The Scientific Basis of National Progress, Including that of Morality

Whilst research is being neglected, manufacturers and others in all directions are asking for improvements in their machines and processes; employers of steam engines want to obtain more power from the coals; makers of washing soda wish to recover their lost sulphur; copper smelters, want to utilize the copper smoke; glass makers wish to prevent bad colour in their glass; iron puddlers want to economise heat; gas companies are desirous of diminishing the leakage of gas; iron smelters wish to avoid the evil effects of impurities in the iron; manufacturers in general want to utilise their waste products and prevent their polluting our streams and atmosphere; and so on without end. And inventors are continually trying to supply these demands, by exercising their skill in every possible way, with the aid of scientific information contained in books; but after putting manufacturers and themselves to great expense, they very frequently fail, not always through want of inventive skill, but often through want of new knowledge attainable only by means of pure research. Judging from the vast amount of inventive skill already expended upon the steam engine, and the small proportion of available mechanical power yet obtained from the coals consumed in it, it is highly probable that a machine for completely converting heat into mechanical force cannot be invented until more scientific knowledge is discovered.

It must not be supposed from these remarks, that discoveries which will enable a man to make any particular invention, can be produced to order; that is only true to a very limited extent. Men are beggars of nature, and must not expect to be permitted to choose her gifts, or dictate what secrets shall be disclosed. We may however be certain that if we acquire a very much greater supply of new scientific knowledge, we shall then be able to perfect many good inventions, though not always of the kind we wish, or in the way we expect. The great sewage question may perhaps be solved in quite an unexpected way, possibly by the discovery of some substance capable of precipitating ammonia and organic matter from their solutions.

Nearly all our manufacturing processes are full of imperfections; thus the loss of gas by a single large provincial gas company, after that substance has left the works, amounts to nearly one hundred and fifty millions of cubic feet per annum, and to a value of about £18,000; and the soil of all our large cities and towns is permeated and rendered fœtid by coal gas. And it has been stated by an eminent authority in such matters that we might save 500,000 tons of coal a year by economizing the waste heat of furnaces, by purifying the coal, coking it, etc. In a single chemical manufactory, out of about two thousand tons of hydrochloric acid used per annum, about eight hundred tons have been allowed to flow away as a polluting substance, because it was not possible to utilise it. The loss of material from a single large glass works equals fourteen hundred tons per annum, and a value of £8,000. Similar grave defects might be pointed out in nearly all our large manufactures, by those acquainted with the subject.

Inventions are wanted for quickening the process of vinegar making, and diminishing the percentage of loss of the acid. For bleaching discoloured fats. For quickening the process of converting cast iron into malleable iron. To easily separate nitrogen from the oxygen of the atmosphere. To economically convert the nitrogen of the air into valuable products, such as nitric acid and ammonia. To find uses for the immense quantities of minerals which abound all over the earth; to utilise wolfram and find applications for tungstic acid; to apply titanic acid to great industrial purposes; to produce aluminium on the large scale, as we now produce iron. To tan leather more quickly, and without detriment to its quality. To prevent the rusting of iron. To more perfectly prevent smoke. To collect and use the sulphuric acid of the salt cake consumed in the glass manufacture. To make window glass by means of common salt. To deodorise offensive substances. To find larger uses for phosphorus, sodium, magnesium, and common salt. To remove phosphorus and sulphur from iron ores, and sulphur from coal and coke. To obtain a good white alloy as a cheaper substitute for German silver. To convert white phosphorus into the red variety by a less dangerous process than the present one. To prevent the putrefaction of "peltries" in glue making. To obtain better and cheaper materials for colouring glass. To more perfectly prevent animal food from change. To obviate or prevent explosions in mines. To perfectly purify ordinary red lead for making flint glass. A cheaper process for converting common salt into washing soda; and so on without end.

We also very badly require a method of recording our thoughts in readable forms upon paper, without the slow and laborious process of writing. An incalculable amount of brains and of intellect, especially of the greatest thinkers, would be saved by such a discovery. The curative arts also are permeated with empiricism, and thousands of lives of persons of all classes of society, are annually lost in this country through want of a more perfect scientific basis of medicine, attainable only by means of experiment and observation.

