Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 3/Representative men: The natural philosopher - Faraday
REPRESENTATIVE MEN.
The Natural Philosopher.
faraday.
In the history of the intellect of any one of us, perhaps no stage is more strongly marked, or more vividly remembered, than that in which we first conceived of the subject-matter of Physics and Chemistry. It was the opening of a new world; or rather the ordinary world of our experience became altogether new, as if we had been translated into a different system of nature from that in which we had hitherto lived. We were all once children: and little children go through the same experience, all the world over, up to the point of which I am speaking; when some get no further, but remain children all their lives in their way of regarding the objects around them, while others obtain an insight, a revelation, which at once raises them to a higher rank of human intelligence.
The lowest stage of our minds, in regarding objects, is very like the notions that the higher brutes evidently have. An infant and a savage, like a monkey or a dog, supposes everything he sees to be alive as he is alive. In the early days of our race this notion was a permanent belief for a long period of time. Each tree, each hill, each brook, each cloud was supposed to be a separate existence, with a life of its own—with thoughts and feelings more or less like ours. The actions and passions of our higher domestic animals show now that they regard in this way any objects that puzzle or oppose them; and we need not go so far as to the Red Indians or the Patagonians to satisfy ourselves that the case is the same with human observers in their lowest stage of knowledge. We can remember the time when the starry sky was, in our opinion, alive and observing us, and when the bushes nodded intelligently to us; and when the clock stared at us, and when shadows crept round the wall to catch us. Not only does a dog greet a ticking watch as a live thing; but a Highlander who had taken on the battle-field the first watch he had ever seen, and gazed at the face and listened to the tick all day, had no conception that it was not a conscious being. When, next morning, it neither moved nor ticked, he whispered to a comrade, “She died in the night.” It might be going out of my way to inquire why the common people in Scotland and the North of England call a clock or a watch “she.” “I wound her up;” “she stopped this morning,” one hears in every kitchen there; and if one remarks upon it, one is asked why a ship is called “she.”
By degrees the delusion passes away from the minds of children in a civilised country, that every object has a conscious or at least a sensitive life of its own; but even in our own land we cannot say that all persons get beyond this stage. There is an Irish island where a stone, shaped like a short pillar, is actually worshipped. The women periodically dress it in a woollen petticoat or wrapper; and then the men pray to it to send them wrecks! This is the Fetishism of the rude African and low Hindoo. Our children are led up out of it; but the wild Irish out in the Western main, and the Africans in Soudan, have hitherto rested in that primitive state.
Next, we supposed each object to be a complete, individual thing,—a unit which we had only to take as it stood. We made no inquiry about it, because we did not conceive that there was anything to inquire about. A man was that man: a table was that table: air was air, and water water: and we could count existing things, and make an inventory of the furniture of nature, if only we could count up to the sum of such a multitude. It was an advance when we understood that anything was made up of necessary parts; and yet more when those parts were seen to grow out of each other. A tree appeared in a somewhat fresh light when we were shown that it had grown out of a seed or a root, and that the buds and leaves grew out of the wood. At this stage we were capable of some serviceable notion of the structure of the human or other animal body, so as to perceive what the heart and lungs were for, and how the limbs were moved, and what a delicate structure the eye is. Still, all this advance threw no light at all upon the constitution of bodies, and caused no inquiry into their material, and what was going on there. The regions of Physics and Chemistry were not yet even dreamed of. A table was still a table, with nothing more to be said about it; and the air, and the water, and the fire were in the same case. To be sure, there were incidents which might puzzle us. When a felled tree in time began to rot, that was no great wonder. The damp from the ground might well cause fungi to grow; and it was natural that insects should infest it. The case of a decayed cheese was not much more difficult. Somebody had told us that the mould was a vegetation, like the moss on a damp wall: and as for the mites, some creature or other must have laid eggs in the cheese. These sorts of decay might be accounted for: but what were we to say to milk and broth and beer turning sour? If we were told that it was the heat that did it, or time (standing too long), we could only take it as a fact to be believed because everybody said so, and not from any understanding how it was.
