her in to his use by the very same method by which that admirable inductive philosopher, Mr. Rarey, used to break in his horses; first, by not being afraid of them; and next, by trying to find out what they were thinking of. But after all, as with animals, so with Nature; cowardice is dangerous. The surest method of getting bitten by an animal is to be afraid of it; and the surest method of being injured by Nature is to be afraid of it. Only as far as we understand Nature are we safe from it; and those who in any age counsel mankind not to pry into the secrets of the universe, counsel them not to provide for their own life and well-being, or for their children after them. But how few there have been in any age who have not been afraid of Nature. How few have set themselves, like Rarey, to tame her by finding out what she is thinking of. The ma.s.s are glad to have the results of science, as they are to buy Mr. Rarey's horses after they are tamed: but for want of courage or of wit, they had rather leave the taming process to some one else. And therefore we may say that what knowledge of Nature we have--and we have very little--we owe to the courage of those men--and they have been very few--who have been inspired to face Nature boldly; and say--or, what is better, act as if they were saying--”I find something in me which I do not find in you; which gives me the hope that I can grow to understand you, though you may not understand me; that I may become your master, and not as now, you mine. And if not, I will know: or die in the search.”

It is to those men, the few and far between, in a very few ages and very few countries, who have thus risen in rebellion against Nature, and looked it in the face with an unquailing glance, that we owe what we call Physical Science.

There have been four races--or rather a very few men of each four races--who have faced Nature after this gallant wise.

First, the old Jews. I speak of them, be it remembered, exclusively from an historical, and not a religious point of view.

These people, at a very remote epoch, emerged from a country highly civilised, but sunk in the superst.i.tions of nature-wors.h.i.+p. They invaded and mingled with tribes whose superst.i.tions were even more debased, silly, and foul than those of the Egyptians from whom they escaped. Their own ma.s.ses were for centuries given up to nature-wors.h.i.+p. Now among those Jews arose men--a very few--sages--prophets--call them what you will, the men were inspired heroes and philosophers--who a.s.sumed towards nature an att.i.tude utterly different from the rest of their countrymen and the rest of the then world; who denounced superst.i.tion and the dread of nature as the parent of all manner of vice and misery; who for themselves said boldly that they discerned in the universe an order, a unity, a permanence of law, which gave them courage instead of fear. They found delight and not dread in the thought that the universe obeyed a law which could not be broken; that all things continued to that day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent--identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superst.i.tious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the hills were carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters raged and swelled, and the mountains shook at the tempest.

The fact is indisputable. And you must pardon me if I express my belief that these men, if they had felt it their business to found a school of inductive physical science, would, owing to that temper of mind, have achieved a very signal success. I ground that opinion on the remarkable, but equally indisputable fact, that no nation has ever succeeded in perpetuating a school of inductive physical science, save those whose minds have been saturated with this same view of Nature, which they have--as an historic fact--slowly but thoroughly learnt from the writings of these Jewish sages.

Such is the fact. The founders of inductive physical science were not the Jews: but first the Chaldaeans, next the Greeks, next their pupils the Romans--or rather a few sages among each race. But what success had they? The Chaldaean astronomers made a few discoveries concerning the motions of the heavenly bodies, which, rudimentary as they were, still prove them to have been men of rare intellect. For a great and a patient genius must he have been, who first distinguished the planets from the fixed stars, or worked out the earliest astronomical calculation. But they seem to have been crushed, as it were, by their own discoveries.

They stopped short. They gave way again to the primeval fear of Nature.

They sank into planet-wors.h.i.+p. They invented, it would seem, that fantastic pseudo-science of astrology, which lay for ages after as an incubus on the human intellect and conscience. They became the magicians and quacks of the old world; and mankind owed them thenceforth nothing but evil. Among the Greeks and Romans, again, those sages who dared face Nature like reasonable men, were accused by the superst.i.tious mob as irreverent, impious, atheists. The wisest of them all, Socrates, was actually put to death on that charge; and finally, they failed. School after school, in Greece and Rome, struggled to discover, and to get a hearing for, some theory of the universe which was founded on something like experience, reason, common sense. They were not allowed to prosecute their attempt. The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was Neoplatonism--the muddiest of the muddy--an attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superst.i.tions of the Roman world. Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her school--they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for they were n.o.ble souls. Yet they spent their time in justifying those who had; in apologising for the superst.i.tions of the very mob which they despised: just as--it sometimes seems to me--some folk in these days are like to end in doing; begging that the ma.s.ses might be allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all: as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being.

And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood, just where it began.

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks and Romans proved that it was possible. It remained for our race, under the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.

Many causes contributed to give them this power. They were a personally courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Their laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations by land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured, moreover, by circ.u.mstances, or--as I should rather put it--by that divine Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their habitation. They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics. They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it: and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-d.y.k.e, that they are winning at last. But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superst.i.tions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the early legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own superst.i.tions, they added those of the Rome which they conquered. They dreaded the Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace's Canidia, still performed horrid rites in grave-yards and dark places of the earth. They dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. They dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed. They were the work of enchanters. Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden. The Caesars became to them magical man-G.o.ds. The poet Virgil became the prince of necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and often came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in prison. All the medieval sages--even Albertus Magnus--were stigmatised as magicians. One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coa.r.s.e common sense, took--vain and sensual--to drinking the laudanum which he himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the ”Romani nominis umbra,” the shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens was really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when the authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries, those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superst.i.tion, and are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of the middle ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think of Nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of her. Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe--as there certainly were in the days of the immortal 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum'--who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the ma.s.ses. The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use--as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear witness--till the latter half of the seventeenth century.

After that time a rapid change began. It is marked by--it has been notably a.s.sisted by--the foundation of our own Royal Society. Its causes I will not enter into; they are so inextricably mixed, I hold, with theological questions, that they cannot be discussed here. I will only point out to you these facts: that, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, the n.o.blest heads and the n.o.blest hearts of Europe concentrated themselves more and more on the brave and patient investigation of physical facts, as the source of priceless future blessings to mankind; that the eighteenth century, which it has been the fas.h.i.+on of late to depreciate, did more for the welfare of mankind, in every conceivable direction, than the whole fifteen centuries before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and a.n.a.lysing facts; that this boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their att.i.tude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual emanc.i.p.ation of the human intellect. The connection may not, of course, be one of cause and effect; it may be a mere coincidence. I believe it to be a cause; one of course of very many causes: but still an integral cause. At least the coincidence is too remarkable a fact not to be worthy of investigation.

I said, just now--The emanc.i.p.ation of the human intellect. I did not say--Of science, or of the scientific intellect; and for this reason:

That the emanc.i.p.ation of science is the emanc.i.p.ation of the common mind of all men. All men can partake of the gains of free scientific thought, not merely by enjoying its physical results, but by becoming more scientific men themselves.

Therefore it was, that though I began my first lecture by defining superst.i.tion, I did not begin my second by defining its antagonist, science. For the word science defines itself. It means simply knowledge; that is, of course, right knowledge, or such an approximation as can be obtained; knowledge of any natural object, its cla.s.sification, its causes, its effects; or in plain English, what it is, how it came where it is, and what can be done with it.