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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Hermann von Helmholtz
Men of science form, as it were, an organized army, laboring on behalf of the whole nation, and generally under its direction, and at its expense, to augment the stock of such knowledge as may serve to promote industrial enterprise, to increase wealth, to adorn life, to improve political and social relations, and to further the moral development of individual citizens. After the immediate practical results of their work we forbear to inquire; that we leave to the instructed. We are convinced that whatever contributes to the knowledge of the forces of nature or the powers of the human mind is worth cherishing, and may, in its own due time, bear practical fruit, very often where we should least have expected it. Who, when Galvani touched the muscles of a frog with different metals, and noticed their contraction, could have dreamt that eighty years afterward, in virtue of the selfsame process, whose earliest manifestations attracted his attention in his anatomical researches, all Europe would be traversed with wires, flashing intelligence from Madrid to St. Petersburg with the speed of lightning? In the hands of Galvani, and at first even in Volta's, electrical currents were phenomena capable of exerting only the feeblest forces, and could not be detected except by the most delicate apparatus. Had they been neglected, on the ground that the investigation of them promised no immediate practical result, we should now be ignorant of the most important and most interesting of the links between the various sources of nature. When young Galileo, then a student at Pisa, noticed one day during divine service a chandelier swinging backward and forward, and convinced himself, by counting his pulse, that the duration of the oscillations was independent of the arc through which it moved, who could know that this discovery would eventually put it in our power, by means of the pendulum, to attain an accuracy in the measurement of time till then deemed impossible, and would enable the storm-tossed seaman in the most distant oceans to determine in what degree of longitude he was sailing? Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain. All that science can achieve is a perfect knowledge and a perfect understanding of the action of natural and moral forces. Each individual student must be content to find his reward in rejoicing over new discoveries, enjoying the aesthetic beauty of a well-ordered field of knowledge, where the connection and the filiation of every detail is clear to the mind, and where all denotes the presence of a ruling intellect; he must rest satisfied with the consciousness that he too has contributed something to the increasing fund of knowledge on which the dominion of man over all the forces hostile to intelligence reposes.... The sciences have, in this respect, all one common aim, to establish the supremacy of intelligence over the world: while the moral sciences aim directly at making the resources of intellectual life more abundant and more interesting, and seek to separate the pure gold of Truth from alloy, the physical sciences are striving indirectly toward the same goal, inasmuch as they labor to make mankind more and more independent of the material restraints that fetter their activity. Each student works in his own department, he chooses for himself those tasks for which he is best fitted by his abilities and his training. But each one must be convinced that it is only in connection with others that he can further the great work, and that therefore he is bound, not only to investigate, but to do his utmost to make the results of his investigation completely and easily accessible. If he does this, he will derive assistance from others, and will in his turn be able to render them his aid. The annals of science abound in evidence of how such mutual services have been exchanged, even between departments of science apparently most remote. Historical chronology is essentially based on astronomical calculations of eclipses, accounts of which are preserved in ancient histories. Conversely, many of the important data of astronomy -- for instance, the invariability of the length of the day, and the periods of several comets, rest upon ancient historical notices. Of late years, physiologists, especially Brucke, have actually undertaken to draw up a complete system of all the vocables that can be produced by the organs of speech, and to base upon it propositions for a universal alphabet, adapted to all human languages. Thus physiology has entered the service of comparative philology, and has already succeeded in accounting for many apparently anomalous substitutions, on the ground that they are governed, not as hitherto supposed, by the laws of euphony, but by similarity between the movements of the mouth that produce them. Again, comparative philology gives us information about the relationships, the separations, and the migrations of tribes in prehistoric times, and of the degree of civilization which they had reached at the time when they parted. For the names of objects to which they had already learnt to give distinctive appellations reappear as words common to their later languages. So that the study of languages actually gives us historical data for periods respecting which no other historical evidence exists. Yet again I may notice the help which not only the sculptor, but the archaeologist, concerned with the investigation of ancient statues, derives from anatomy. And if I may be permitted to refer to my own most recent studies, I would mention that it is possible, by reference to physical acoustics and to the physiological theory of the sensation of hearing, to account for the elementary principles on which our musical system is constructed, a problem essentially within the sphere of aesthetics. In fact, it is a general principle that the physiology of the organs of sense is most intimately connected with psychology, inasmuch as physiology traces in our sensations the results of mental processes which do not fall within the sphere of consciousness, and must therefore have remained inaccessible to us. I have been able to quote only some of the most striking instances of this interdependence of difference sciences, and such as could be explained in a few words. Naturally, too, I have tried to choose them from the most widely separated sciences. But far wider is of course the influence which allied sciences exert upon each other.
Excerpted from Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, by Hermann von Helmholtz. |
Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, by Hermann von Helmholtz
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