There may have been different ways of first obtaining the notion that the universe was not an abode furnished with articles large and small, each complete and unchanging after being once made till it was worn out; but an infinite region so all alive with ever-acting forces that no atom remains for one second of time unaffected by some of those forces; so that forms which appear to us rigid, and substances which seem to us hard and impenetrable, are, in fact, incessantly fluctuating, falling away, rushing together, subject to eternal change and mutation, never pausing, while so silent and invisible as to be concealed from us till reason opens our senses to the truth. At the beginning of the disclosure, we can manage the mechanical facts before we know what to make of the chemical. We can take in and believe any marvels about the changes in the structure and position of bodies caused by the operation of forces. We ignorantly fancy we know what forces must be, and can imagine anything that is set before us that is at all in analogy with what we ourselves can do by exertions of force. We can blow feathers, and knock billiard balls, and produce a vacuum (or what we call so) in tubes, and pull india-rubber, and so forth: and thus some of the leading ideas of Physics are easily received, and, while making a considerable impression, leave room for a deeper. It was a prodigious gain to have heard about the solar system; and, as wiser people have done before us, we adopted the terms “gravitation,” “heat” (which we called “caloric”), as meaning actual principles or agents, and went on very pleasantly accounting for everything we saw or felt that was wrought by “forces” or “elements.” A great entertainment was opened to us in this way; and our minds had certainly expanded in a very desirable way. But all that we had gained in amusement, all the benefit of new conceptions about mechanical action, and the relation of different bodies to each other, was a mere introduction to the mental changes wrought by the first conception of chemical action. That there should be constant action on the form and arrangement of bodies was a wonderful revelation; but how immeasurably more astonishing was the notion of change in substance itself! Under this view we saw all nature always melting, flowing, dissolving, recomposing,—till the whole frame, and every object in it, seemed to our mind’s eye fluid and transparent, whirling and spinning with eternal movement in every particle, and each form losing its limits, and its materials blending with forces that have no form, but pass through all to work upon substance. But I must stop; or inexperienced readers may fancy the first glimpse of science is the last of reason. It must suffice, then, that the whole aspect and notion of nature are changed into a scene of intense life and utterly new beauty by the disclosure of the mere object and scope of natural philosophy, and especially of Chemistry. It does not follow from this that Chemistry is the highest branch of natural philosophy, but only that it is the most striking at the first moment to minds to which all science is new and strange.
It is not surprising that natural philosophers should have been eminent men in every stage of human society. A man who was not frightened at an eclipse when his neighbours were frantic with terror was a distinguished man; and when he could foretell one, he became preter-human. A man who could measure time and height by a shadow, or turn one substance into another in a crucible, or create new arts by his science, was sometimes a miracle-worker, sometimes a sorcerer, sometimes a sage, sometimes a beloved teacher; but he has always been a distinguished man. There have been some of these in every age,—now arriving at the conclusion that Water was the all-in-all in the universe; and now that it was Air; and now that it was Number: and then learning to see that there were different methods of pursuing the truths of Nature; and again, discovering what the true method really is; each one adding largely to our knowledge, and most of them opening some new region to human inquiry.
These men have been usually, and very properly, supposed venerable and admirable on other grounds than their superior knowledge, or their usefulness to mankind. There is, and always has been, a rooted persuasion in men’s minds that the loftiness of the pursuits of these philosophers must have an elevating effect on their characters. The persuasion is rational; and it may be said that, on the whole, it is justified by fact. It may be true that of the great students of nature through the whole historical period some have been vain, some rapacious, many jealous and irritable, and some malignant: but it is also true that the proportion of these unhappy men has not been larger than among any other class of distinguished persons; while it is certainly the general impression that these confidential servants of nature have been, for the most part, eminently serene in their habit of mind, unworldly from their habitual occupation by large ideas, happy in their eagerness about substantial realities of a noble and beautiful kind; grave and thoughtful from passing their hours out of hearing of the babbles and jests of the market, and pure and clear in heart and manners from living in the holy places of wisdom, instead of seeing and hearing the things that press upon other men’s notice wherever there is gossip, and passion, and idleness, and a police.
In the earliest days of science, it seems that philosophers were honoured and revered as well as admired: and if, up to this day, there have been savans notoriously greedy of praise, or of money, at least as much as of knowledge, we must suppose that they would probably have been more vain and rapacious in any other career. The irritability and jealousy which appear to be a more ordinary snare when the pursuit lies in the direction of discovery, is simply the form assumed by ambition in a department where there is less restraint imposed by custom and breeding than in the walks of worldly pursuit: and we see the same evils in a much aggravated form among students and professors of art and literature. At the same time, these evil tempers, though complained of by savans who are themselves not so happy as they should be, are so far from being generally considered characteristic of natural philosophers that we find that class indicated both by moralists and by common observers as the most simple-minded and amiable order of men of their time—whether that time be past or present.
