Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in scienceTyndall, John
Science
Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science
Tyndall, John
Science
Here, too, we question whether Sir William Thomson will be content
with this definition of the process by which he has been guided to
his most recent advance in molecular physics. In the splendid series
of inductions verified step after step by rigorous experiment
and observation, and kept in exactest continuity by the chain of
mathematical evolution, is imagination the faculty to which are
to be given the chief honours of this conquest of a new realm of
physics? This would surely be to force upon us a new and arbitrary
classification or analysis of the powers of the intellect. If we follow
Professor Tyndall himself through the masterly train of reasoning
whereby he leads us to the laws of reflection and transmission of light
as the cause of the azure of the firmament, is what we admire the
leap of imagination, or the firmly balanced and duly graduated tread
of a mind trained in the discipline of logic, and careful to plant
every step on the assured ground of fact or experience? It is simply
a misnomer to apply the name of imagination to the process or the
faculty to which this onward march into the realm of unexplored nature
is really due. As well describe as a triumph of the imagination the
connected and organized plan of the great strategist which has drawn
round Paris a living cordon of 300,000 men.
_From a Lecture addressed to Teachers at the South Kensington Museum,
April 30, 1861, by_ J. TYNDALL.
Here, then, is an exhibition of power which we can call forth or cause
to disappear at pleasure. We magnetize our strip of steel by drawing
it along the pole of a magnet; we can demagnetize it, or reverse its
magnetism, by properly drawing it along the same pole in the opposite
direction. What, then, is the real nature of this wondrous change? What
is it that takes place among the atoms of the steel when the substance
is magnetized? The question leads us beyond the region of sense, and
into that of imagination. This faculty, indeed, is the divining rod
of the man of science. Not, however, an imagination which catches its
creations from the air, but one informed and inspired by facts, capable
of seizing firmly on a physical image as a principle, of discerning its
consequences, and of devising means whereby these forecasts of thought
may be brought to an experimental test. If such a principle be adequate
to account for all the phenomena, if from an assumed cause the observed
facts necessarily follow, we call the assumption a theory, and once
possessing it, we can not only revive at pleasure facts already known,
but we can predict others which we have never seen. Thus, then, in the
prosecution of physical science, our powers of observation, memory,
imagination, and inference, are all drawn upon. We observe facts and
store them up; imagination broods upon these memories, and by the
aid of reason tries to discern their interdependence. The theoretic
principle flashes, or slowly dawns upon the mind, and then the
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