The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

If the study of physical phenomena be regarded in its bearings not on the material wants of man, but on his general intellectual progress, its highest result is found in the knowledge of those mutual relations which link together the general forces of nature. It is the intuitive and intimate persuasion of the existence of these relations which at once enlarges and elevates our views and enhances our enjoyment. Such extended views are the growth of observation, of meditation, and of the spirit of the age, which is ever reflected in the operations of the human mind whatever may be their direction.

From the time when man, in interrogating nature, began to experiment or to produce phenomena under definite conditions, and to collect and record the fruits of his experience—so that investigation might no longer be restricted by the short limits of a single life—the philosophy of nature laid aside the vague and poetic forms with which she had at first been clothed, and has adopted a more severe character.

The history of science teaches us how inexact and incomplete observations have led, through false inductions, to that great number of erroneous physical views which have been perpetuated as popular prejudices among all classes of society. Thus, side by side with a solid and scientific knowledge of phenomena, there has been preserved a system of pretended results of observation, the more difficult to shake because it takes no account of any of the facts by which it is overturned.

This empiricism—melancholy inheritance of earlier times—invariably maintains whatever axioms it has laid down; it is arrogant, as is everything that is narrow-minded; while true physical philosophy, founded on science, doubts because it seeks to investigate thoroughly—distinguishes between that which is certain and that which is simply probable—and labours incessantly to bring its theories nearer to perfection by extending the circle of observation. This assemblage of incomplete dogmas bequeathed from one century to another, this system of physics made up of popular prejudices, is not only injurious because it perpetuates error with all the obstinacy of ill-observed facts, but also because it hinders the understanding from rising to the level of great views of nature.

Instead of seeking to discover the mean state around which, in the midst of apparent independence and irregularity, the phenomena really and invariably oscillate, this false science delights in multiplying apparent exceptions to the dominion of fixed laws, and seeks, in organic forms and the phenomena of nature, other marvels than those presented by internal progressive development, and by regular order and succession. Ever disinclined to recognise in the present the analogy of the past, it is always disposed to believe the order of nature suspended by perturbations, of which it places the seat, as if by chance, sometimes in the interior of the earth, sometimes in the remote regions of space.