Part 7 (1/2)
Enough for us that He knows when, in whose hand are the times and the seasons--G.o.d the Father of the spirits of all flesh.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, take from hence a lesson. I have brought you a long and a strange road. Starting from this seemingly uninteresting pit, we have come upon the records of three older worlds, and on hints of worlds far older yet. We have come to them by no theories, no dreams of the fancy, but by plain honest reasoning, from plain honest facts. That wonderful things had happened, we could see: but why they had happened, we saw not.
When we began to ask the reason of this thing or of that, remember how we had to stop, and laying our hands upon our mouths, only say with the Mussulman: ”G.o.d is great.” We pick our steps, by lanthorn light indeed, and slowly, but still surely and safely, along a dark and difficult road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness; and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw its light a yard.
Such is true science. Is it a study to make men conceited and self- sufficient? Believe it not. If a scientific man, or one who calls himself so, be conceited, the conceit was there before the science; part of his natural defects: and if it stays there long after he has really given himself to the patient study of nature, then is he one of those of whom Solomon has said: ”Though you pound a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart from him.”
For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a student, than being pounded by these same hard facts--which tell him just enough to let him know--how little he knows? What more fit to make a man patient, humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science is, after each half-dozen steps, by some tremendous riddle which he cannot explain--which he may have to wait years to get explained-- which as far as he can see will never be explained at all?
The poet says: ”An undevout astronomer is mad,” and he says truth.
It is only those who know a little of nature, who fancy that they know much. I have heard a young man say, after hearing a few popular chemical lectures, and seeing a few bottle and squirt experiments: Oh, water--water is only oxygen and hydrogen!--as if he knew all about it. While the true chemist would smile sadly enough at the youth's hasty conceit, and say in his heart: ”Well, he is a lucky fellow. If he knows all about it, it is more than I do. I don't know what oxygen IS, or hydrogen, either. I don't even know whether there are any such things at all. I see certain effects in my experiments which I must attribute to some cause, and I call that cause oxygen, because I must call it something; and other effects which I must attribute to another cause, and I call that hydrogen. But as for oxygen, I don't know whether it really exists. I think it very possible that it is only an effect of something else--another form of a something, which seems to make phosphorus, iodine, bromine, and certain other substances: and as for hydrogen--I know as little about it. I don't know but what all the metals, gold, silver, iron, tin, sodium, pota.s.sium, and so forth, are not different forms of hydrogen, or of something else which is the parent of hydrogen. In fact, I know but very little about the matter; except this, that I do know very little; and that the more I experiment, and the more I a.n.a.lyse, the more unexpected puzzles and wonders I find, and the more I expect to find till my dying day. True, I know a vast number of facts and laws, thank G.o.d; and some very useful ones among them: but as to the ultimate and first causes of those facts and laws, I know no more than the shepherd-boy outside; and can say no more than he does, when he reads in the Psalms at school: ”I, and all around me, are fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.”
And so, my friends, though I have seemed to talk to you of great matters this night; of the making and the destruction of world after world: yet what does all I have said come to? I have not got one step beyond what the old Psalmist learnt amid the earthquakes and volcanoes of the pastures and the forests of Palestine, three thousand years ago. I have not added to his words; I have only given you new facts to prove that he had exhausted the moral lesson of the subject, when he said:
These all wait upon thee, that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.
Thou givest, and they gather: thou openest thy hand, and they are filled with good.
Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath; they die and return to their dust.
Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the earth.
But--The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever. The Lord shall rejoice in his works. Amen.
HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY {290}
Ladies and gentlemen, I speak to you to-night as to persons a.s.sembled, somewhat, no doubt, for amus.e.m.e.nt, but still more for instruction. Inst.i.tutions such as this were originally founded for the purpose of instruction; to supply to those who wish to educate themselves some of the advantages of a regular course of scholastic or scientific training, by means of cla.s.ses and of lectures.
I myself prize cla.s.ses far higher than I do lectures. From my own experience, a lecture is often a very dangerous method of teaching; it is apt to engender in the mind of men ungrounded conceit and sciolism, or the bad habit of knowing about subjects without really knowing the subject itself. A young man hears an interesting lecture, and carries away from it doubtless a great many new facts and results: but he really must not go home fancying himself a much wiser man; and why? Because he has only heard the lecturer's side of the story. He has been forced to take the facts and the results on trust. He has not examined the facts for himself. He has had no share in the process by which the results were arrived at. In short, he has not gone into the real scientia, that is, the ”knowing” of the matter. He has gained a certain quant.i.ty of second-hand information: but he has gained nothing in mental training, nothing in the great ”art of learning,” the art of finding out things for himself, and of discerning truth from falsehood. Of course, where the lecture is a scientific one, ill.u.s.trated by diagrams, this defect is not so extreme: but still the lecturer who shows you experiments, is forced to choose those which shall be startling and amusing, rather than important; he is seldom or never able, unless he is a man of at once the deepest science and the most extraordinary powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in the proper order which will unfold the subject to you step by step; and after all, an experiment is worth very little to you, unless you perform it yourself, ask questions about it, or vary it a little to solve difficulties which arise in your own mind.