In this country, such great practical results have been obtained by means of invention, that many persons suppose a sufficiency of inventive skill will enable us to effect every possible scientific object, and are surprised that no one can invent a plan of utilising the entire heat of coals, or a mode of overcoming the sewage difficulty, or prevent the great leakage of coal gas, or arrest epidemics, or produce a steam engine which shall work without waste of power. The progress of invention however depends upon that of discovery, and these various inventions, etc., wanted by manufacturers and others probably cannot be perfected until suitable new knowledge is found. Every new invention has its own appropriate discoveries, by means of which alone it can be perfected; it was not possible to perfect the idea of an electric telegraph before the discoveries of Volta and Oersted were made. According to scientific laws, out of everything proceeds everything, and out of nothing, nothing can come, even ideas are not created. An unlimited number of inventions cannot be made by means of a limited amount of scientific knowledge; and our present stock of such information applicable to invention, is very insufficient. One great reason why only a small portion of patents are of practical value; and so many useless ones are taken out is, that in consequence of our so-called "practical" spirit, we overestimate the power of invention and under-value the discovery of new abstract truths; because also invention has done so much, we think it will continue to do so, but the latter depends upon a continued supply of discoveries.

Nearly every manufacturer is aware by painful experience of the great and almost incessant variation that occurs in the quality and properties of the materials used in his trade, and the frequent risk of failure of his process. In the manufacture of iron, for example, the presence of much phosphorus, sulphur, or silicon in the ore is liable to be very detrimental to the quality of the iron produced from it; in the manufacture of glass, the least quantity of iron in the materials will seriously injure the colour of the product; in the selection of copper for telegraph wire, if it contains the least trace of arsenic, the wire will not conduct the electricity properly. The difficulties experienced in procuring suitable materials for a manufacturing process are in some cases very great; and when they are procured, additional difficulties arise from the inability of the manufacturer or his manager to analyse them.

Every manufacturer is also aware that the difficulties encountered in manufactures are not limited to the substances employed, but extend to all the different processes and stages of processes through which these substances have to pass, and to all the forces, tools, machinery, and appliances employed in those processes; in the manufacture of glass, for example, the greatest care has to be exercised in the making and gradual heating of the pots in which the glass is melted, the proportions of the materials, the construction of the furnaces, the management of the heat, and a whole host of minor conditions too numerous to mention, all of which must be attended to with the greatest care. In the manufacture of iron and steel, the smelting of copper, the refining of nickel, the preparation and baking of porcelain, and in many other trades, innumerable difficulties, all having their origin in the properties of matter and forces, continually beset the manufacturers. In some cases difficulties occur which perplex both the workman and the scientific man called in to his aid, and so far from an unscientific workman being able to overcome them, even with the aid of the scientific man, he is unable to do so.

The hidden difficulties which beset a manufacturer are not unfrequently so inscrutable that the present state of knowledge in science fails to explain them. Who can tell why it is that wire-work of brass or German silver becomes gradually brittle by lapse of time? Or why varnish made in the open country has different properties from that made in a town? Or why silk dyed in Lyons should possess a finer colour than the same silk dyed by the same process in Coventry? With our present extremely imperfect knowledge of Physical and Chemical science, we can perhaps hardly form an idea of the amount of knowledge yet to be discovered respecting the phenomena which manufactures present.

One of the inevitable results of these difficulties in manufacturing processes and of deficiency of knowledge, is the production of a large amount of goods of an inferior quality; and useless goods, technically called "wasters," the cost of which has to be laid upon the saleable ones, and thus the price of the latter is enhanced to the consumer. For instance, flint glass discoloured by iron has sometimes to be sold at a loss for making common enamel; waste window glass has to be sold as "rockery" for ornamenting gardens, and defective articles of glass or metal have to be re-melted.

In consequence of this want of new knowledge, manufacturers continue to suffer losses which might be avoided; high prices of useful articles are maintained; defects in their quality are not improved; preventable accidents still continue to happen; the health of workmen continues to suffer; many means of curing diseases remain unknown; medical practice remains full of empiricism, &c., &c.

The great sewage question is apparently in this predicament; we are probably trying to solve it without first discovering the requisite knowledge; inventors, engineers, and consulting chemists have racked their brains, and have not been able to devise a satisfactory remedy, and meanwhile the health of the entire population of this country is suffering. If we so neglect the fundamental means of ameliorating our condition we deserve to suffer. One would suppose that cholera, contagious diseases, colliery accidents, pollution of air and water, enormous waste of heat from fires, and a multitude of other evils which depend upon physical and chemical conditions, are of but little importance, that we should so neglect one of the most effectual means of preventing them; and it is perfectly clear that by neglecting to aid research, those who gain so much money and advantage from original science, and render no return, are unwittingly sacrificing national interests upon a large scale to personal benefit.

