Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
A true and sufficient culture can never, as we conceive, be founded on
literature and language alone. No mind can be truly liberalized
without imbibing and assimilating the fundamental principles of
science. There is darkness in the mind that believes that anything can
come out of nothing and which has never obtained a glimpse of the
exactness with which Nature solves her equations. In the region of
mechanics alone there are a thousand beautiful and varied
illustrations of the unfailing constancy of natural laws. It is a
liberal education to trace the operation of one law under numberless
disguises, and thus arrive at an ineradicable conviction that the same
law must be reckoned with always and everywhere. The persistence of
force, the laws of the composition and resolution of forces, the laws
of falling bodies and projectiles, the conservation of energy, the
laws of heat, to mention only a few heads of elementary scientific
study, are capable, if properly unfolded and illustrated, of producing
in any mind open to large thoughts a sense of harmony and a trust in
the underlying reason of things, which are constitutive elements of
the very highest culture. Only, care must be taken to approach these
studies in a right spirit. There is a way of regarding the laws of
Nature which tends to vulgarize rather than refine the mind. If we
approach Nature merely as something to be exploited, we get no culture
from the study of it; but if we approach it as the great men of old
did, and feel that in learning its laws we are grasping the thoughts
which went to the building of the universe, and, by so doing, are
affirming our own high calling as intelligent beings, then every
moment given to the study of Nature means intellectual, moral, and
spiritual gain. When we look into literature there is much to charm,
much to delight and satisfy; and doubtless, in relation to what any
one man can accomplish, the field is infinite; but still we know we
are looking into the limited. On the other hand, when we are face to
face with Nature, we know we are looking into the infinite, and that,
however many veils we may take away, there is still "veil after veil
behind."
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