But, great as these changes may be, they sink into insignificance beside the progress of physical science, whether we consider the improvement of methods of investigation, or the increase in bulk of solid knowledge. Consider that the labors of Laplace, of Young, of Davy, and of Faraday; of Cuvier, of Lamarck, and of Robert Brown; of Von Baer, and of Schwann; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been carried on since Priestley discovered oxygen; and consider that they are now things of the past, concealed by the industry of those who have built upon them, as the first founders of a coral-reef are hidden beneath the life's work of their successors; consider that the methods of physical science are slowly spreading into all investigations, and that proofs, as valid as those required by her canons of investigation, are being demanded of all doctrines which ask for men's assent—and you will have a faint image of the astounding difference in this respect between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth.
If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all these vast changes, I think there can be but one reply. They mean that Reason has asserted and exercised her primacy over all provinces of human activity: that ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place; that the good of the governed has been finally recognized as the end of government, and the complete responsibility of governors to the people as its means; and that the dependence of natural phenomena in general, on the laws of action of what we call matter, has become an axiom.
But it was to bring these things about, and to enforce the recognition of these truths, that Joseph Priestley labored. If the nineteenth century is other and better than the eighteenth, it is to him and to such men as he that we owe the change. If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps.
Such men are not those whom their own Generation delights to honor; such men, in fact, rarely trouble themselves about honor, but ask, in another spirit than Falstaff's, "What is honor? Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday." But whether Priestley's lot be theirs, and a future generation, in justice and in gratitude, set up their statues; or whether their names and fame are blotted out from remembrance, their work will live as long as time endures. To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehood and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.—From advance sheets of Macmillan's Magazine.
