Heroes of Science: ChemistsMuir, M. M. Pattison (Matthew Moncrieff Pattison)
History
Heroes of Science: Chemists
Muir, M. M. Pattison (Matthew Moncrieff Pattison)
Chemistry -- History; Chemists
When we ask how it was that Dalton acquired his great power of penetrating
beneath the surface of things and finding general laws, we must attribute
this power in part to the training which he gave himself in physical
science. It was from a consideration of physical facts that he gained the
conception of ultimate particles of definite weight. His method was
essentially dynamical; that is, he pictured a gas as a mass of little
particles, each of which acted on and was acted on by, other particles. The
particles were not thrown together anyhow; definite forces existed between
them. Each elementary or compound gas was pictured as a system of little
particles, and the properties of that gas were regarded as dependent on the
nature and arrangement of these particles. Such a conception as this could
only be gained by a careful and profound thinker versed in the methods of
physical and mathematical science. Thus we see that although Dalton
appeared to gain his great chemical results by a method which we are not
generally inclined to regard as the method of natural science, yet it was
by virtue of his careful training in a branch of knowledge which deals with
facts, as well as in that science which deduces particular conclusions from
general principles, that he was able to introduce his fruitful conceptions
into the science of chemistry.
To me it appears that Dalton was pre-eminently distinguished by the
possession of imagination. He formed clear mental images of the phenomena
which he studied, and these images he was able to combine and modify so
that there resulted a new image containing in itself all the essential
parts of each separate picture which he had previously formed.
From his intense devotion to the pursuit of science the development of
Dalton's general character appears to have been somewhat dwarfed. Although
he possessed imagination, it was the imagination of a naturalist rather
than that of a man of broad culture. Perhaps it was a want of broad
sympathies which made him trust so implicitly in his own work and so
readily distrust the work of others, and which moreover led him astray in
so many of his purely experimental investigations.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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