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ART. III.- ABSTRACT SCIENCE IN AMERICA, 1776-1876.

If we were called upon to decide in what field of purely intellectual effort a people, situated as ours were at the beginning of their national existence, would be least likely to distinguish themselves, we should hardly hesitate to say, the field of abstract science in all its parts, physical, political, and intellectual. One reason for this conclusion lies upon the surface. That precise knowledge of the first knowable principles which underlie the phenomena of nature, and that seemingly useless tracing of the ideas of Nature through the minutest details of her operations, are, among important intellectual employments, those of which the natural man, though enlightened, least feels the want. He cannot live in society without feeling the want, first, of a code of laws, and then of a knowledge of law in general. He cannot advance far in intellectual capacity without feeling the want of a literature with which to beguile his weary hours, nor can he read much that is good without appreciating the difference between the good and the bad. It needs no rare and peculiar gifts or taste to be enraptured with the charms of music, and with the beauties of form and color. But how will he ever learn to care for the seeming technicalities of scientific investigation? Undoubtedly, a curiosity to know many things respecting the phenomena of nature will arise as naturally as will the love of literature and art, and will be as widely extended. We cannot imagine a man loving to read without feeling some curiosity respecting the nature and purpose of the heavenly bodies, while a certain amount of knowledge respecting animals and plants is necessarily acquired by every backwoodsman. But the acquisition of knowledge of this class does not constitute scientific progress. When we touch upon the consideration of the circles of the celestial sphere, the atomic weights of the chemical elements, the homologies of corresponding parts of the various species of animals, or the laws of hereditary descent, and especially when we enter upon that minute analysis of every-day subjects which is at the same time so necessary to their philosophic comprehension, and so

distasteful to the ordinary mind, our hearers will rapidly disappear.

We have thus an obvious cause why, in a country like ours, scientific investigation worthy of the name should commence only when a very advanced point of intellectual development had been reached. But an allied, though less obvious element enters among the causes of scientific progress which is worthy of very serious consideration. The intellect of a nation may exhibit peculiarities, as well as that of an individual, leading to its being eminently successful in some directions, while wholly failing in others. We do not here refer to well-known general differences in the intellectual power of different races, the Caucasian and the Mongolian, for instance, but to differences of special faculties or tastes between people whose general powers are on the whole equal. A study of the history of modern science will show plenty of instances of the diffusion of special powers among a large part of a nation or of their seeming total absence, for which it is extremely difficult to account. One such is afforded by the development of the theory of gravitation. The establishment of universal gravitation was an achievement of the British intellect, as well as of Newton, since several of his countrymen were very little behind him in the course of thought which led to this result. The superiority of Englishmen in the powers of investigation necessary to establish the theory would seem to be evinced by the readiness with which they perceived its truth and traced its effects, while a generation of Continental mathematicians occupied themselves with puerile objections to it. But, with the publication of the Principia, the development of the subject came to a dead stop in England, and while Clairant, Lagrange, and Laplace were working out the results of Newton's discovery, there was scarcely an Englishman who could even understand their writings. The liberal rewards by which the British government have sometimes so honorably expressed the national appreciation of the men who have made gravitation instrumental in the determination of longitude at sea have all gone to foreigners. Although the British Nautical Almanac is mainly founded on data derived from the Greenwich observations, the labor of putting these data into a tabular shape to be used has, during the entire century, been performed by foreigners.

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We see here a striking difference between the intellectual productions of two peoples, - a difference showing itself through two centuries, and yet arising from what might seem as too slight a difference in the characters of the intellects themselves to require notice. The English intellect was perhaps the more scientific of the two; it was more ready in grasping the ideas of nature, in seeing the correlations of natural phenomena, in distinguishing between the relevant and the irrelevant in propositions, and in freeing itself from the trammels of philosophic systems when it turned its attention toward the external world. In short, it was generally superior in everything connoted by the word "sagacity." But, the general idea of nature once grasped and expressed in mathematical language, the Continental intellect was that best adapted to tracing it to its results by deductive operations. These required powers of minute analysis, of close concentration upon minute points, and of patient endurance while carrying through long trains of thought, which the English intellect did not possess, and has never since acquired.

