A study of the principles of nature / by Frederick Hovenden.

  • Hovenden, Frederick.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A study of the principles of nature / by Frederick Hovenden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    famine, disease, crime, and last, but not least, poverty. At least this will be the result in great part, for this is the goal the study of pure Science aims at, and if this goal did not exist, then the study of pure Science is futile.1 But although I cannot take you to the seashore and explain what is to be seen, I can in a very poor way, by 1 The main issue is only seen when the principles of the science of physics * and the science of biology f are understood. The late Professor Huxley clearly saw the issues when he wrote : “ Biology deals only with living beings as isolated things—treats only of the life of the individual : but there is a higher division of science still, which considers living beings as aggregates—which deals with the relation of living beings one to another—the science which observes men—whose experiments are made by nations one upon another, in battlefields—whose general propositions are embodied in history, morality, and religion—whose deductions lead to our happiness or our misery,—and whose verifications so often come too late, and serve only ‘ To point a moral, or adorn a tale ’— I mean the science of Society or Sociology. “ I think it is one of the grandest features of Biology, that it occupies this central position in human knowledge. There is no side of the human mind which physiological study leaves uncultivated. Connected by innumerable ties with abstract science, Physiology J is yet in the most intimate relation with humanity; and by teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of development, regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of individual life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst the erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that history offers something more than an entertaining chaos—a journal of a toilsome, tragi-comic march nowhither.” * “ Physics” may be defined as the study of the ultimate particles of which all things (including man) are built and their reactions on each other. t “ Biology ” is the study of these ultimate particles in the reactions called Life. f Physiology is the study of the uses or functions of the parts of the organisms which are built up of ultimate particles called “molecules.” These sciences are parts of a great whole called “ The Science of Nature.’’