Now mind--I do not say all this to make you give up attending lectures. Heaven forbid. They amuse, that is, they turn the mind off from business; they relax it, and as it were bathe and refresh it with new thoughts, after the day's drudgery or the day's commonplaces; they fill it with pleasant and healthful images for afterthought. Above all, they make one feel what a fair, wide, wonderful world one lives in; how much there is to be known, and how little one knows; and to the earnest man suggest future subjects of study. I only ask you not to expect from lectures what they can never give; but as to what they can give, I consider, I a.s.sure you, the lecturer's vocation a most honourable one in the present day, even if we look on him as on a mere advertiser of nature's wonders.
As such I appear here to-night; not to teach you natural history; for that you can only teach yourselves: but to set before you the subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the study of it.
I have said that lectures do not supply mental training; that only personal study can do that. The next question is, What study? And that is a question which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, The study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study which a young man entering on the business of self-education would be likely to take up. To him, naturally, man is the most important subject.
His first wish is to know the human world; to know what men are, what they have thought, what they have done. And therefore, you find that poetry, history, politics, and philosophy are the matters which most attract the self-guided student. I do not blame him, but he seems to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at the beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more than once, when I was younger, and meddled in matters too high for me, instead of refraining my soul, and keeping it low; so I can sympathise with others who do so. But I can a.s.sure them that they will find such lofty studies do them good only in proportion as they have first learnt the art of learning. Unless they have learnt to face facts manfully, to discriminate between them skilfully, to draw conclusions from them rigidly; unless they have learnt in all things to look, not for what they would like to be true, but for what is true, because G.o.d has done it, and it cannot be undone--then they will be in danger of taking up only the books which suit their own prejudices--and every one has his prejudices--and using them, not to correct their own notions, but to corroborate and pamper them; to confirm themselves in their first narrow guesses, instead of enlarging those guesses into certainty. The son of a Tory turn will read Tory books, the son of a Radical turn Radical books; and the green spectacles of party and prejudice will be deepened in hue as he reads on, instead of being thrown away for the clear white gla.s.s of truth, which will show him reason in all honest sides, and good in all honest men.
But, says the young man, I wish to be wide-minded and wide-hearted-- I study for that very purpose. I will be fair, I will be patient, I will hear all sides ere I judge. And I doubt not that he speaks honestly. But (I quote with all reverence) though the spirit be willing, the flesh is weak. Studies which have to do with man's history, man's thoughts, man's feelings, are too exciting, too personal, often, alas, too tragical, to allow us to read them calmly at first. The men and women of whom we read are so like ourselves (for the human heart is the same in every age), that we unconsciously begin to love or hate them in the first five minutes, and read history as we do a novel, hurrying on to see when the supposed hero and heroine get safely married, and the supposed villain safely hanged, at the end of the chapter, having forgotten all the while, in our haste, to ascertain which is the hero and which is the villain. Mary Queen of Scots was ”beautiful and unfortunate”--what heart would not bleed for a beautiful woman in trouble? Why stop to ask whether she brought it on herself? She was seventeen years in prison. Why stop to ascertain what sort of a prison it was? And as for her guilt, the famous Casket Letters were, of course, a vile forgery. Impossible that they could be true. Hoot down the cold-hearted, and disagreeable, and troublesome man of facts, who will persist in his stupid attempt to disenchant you, and repeat--But the Casket Letters were not a forgery, and we can prove it, if you will but listen to the facts. Her prison, as we will show you (if you will be patient and listen to facts), consisted in greater pomp and luxury than that of most n.o.blemen, with horses, hounds, books, music, liberty to hunt and amuse herself in every way, even in intriguing with every court of Europe, as we can show you again, if you will be patient and listen to facts. And she herself was a very wicked and false woman, an adulteress and a murderess (though fearfully ill-trained in early youth), who sowed the wind, poor wretch, from girlhood to old age, and therefore reaped the whirlwind, receiving the just reward of her deeds.