A critical history of scientific thought during the three centuries which have elapsed since the revival of science would, no doubt, show many other fruits of the difference we have sought to elucidate. It would be seen that in everything requiring sagacity, in pregnant suggestions, and in discoveries reached by induction, England would be ahead of any other nation; while the development of the discoveries, or at least every branch of the development which required patient industry and minute analysis, would have been found left to other nations. The illustration need not be confined to physical science. Political economy, as hitherto developed, is just that branch of applied thought, if we may use the expression, which most requires sagacity for its apprehension and application; and this quality is seen pre-eminently in the large comparative ratio of sense to nonsense in the mass of English writing on the subject.

One disposed to study what we might call the intellectual natural history of nations would find an instructive subject for investigation in the different views of Darwinism prevalent in the four great intellectual nations of the world. In the land

of its origin it is a subject of fierce controversy between the religious world on the one side and the scientific one on the other; in Germany, received with universal applause as one of the great philosophic triumphs of the century; in France, so utterly groundless a piece of speculation as to be unworthy of the attention of a biologist; in America, received by naturalists, but viewed by the public as something on which it is quite incompetent to pass judgment.

If, now, one enters upon a critical examination of the judging faculty of the American people, as shown by their reasoning on subjects of every class, one can hardly avoid being struck by a certain one-sidedness in its development, having an important bearing on its fitness for scientific investigation. Within a certain domain, usually characterized as that of practical sagacity and good sense, they have nothing to be ashamed of. Where the conclusion is reached by a process so instinctive that it is not reduced to a logical form, and where there is no need of an analysis of first principles, we may not unfairly claim to be a nation of good reasoners. But, if we pursue any subject of investigation into a region where a higher or more exact form of reasoning is necessary, where first principles have to be analyzed, and a concatenation of results have to be kept in the mind, it must be admitted that we do not make a creditable showing. It might almost seem as if the dialectic faculty among us had decayed from want of use. The plain "common-sense" of the fairly intelligent citizen has in most cases so completely sufficed for all the purposes where judging capacity was required, that the need of more exact methods of thought has never been felt by the nation at large.

There is hardly a branch of our intellectual activity in which the close and critical observer will not find plenty of illustrations of the peculiarity which we have described. Taking as our standard of comparison the three leading intellectual nations of Europe, England, France, and Germany, the latter alone can compete with us in provision for, and appreciation of, the education of the masses. But when we look at the higher education, whether that of the polished gentleman, the statesman, the engineer, or the financier, we find ourselves far behind those countries in both the provision and the

appreciation. Our elementary text-books are as good as any. What few we have on the higher logic and the more advanced branches of mathematics are very deficient, and, in the case of the mathematical text-books, betray a lack of clear and accurate thought which would not be tolerated in a teacher in the other countries we have mentioned. If we examine our politics and jurisprudence, the general astuteness of our public men, their faculty of adapting means to such ends as are immediately in view, and their successful diplomacy, cannot be questioned. But where in our legislation shall we find any effort to look beyond the necessities of the immediate present? What shall we say to the continued presence of usury laws in our statute-books, and to the rarity with which a man is found in public life with the logical acumen necessary to see through the fallacies of the protection theory? What a disheartening picture of our jurisprudence would be found in the mere citation of the various legal decisions to which the legal-tender acts have given rise!

This national one-sidedness of the judging faculty has a very important bearing on the state of science, because the successful cultivation of the higher regions of science, no matter in what department, requires the highest development of that faculty. Neither instinct nor good sense will alone suffice to comprehend the more recondite workings of natural law. It is true that a large majority of the more important applications of scientific principles may be made, and a great deal of valuable scientific work may be done, without the highest development of the dialectic faculty. But such applications and such work do not constitute the highest employment of the scientific investigator. It is, therefore, very naturally to be expected that the development of the higher branches of science in our country should be marked by the same backwardness which characterizes the higher forms of thought in other directions; and that, however eminent we might stand in the lower branches, we should find ourselves far behind in the higher

ones.

The same subject may be viewed from a slightly different standpoint. No two sets of ideas are more completely antagonistic than those which animate the so-called "practical man"

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