Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

Page 22 text:

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

Page 21 text:

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

Page 23 text:

sale, but a rich structure for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate, and a thoughtful community will cherish the student who can take us by the hand and lead us into that delightful fairy land where the eye is never satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing, and it will have no feeling but reverence for him who can teach us a little of these grand and awful laws through which the cosmos is moving onwards and working out its mysterious destiny. He who can f'NVander away, and away With nature that dear old nurse Who sings to him night and day The rhymes of the universe, must often pass far beyond our sight, nor, so long as he does not forget his duty to us, should we dare to arrest him by rude and clumsy suggestions which can cause nothing but a tumble, although history shows that these lofty flights are not incompatible with service to man. The Florentine peasant, who in far off Italy before the day of Columbus saw with a prophets eye so much of the path along which Galileo and Newton and Lyell and Darwin were to lead the modern world, must have passed most of his spiritual life alone. When he Dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, there was no one to whom he could tell his story of the astronomy and the physics and the geology which were to be in these later days g yet he gave us the wheel-barrow and the Last Supper, the camera of the amateur photographer and the Mona Lisa. We must encourage pure science and the search for truths too profound to be f'practical in any material sense, or even generally intelligible, but no weak and foolish brother of the laboratory should be permitted to infer that he belongs to a favored class, or has any claim to support except for service rendered. He who, for his own pleasure or distinction, spends his life in fields which yield nothing except the interest of the exploration, must look to his pleasure for his reward, since science is no more exalted by turning it into an aristocratic and exclusive pleasure ground, than by making it a shop for profit. As both heaven and earth contribute to the use and benefit of man, so the end ought to be . to separate and reject vain speculation and whatever is empty and void, and to augment whatever is solid and fruitful that knowledge may be not as a Courtesan for pleasure and vanity only, or as a bondwoman to acquire and gain for her master's use, but as a spouse for generation, fruit and comfort. I7