Catherine of Russia, meanwhile, instead of being beautiful and unfortunate, was only handsome and successful. Brand her as a disgrace to human nature. The morals and ways of the two were pretty much on a par, with these exceptions in Catherine's favour-- that she had strong pa.s.sions, Mary none; that she lived in outer darkness and practical heathendom, while Mary had the light s.h.i.+ning all round her, and refused it deliberately again and again. What matter to the sentimentalist? Hiss the stupid hard-hearted man of facts, by all means. What if he be right? He has no business to be right; we will consider him wrong accordingly, of our own sovereign will and pleasure. For after all, if we had the facts put before us (says the conscience of many a hearer), we could not judge of them; we read to be amused and instructed, not to study cases like so many barristers. So is history read. And so, alas, is history written, too often, for want of a steady and severe training which would enable people to judge dispa.s.sionately of facts. In politics the case is the same. In poetry, which appeals more directly to the feelings, it must needs be still worse; as has been shown sadly enough of late by the success of several poems, in which every possible form of bad taste has only met with unbounded admiration from the many who have not had their senses exercised to discern between good and evil.
Now what seems to me to be wanted for young minds, is a study in which no personal likes or dislikes shall tempt them out of the path of mental honesty; a study in which they shall be free to look at facts exactly as they are, and draw their conclusions patiently and dispa.s.sionately. And such a study I have found in that of natural history.
Do not fancy it, I beg you, an easy thing to judge fairly of facts; even to discover the facts at all, when they are staring you in the face; and to see what it is that you do see. Any lawyer will tell you, that if you ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning an event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if he be at all an interested party, will give you exactly the same account of it: not that he wishes to say what is untrue; but that different parts of the whole matter having struck each man with different force, a different picture has been left on each man's memory. I have been utterly astounded of late, in investigating these strange stories of table-turning and spirit-rapping, to find how even clear-headed and well-instructed persons (as one had fancied them) become unable to examine fairly into a thing, the moment the desire to believe has entered the heart; and how no amount of mere cultivation, if the scientific habit of mind be wanting, can prevent people from finding (as in table-turning) miracles in the most simple mechanical accidents; or from becoming (as in spirit-rapping) the dupes of the most clumsy, palpable, and degrading impostures, even after they have been exposed over and over again in print. Humiliating, indeed, it is, in this so self-confident and boastful nineteenth century, amid steam-engines, railroads, electric telegraphs, and all the wonders of our inductive science, to find exploded superst.i.tions leaping back into life even more monstrous and irrational than in past ages, and to see our modern Pharisees and Sadducees, like those in Judea of old, seeking after a sign of an unseen world; and being unable to find one either in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, discovering it at last (I am almost ashamed to speak the words) under the parlour-table.
Against such extravagances, and against the loose sentimental tone of mind which begets them, hardly anything would be a better safeguard than the habitual study of nature. The chemist, the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, has to deal with facts which will make him master of them, and of himself, only in proportion as he obeys them. Many of you doubtless know Lord Bacon's famous apothegm, Nature is only conquered by obeying her; and will understand me when I say, that you cannot understand, much less use for scientific purposes, the meanest pebble, unless you first obey that pebble. Paradoxical; but true.
See this pebble which I hold in my hand, picked up out of the street as I came along; it shall be my only object to-night. There the thing is; and is as it is, and in no other way; and such it will be, and so it will behave and act, in spite of me, and all my fancies about it, and notions of what it ought to have been like, and what it ought to have done. It is a thought of G.o.d's; and strong by the eternal laws of matter, which are the will of G.o.d. It has the whole universe, sun, and stars, and all, backing it by G.o.d's appointment, to keep it where it is and what it is; and till (as Lord Bacon has it) I have discovered and obeyed the will of G.o.d revealed in that pebble, it is to me a riddle more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a fortress more impregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it: but destroying is not conquering: but I cannot even mend the road with it prudently, until I have discovered whether Almighty G.o.d has made it fit to mend roads with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of a Shakespeare, but all my genius will not avail to penetrate that pebble, or see anything in it but a little round dirty stone, until I have treated the pebble with reverence, as a thing independent of my likes and dislikes, fancies, and aspirations; and have asked it humbly to tell me its story, taking counsel meanwhile of hundreds of kindred pebbles, each as silent and reserved as this one; and watched and listened patiently, through many mistakes and misreadings, to what it has to say for itself, and what G.o.d has made it to be. And then at last that little black rounded pebble, from the street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and honest enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than any which I could have dreamed for myself; will shame the meanness of my imagination, by the awful magnificence of G.o.d's facts, and say to me: