Introduction to science / by Alex Hill.

  • Alexander Hill
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introduction to science / by Alex Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    unscientific man is often content with the ‘ nearly ’ and the ‘almost.’ Nature never is.” This was the doctrine preached by Sir Michael Foster in his address at Dover as President of the British Association. It is the first prin¬ ciple of science. Mathematics neglects the infinitely small. Common sense is content with an approximation to the truth, trusting, quite justifiably in the hurry of business, that much that it does not understand is capable of explanation. Science recognises no negligible quantity. “You don’t seem aston¬ ished, Mr Brown, at the wonderful narrations of Deacon Smith,” said widow Jones to one of two Yankees who were lounging in front of her fire. “ No, ma’am, I’m a liar myself,” was the laconic reply. One of the first things which science recognises is that all men are liars. We all inherit a ten¬ dency to believe in and, still more strongly, to narrate the marvellous. It is the business of the man of science to shake such narrations with simple straight-forward questions, to check them again and again by pointing out gaps in evidence, or barriers against evidence, which the narrator cannot cross. We have already insisted that consciousness can be in¬ vestigated only by consciousness. The senses are the “ windows of the mind ” which give upon the outside world. Consciousness is not force. We cannot find a place for it in the balance-sheet of the body. When we have audited its accounts — have debited the body with x + y units of potential energy received in food, and have placed to its credit x units of muscular force and y units of heat; when we have debited it with a + (3 units of force received as vibrations by the endings of nerves in the sense-organs, and have credited it with cc units of nerve force transmitted to the muscles through the central reflex mechanism, and (3 units consumed in effecting molecular re¬ arrangement of nerve-tissue; we still find no place for consciousness. We cannot enter as “concerned in the pro¬ duction of consciousness ” -i- of the force received. And yet, although consciousness cannot be identified with either matter or force, it is at least as real as either. When we think
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