Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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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

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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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which the structure of a complicated animal is unfolded step by step from its simple starting point, and illustrating the successive stages by drawings, which are shown by his references to have been both original and accurate. He goes with the fishermen to their nets and traps, learns their methods, and as they tell him of the life of whales and dolphins, he listens humbly, although they are poor slaves with none of the cul- tivated instincts of Athenian citizens. He learns all they have to tell him, and finds out, for himself, many secrets which naturalists of the nineteenth century have won honors by rediscovering. His writings on nature are not finished Works like those in logic: they are crude and imperfect, and full of short-comings, as all science still is, and must be, but they laid the foundation for science, in the study of the world as it exists outside ourselves, and to them we owe it that nature did not vanish utterly from the sight of man during the dark ages. How came the works of the same man to differ so greatly in aim and method, and in their intiuence on human progress? Aristotle lived at a time of transition 5 at the end of an order which was passing away and the beginning of one to come. His produc- tive philosophy, which takes no account of nature but centres about man, was the fruit of Athenian democracy, while we owe to Mace- donian paternalism his studies of that greater world where man has no supremacy except his power to learn and to interpret. We have outgrown paternalism, and found that we can do its work better ourselves, but the history of Athens teaches that, however en- lightened and liberal we may become as a people, pure science may still have to look elsewhere for encouragement. What nobler task can our college graduates undertake than to teach that, while the benefits which science confers are its only claims to our support, these benefits will cease as soon as they are made an end or aim. Ulf men judge that learning should be referred to action theyjudge well, but in this they fall into the error described in the ancient fable, in which the other parts of the body did suppose the stomach had been idle because it neither performed the ofhce of motion as the limbs do, nor of sense as the head doth, but yet notwithstanding it is the stomach that digesteth and distributeth to all the rest, so if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied. Science has no claim to support except as it contributes to man's service or to his improvement: as it has practical application, or as it adds to the innocent pleasures or to the ennobling resources of life. Bacon tells us that we must not seek in knowledge a shop for profit and 16