If it is true that the man who has the best chance of wisdom and peace is (other things being equal) he who is born into a working-class, with means of intellectual cultivation when his handiwork is done, the natural philosopher must be regarded as blessed in the same way, while he has at the same time special advantages of his own. Like the intelligent artisan, he lays his grasp upon the substance of nature. The book-man, the professional student, the man of no particular calling, who is doomed to a life of pastime, can never exercise their faculties to the same sure and effectual result as the student who manipulates his materials, and verifies his course of thought by demonstration. The manipulating hand gives no education when the mind is unawakened; and the knowledge of words and abstract topics may leave a man intellectually feeble and misled, if he brings nothing to the test of actual handling. The studious artisan may have the advantage of both in regard to mental health; and under the same conditions with the studious artisan, but of a far higher order in the scale of advantage, is the Natural Philosopher.
The best case of all, and that which is the greatest blessing to everybody to contemplate, is that of the philosopher who, now supreme in that highest class of men, has passed into it from the other favoured condition. A man who once worked at day-labour for his bread, and so loved knowledge as to obtain it by intellectual toil which seemed better than rest and pleasure; thence passing by natural desert into the class of philosophers, and rising in it to the highest seat, ought to be morally elevated, ought to be serene, ought to be amiable, ought to be happy. And this is precisely the case, in all its points, of the chief Representative Man of the Natural Philosophers in our day.
Michael Faraday was born in the dwelling of a poor blacksmith in London. He must have had the handling of very hard realities, physical and moral, during his childhood; and it does not appear that he had much to do with books before becoming apprenticed to a bookbinder. If my readers have attended his lectures at the Royal Institution, they have probably heard him mention “the time when I was a bookbinder’s apprentice.” Critical observers who expect to find either pride or shame in a low-born man’s mention or concealment of his original rank, will be disappointed in Faraday’s case. He has something else to do than to spend thought on considerations of rank; and he is too simple to see that it can possibly signify—a man being what he is—whether he was born in a cottage or a manor-house. Faraday is neither proud nor ashamed of his birth and rearing. The reason for mentioning his apprenticeship is that at that time he had already instituted some experiments with an electrical machine and some other instruments of his own making. The lad was philosopher and mechanician in one, as far as he had yet gone; and his admirable use of his hands through life—his fingers being the speech of his purposes in his experiments—is probably owing to his being the son of a labouring man. If he could not have made his electrical machine and other instruments, his master would not have seen reason to point out his apprentice, Michael, to a member of the Royal Institution, Mr. Dance, when that gentleman wanted some books bound; and then the great first opening of Faraday’s career would have been no opening at all.
How he had obtained insight into the region of Natural History has never, as far as I know, been told; but at this time he was certainly forming a comparison in his own mind between such different ways of spending life as he knew something of. His father had passed his years in useful bodily labour, for which he took pay in detail. He thought he was raising his son Michael by putting him to a trade in which the practices of commerce might be united with that of a handicraft. Michael had had seven years’ insight into this kind of commercial life; and he made no secret of his impression that in working for money, and in scheming to increase their gains, commercial men do what is demoralising and hurtful to themselves and others. Many, perhaps most, young people think so at one time or another, when their desires for a spiritual life are strongest, and their actual knowledge of permanent moral influences is weakest; and Michael might have held the same view if he had not formed a conception of the life of scientific pursuit which he has since so exquisitely illustrated: but he announced his expectation, from what he knew of science, that the philosopher would be found amiable and liberal, while the trader was growing hard and rapacious. So thought the youth after a season of hankering after “experiment” and extreme dislike of trade; and when Mr. Dance took him to hear four lectures of Sir Humphry Davy’s, he made a decisive effort to get out of the one mode of life into the other. He wrote out the notes he had taken at the lectures, and sent them to Sir H. Davy, with an account of his feelings about trade and science, and a petition that Sir H. Davy would remember him if he could see any way open for the fulfilment of his wishes. The philosopher received the application kindly, smiled at what he considered the delusion about the spirit and temper of philosophers, expressed a wish to serve him, and in a few weeks let him know that an assistant was wanted in the laboratory of the Royal Institution—a post which Faraday obtained. Sir H. Davy advised him to hold by his trade, saying that science was a harsh mistress, and ungrateful in regard to pecuniary recompense for service. At a later time, the philosopher found by his own experience that this was not always true, as wealth is an early consequence of discoveries which can be applied to the arts: but Faraday had other interests in his mind, and let the pecuniary question drop out of sight.
