Chapter 4

Science is different.

The relative, which governs it, leaves its mark on it; and these successive stamps of the relative, more and more resembling the real, constitute the movable certainty of man.

In science, certain things have been masterpieces which are so no more. The hydraulic machine of Marly was a chef-d’œuvre.

Science seeks perpetual movement. She has found it; it is itself perpetual motion.

Science is continually moving in the benefit it confers.

Everything stirs up in science, everything changes, everything is constantly renewed. Everything denies, destroys, creates, replaces everything. That which was accepted yesterday is put again under the millstone to-day. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satisfied; it is everlastingly thirsting for improvement, which the absolute ignores. Vaccination is a problem, the lightning-rod is a problem. Jenner may have erred, Franklin may have deceived himself; let us go on seeking. This agitation is grand. Science is restless around man; it has its own reasons for this restlessness. Science plays in progress the part of utility. Let us worship this magnificent servant.

Science makes discoveries, art composes works. Science is an acquirement of man, science is a ladder; one savant overtops the other. Poetry is a lofty soaring.

Do you want examples? They abound. Here is one, —the first which occurs to our mind.

Jacob Metzu, scientifically Metius, discovers the telescope by chance, as Newton did gravitation and Christopher Columbus, America. Let us open a parenthesis: there is no chance in the creation of “Orestes” or of “Paradise Lost.” A chef-d’œuvre is the offspring of will. After Metzu comes Galileo, who improves the discovery of Metzu; then Kepler, who improves on the improvement of Galileo; then Descartes, who, although going somewhat astray in taking a concave glass for eyepiece instead of a convex one, fructifies the improvement of Kepler; then the Capuchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of objects; then Huyghens, who makes a great step by placing the two convex glasses on the focus of the objective; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to 1659, during the short interval which separates the “Nuncius Sidereus” of Galileo from the “Oculus Eliæ et Enoch” of Father Reita, behold the original inventor, Metzu, obliterated. And it is constantly the same in science.

Vegetius was Count of Constantinople; but that is no obstacle to his tactics being forgotten, —forgotten like the strategy of Polybius, forgotten like the strategy of Folard. The pig’s-head of the phalanx and the pointed order of the legion have for a moment re-appeared, two hundred years ago, in the wedge of Gustavus Adolphus; but in our days, when there are no more pikemen as in the fourteenth century, nor lansquenets as in the seventeenth, the ponderous triangular attack, which was in other times the base of all tactics, is replaced by a crowd of Zouaves charging with the bayonet. Some day, sooner perhaps than people think, the charge with the bayonet will be itself superseded by peace, at first European, by-and-by universal, and then a whole science—the military science—will vanish away. For that science, its improvement lies in its disappearance.

Science goes on unceasingly erasing itself, —fruitful erasures. Who knows now what is the “Homœomeria” of Anaximenes, which perhaps belongs in reality to Anaxagoras? Cosmography is notably amended since the time when this same Anaxagoras told Pericles that the sun was almost as large as the Peloponnesus. Many planets, and satellites of planets, have been discovered since the four stars of Medici. Entomology has made some advance since the time when it was asserted that the scarabee was somewhat of a god and a cousin of the sun, —firstly, on account of the thirty toes on its feet, which correspond to the thirty days of the solar month; secondly, because the scarabee is without a female, like the sun; and when Saint Clement, of Alexandria, out-bidding Plutarch, made the remark that the scarabee, like the sun, passes six months in the earth and six months under it. Do you wish to have the proof of this?—refer to the “Stromates,” paragraph IV. Scholasticism itself, chimerical as it is, gives up the “Holy Meadow” of Moschus, laughs at the “Holy Ladder” of John Climacus, and is ashamed of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel to the stake which the Viscounts of Campania wished to put out, called Arnaud de Bresse “a man with the head of the dove and the tail of the scorpion.” The cardinal virtues are no longer the law in anthropology. The steyardes of the great Arnauld are decayed. However uncertain is meteorology, it is far from discussing now, as it did in the twelfth century, whether a rain which saves an army from dying of thirst is due to the Christian prayers of the Melitine legion or to the Pagan intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. The astrologer, Marcian Posthumus, was for Jupiter; Tertullian was for the Melitine legion. No one stood in favour of the cloud and of the wind. Locomotion, if we go from the antique chariot of Laïus to the railway, passing by the patache, the track-boat, the turgotine, the diligence, and the mail, has made some progress indeed. The time is gone by for the famous journey from Dijon to Paris, lasting a month; and we could not understand to-day the amazement of Henry IV. asking of Joseph Scaliger, “Is it true, Monsieur l’Escale, that you have been from Paris to Dijon without relieving your bowels?” Micrography is now far beyond Leuwenhoeck, who was himself far beyond Swammerdam. Look at the point to which spermatology and ovology are arrived to-day, and recollect Mariana reproaching Arnaud de Villeneuve, who discovered alcohol and the oil of turpentine, with the strange crime of having tried human generation in a pumpkin. Grand-Jean de Fouchy, the not over-credulous life secretary of the Academy of Sciences, a hundred years ago, would have shaken his head if any one had told him that from the solar spectrum one would pass to the igneous spectrum, then to the stellar spectrum, and that by the aid of the spectrum of flames and of the spectrum of stars, would be discovered an entirely new method of grouping the heavenly bodies, and what might be called the chemical constellations. Orffyreus, who destroyed his machine rather than allow the Landgrave of Hesse to see inside it, —Orffyreus, so admired by S’Gravesande, the author of the “Matheseos Universalis Elements,”—would be laughed at by our mechanicians. A village veterinary surgeon would not inflict on horses the remedy with which Galen treated the indigestions of Marcus Aurelius. What is the opinion of the eminent specialists of our times, Desmarres at the head of them, respecting the learned discoveries of the seventeenth century by the Bishop of Titiopolis in the nasal chambers? The mummies have got on; M. Gannal makes them differently, if not better, than the Taricheutes, the Paraschistes, and the Cholchytes made them in the days of Herodotus, —the first by washing the body, the second by opening it, and the third by embalming it. Five hundred years before Jesus Christ it was perfectly scientific, when a king of Mesopotamia had a daughter possessed by the devil, to send to Thebes for a god to cure her. It is not exactly our way to treat epilepsy. In the same way have we given up expecting the kings of France to cure scrofula.