Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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is needed to see that all this practical advantage ceases so soon as it is made an aim, and that it Udiverteth and interrupteth the promotion and advancement of knowledge like unto the golden ball thrown before Atalanta which, while she goeth aside and stoopeth to pick up, the race is hindered? You, the college graduate, can do good service by teaching this truth, for the investigator must look to you and not to the common standard of our people for sympathy and encouragement. All men prize the fruit, you must tell them that the tree will soon be barren if they visit it only at the harvest, that they must dig about it and nourish it and cherish the flowers and green leaves. The claim of science to support must rest on her benefits, but her temple is the laboratory, not the patent office. Wisdom is justihed in her children, and scatters her gifts with a lavish hand, but he who remembers her only in his need, and seeks her to ask help, will find that she demands reverence and loving service as well as dependence, and will soon be sent empty away. No race that has ever lived has reached this lofty conception, and if you do not give the support of your educated sympathy, the gifts of science will soon come to an end, for they are like health, which comes to him who does not seek it, but flies farther and farther from him who would lure it back by physic and indulgence. Let us see how it fared with science at the hands of the most intel- lectual and cultivated democracy the world has known. At the time of Plato and Socrates and Phideas, Athenian life was thoroughly democratic, and all the arts which readily excite the admiration of men had reached their highest excellence. When they met in the market place, the national games, or the public assembly, the people talked of art or ethics or philosophy, or they listened to works of literature compared with which the contents of a railway book stall, or a Sunday paper rank but little above the productions of savages. If we accept this comparison as a gauge of intellectual calibre we must also accept with humility Galton's mathematical computation which shows that the average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own-that is about as much as that of our race is above that of the African negro. Socrates taught in the market to all who chose to listen 5 Sophocles was made a general because of the popularity of his plays, and we are told that the people listened spell-bound while Herodotus chanted his history, which is longer than a speech on the silver bill. Every citizen was in some measure capable of judging all forms of art, and he assumed ability to judge all other matters, forgetting that I4

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HOW COLLEGE GRADUATES l'IAY PROVIOTE SCIENCE. IZY WILLIAM K. ISROUKS. VERY instructor who is an investigator lives in hope that each year there may be among his students one whose mind may become as a mirror or glass, capable of the image ofthe universal world. and joyful to receive the impressions thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light, and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things, but raised also to tind out and discover the ordinances and decrees, which throughout all these changes are infallibly observed. The eye to see nature as it is, and to find hidden truths which we accept as if we had known them before, with wonder, like the critics of Columbus, that the discovery was not made long ago, is a rare and precious gift, like the genius of the poet. The grandest work of a university is, once or twice in a century, to make the way smooth for one born to this great birth-right, that he may 'f give a true account of his gift, to the benefit and use of man. Most of us must promote science in humble stations, some as teachers, some as students of the lesser problems, and some in still other useful service. In thatwonderful essay On the Advancement of Learning which I have quoted, and which all should read, not once or twice, but many times, Bacon shows what kings and princes may do to promote science. Our task is harder: to keep the lamp burning and illuminating the distant regions of unknown truth, without the aid of paternal government. In our society, the only common standard is democratic public opinion. While we all hope that this is destined to become more pure and lofty and disinterested than the common standard of any other race, it must always fall below the best. Practical application of science to the service of man is already rewarded as never before. Its importance in professional training is fully recognized. Our people are not indifferent to its educational value, nor to the variety and delight of that source of pleasure where there is no satiety, but an appetite which increases with its gratification. All this is not enough to promote science. A still broader culture I3

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nature, external to the mind of man, may be a higher tribunal than the cultivated instincts of an Athenian. While public opinion was generous and sympathetic within the limits which it imposed, the approval of the whole State was essential to success, and outside this limit the way of the transgressor was hard. History has preserved the names of three scientists of the Athenian school. Callisthenes died in prison and prob- ably under torture, Theophrastus was tried for his life upon a charge of impiety, and we are told that a death sentence was passed upon the fugitive Aristotle, who, calm philosopher as he was, shared to some degree this democratic intolerance, for he says in his ethics that a man who is virtuous beyond his neighbors is as much a monster as one who is phenomenally wicked, and that excessive goodness, like the grotesque in art, is too abnormal to be pleasing or admirable. While so eminently fitted for developing intellectual brilliancy, Athenian democratic society was hostile to intellectual liberty. Sciences which counted all the wit of Aristophanes, the persuasive eloquence of Socrates, the oratory of Demosthenes, or even the adored philosophy of Plato as nothing, when opposed to facts, must have met indifference or contempt while obscure, and aversion and hostility, if obtrusive. As we look back over the path of science we see it stretching for more than two thousand years through a dreary waste, where only one traveler, a giant of heroic mould, finds his way and joins the culture of Athens to the science of the modern world. During the middle ages Aristotle was without a rival, supreme. To him almost belongs the credit of saving men from barbarism. To him, or to his influence, it is also due that for so many centuries the men of the modern world were turned away from the path which leads to progress in science. What a strange and contradicting history I What does it mean? His works fall into two groups, so different that their common basis is hard to iind. In one are those treatises which deal, one way or another, with the art of influencing man, by logical argument, by rhetoric, by oratory or by poetry. While these works were long known as his practical'l or 'fproductiveu philosophy, Bacon has shown that the unfruitfulness of modern science for centuries was due to them. In his speculative works Aristotle turns from the microcosm to the greater world of nature, no longer as a teacher but as a learner, and wanders over the meadows and hill-sides with all the fresh enthusiasm of a child. He Wades among the rocks at low tide and studies the habits of hermit crabs. He dissects the sharks and the skates which he finds in the nets of the Hshermen, and gathering the eggs of Cepha- lopods he keeps them in aquaria, watching that marvelous process by 15