It was in April, 1813, that he entered upon his professional scientific life in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, where he has worked from that day to this, except during the year and a half when he was abroad with Sir H. Davy, as his assistant in experimenting and writing. That visit to Paris tested the morale of the man in a decisive way, and proved him worthy of his vocation, under his own lofty view of it. He went as a servant. His employer considered him so, and he considered himself so. The philosophers at Paris, while anxious to pay homage to his employer in proportion to his eminence in science, observed the singular merits of his assistant, and, finding in him a fuller measure of the true philosophic spirit and temper, they fell into sympathy with him, and sought his society on his own account, as comrades and not as patrons. Young as he was, only then twenty, he was in no way injured by this trial of his modesty and simplicity. He never forgot or attempted to disguise his position; in short, then, as ever since, the interests of science engrossed him, leaving no room for self-regards and the carking cares which belong to them. He “returned to his situation,” as simple and modest and happy as when he went forth, and for many years pursued his eager studies without making himself heard beyond the bounds of his personal acquaintance.
When he did, it was to open a new region of ideas to mankind, preparing it for a wholly fresh conception of the structure of the universe. During the quiet years when he seemed to be like other men in his ways and his talk, only disclosing occasionally to those who could comprehend it a range of view and originality of speculation which warranted any amount of expectation from him, he was learning to see the visible frame of things with new eyes, and, in fact, to pass his life, amidst a scenery of nature immeasurably more sublime, wonderful, and beautiful than untrained minds can conceive of. In 1831 he showed what he had been thinking about. Within four years he had published three treatises on the practice of experimentation, and on other practical matters; but in 1831 he first communicated to the world those researches on Electricity which have changed the conditions of life to a multitude, and the aspect of life to not a few, while they open a prospect of unlimited advance towards a comprehension of the conditions of existence. In the Philosophical Transactions the whole development of electrical science is shown in a series of papers by Faraday, extending over nearly thirty years, and the progress made in collecting the phenomena, and tracing their operation, and establishing their laws, is wonderful in the life-time of any one man. He sets out, of course, without the remotest idea of the point to which his investigations would bring him, though aware that his subject was practically unlimited. He has (as every great discoverer must have) the imagination of the poet, not the less for his absolute need in his work also of the accuracy of the mathematician, and the judicial faculty of the weigher of evidences; yet, after half a lifetime of grand speculation and growing familiarity with the mighty secrets of nature, he said, fifteen years since, that he had just then obtained glimpses into the constitution of matter which, he owned, had well nigh overwhelmed his faculties.
Even if I had his unequalled power of explanation, I could not, within my present limits, convey to my readers any true conception of Faraday’s achievements, nor even any accurate notion of their nature and value. It must suffice to say that he has detected a range of forces always at work in the universe, which, in proportion as they are studied, explain more and more of the structure and action of everything that exists, and also are seen to merge in each other, so as to suggest and justify the idea that in time we may discover that there is one force in nature under the vast variety of appearances that we think we see. If the sum of the attainment, actual and possible, could be conveyed into the reader’s mind, it would still afford no conception of the marvellous things learned by the way. Now and then there comes such a startling fact as the electric telegraph, to show the ignorant something of the seriousness of the pursuits of the learned; but the profit and pleasure of such pursuits cannot be described to the uninitiated, any more than colours to the blind, music to the deaf, or the charms of mountain-climbing to the cripple who has never gone abroad on his own feet. What we have to do here and now is to look at the winner of these challenges of nature as a Representative of that method of life, and of the order of men to which he belongs. It is impossible to convey what he knows, or what it is in which he is so learned; but any one can understand what sort of man he is.
His love of knowledge is so pure that it is the same thing to him whether any addition to the stock is made by himself or somebody else. Very great men, such as he is now, can afford to let lesser men do all they can, and to help them to do it, without an uneasy thought about their own position and credit; but it is a test of a man’s real greatness whether he is aware of this, or whether he is still subject to a jealousy which he might have left behind long ago. The highest man of all is he who does not consider the thing, one way or another, but simply rejoices in something being gained, and does not care about who has the credit of it, himself or another. Probably Faraday does not care. He certainly never stops to discuss it; never stoops to urge any personal claim; never wastes precious thought and time in settling his own position, or calculating his own greatness. But he always has leisure and patience for other people’s claims. He has sympathy for every new success, and the most winning respect and tenderness for every modest and sensible effort in that direction. What his power of sympathy is appears in his lectures to every class of persons. No treat that can be offered can tempt scientific men to forego a lecture of Faraday’s, while children, when he addresses them, understand all he tells them, or can go up to him afterwards to ask him to settle their difficulty. The same simple hearty sympathy is always ready in his heart for the child who is trying for the first time to discern invisible things, and for the discoverer who is treading on his heels in his own path. Thus does he justify the view which excited Sir H. Davy’s smile,—that the spirit of the philosopher should be amiable and liberal.
It is not often that he puts himself forward otherwise than in his function as a lecturer; but now and then, when he may hope to be useful, we hear of him and his opinion in counsel. When our discontent with the Thames was reaching its height, Faraday employed himself, during a trip in a Thames steamer, in throwing bits of paper into the water, to ascertain its density and other qualities: and he then sent a business-like and rousing letter to the “Times” which did more good than all the vague complaints of meaner men.
His next effort was not, in some people’s opinion, so entirely fortunate; but it did some good, and by its weakness prepared the way for more profit. At the time when heads were getting turned with table-turning, Faraday published his opinion that the phenomenon was occasioned by the unconscious action of the hands of the experimenters, under the full idea and expectation of the table moving in a certain direction. This explanation was eagerly seized upon by puzzled persons, as was natural, and by scornful despisers of the experiment; while it was regarded as rather meagre by some who dared not say so, and openly repudiated, in regard to its sufficiency, by the experienced.
Time seems to have decided that it is an excellent and very useful explanation of many deceptive appearances, and might be applied to half the cases in the absence of the other half; but it casts no light on the phenomenon of tables walking and turning and ascending under certain conditions, without being touched in any way whatever. If, after a series of trials, a heavy table without castors (or cover to hide deception) moves several feet on a Turkey carpet or rises from the floor, while all the persons present are ranged by the wall of the room, Faraday’s explanation is of no avail; and the question is why he does not go the one step further, and himself witness the fact, in order to decided speech or silence in regard to it. No fact is said to be more securely attested; and it seems to crave investigation from the man most capable of it.
If any one wishes for material for a conception of a wise and happy man, I do not know where he could better look for it than in the successive volumes in which Faraday’s researches are given in a collected form from the “Philosophical Transactions” and other scientific publications. Bacon would have delighted in that course of investigation and its results; and the humblest of us may delight in it as an exemplification of the true philosophical spirit. We see the great electrician advancing, step by step, towards the mighty feat, the hope of which he has set before him,—of proving the oneness of several agencies which, not very long ago, were regarded as elements and forces of essentially different natures, and having no necessary connection with each other. Such men are more likely than others to live to attain their objects, because the full occupation and serene pleasures of their lives are favourable to health of brain. Philosophers who are afflicted with a jealous temper or a passionate nature which exhausts itself under pretence of enthusiasm, and sinks under an intemperate love of either personal fame or the marvellous in nature, may, and usually do, suffer through a few years of vanity and irritability which encroach more and more on the greatness of their aims, and then die, worn out in body and mind; but this is not the natural course of the philosopher’s life. After Faraday’s example of a philosophic life, we ought to hear no more of intemperate action and bad passions being characteristic of genius. Whether genius tracks the lightning, or analyses human character, or gives us inventions, or utters poems, it is simply the perfection of sense, acting in one direction or another. The highest genius must have that strength of sense which keeps the world under its feet, and can never more be troubled by passion. To belong to the order supposed to consist of the sage and serene—the chief of the searchers for knowledge—is an honour. To be a Representative Man of that order, in virtue of, not only brilliant achievement, but the illustrative completeness of the whole character, is the highest of honours; and this is the honour which crowns the life, and will immortalise the career of Michael Faraday.