The practice of some manufacturers using and deriving great profit from new knowledge evolved by research, without recompensing the discoverers, sometimes causes injury to the public welfare by preventing the publication of discoveries which have an immediate practical application. Experience of this kind has constrained me to postpone the publication of a method I have found of readily and quickly converting lumps of white phosphorus into the red variety in a state of powder without protracted heat or grinding.

"What will be the next chapter of British enterprise and invention, and who and where the men to perform the chief part in it? As to the work to be done, there can be no doubt or mystery, for not a day passes without loud complaints, indignant remonstrances, fatal oversights, sad mis-calculations, terrible shortcomings, social or material evils to be remedied if possible, whole masses of people, indeed whole classes to be succoured and lifted out of the slough, and enormous difficulties placed by nature in our way evidently that we may exercise our wit and our virtues in the attempt to overcome them. Here, from all these Isles, there arises a despairing cry from agriculture, as if it had really reached the end of its tether, and had found itself landed in utter helplessness and insolvency – a bad speculation altogether. Here are countless problems, and at the same time countless discoveries, which if they lead to nothing else, prove the inexhaustible nature of our dominion over the elements. Then, for the sea, with its terrible average of wreck and total loss running on without intermission and with but rare abatement, who shall say there is here no work for the discoverer and inventor who will give his heart and soul and mind to it?"

It is indeed high time, that by means of discoveries which will enable us to predict with certainty the nature of coming seasons, we shall be better enabled to cope with adversities in agriculture; also, that the numerous wrecks, and the thousands of lives lost with them every year on our coasts, should be diminished. But these desirable results cannot be effected by invention based upon insufficient knowledge; invention must be preceded by general as well as special research, because the former often discloses important truths which we cannot predict. Our present electric lights in light-houses and on large ocean steamers, had their origin, not in direct inventions or special researches for the purpose, but in abstract researches on apparently remote subjects.

It is nothing less than a national crime that proper provision has not yet been made for investigating scientifically the causes of famine and pestilence, also physiology and pathology, and the discovery of the laws which regulate diseases and epidemics. What can be more painful to behold than a mother and father deprived of a whole family of five or six children in rapid succession by scarlatina or other contagious disease, and both the parents and medical men utterly unable to save them; and this is a common occurrence. Persons who are ignorant of science look with an abject feeling of helplessness upon great national calamities, and even upon private afflictions, such as a local epidemic, as if there was absolutely no remedy, whilst scientific men believe that by extension of knowledge, such evils might be largely avoided or prevented.

Many persons however, actuated by the very kindest of motives, but insufficiently acquainted with the necessity, conditions, results, and advantages of experiments, unwittingly obstruct the discovery of new knowledge in physiology and pathology, by attempting to prevent experiments being made upon animals.

We should not strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Nearly every step in life involves a choice between two alternatives, and this is the case with experiments upon living creatures, either such experiments must be made, or the wholesale slaughter of men and other animals, by pestilences, epidemics, small-pox, foot and mouth disease, &c., must continue. Many of the properties of living bodies, like those of dead ones, can only be ascertained by means of experiments, no other course is possible; and the knowledge so obtained enables us not only to prolong the lives but also to alleviate the sufferings of all kinds of living creatures. Nearly all our medical and surgical knowledge has been obtained by observation and study, either of the results of experiments made by ourselves, or by the course of nature for us; and the former is often attended by immeasurably less pain and expence than the latter. No one who has ever made in a proper manner new experiments, would venture to assert that valuable knowledge is not gained by them; and this statement is as correct of experiments in physiology as in all the other sciences.

The total amount of pain inflicted upon animals by vivisection experiments in this country is infinitesimally small – because, firstly, the proportion of experimentalists in so-called "vivisection," does not amount to one person in one million of our inhabitants: – secondly, students cannot be induced to enter upon scientific research in physiology, because such labour is unrewarded, either by enabling them to obtain certificates, degrees, or money. Whatever pain also, is inflicted in such experiments, is by men of the highest eminence in physiology, and therefore by the most competent persons.

Experimental research is an occupation requiring an exceptional kind of ability and experience; and persons who have never made experiments, nor studied their relation to human welfare, are largely incompetent to determine when and how they should be made, the real effects of them, or the value of the knowledge they afford. To persons inexperienced in scientific research, many experiments appear useless, which have great practical value, either immediately or at a later period. Our greatest curse is ignorance; and knowledge, by enabling us to avoid the fatal effects of pestilences, and epidemics, is as necessary as food to mankind. The "Anti-vivisection" movement however is but one of the phases of the ever-existing conflict between the advancing and retarding sections of mankind.

Greater sympathy with suffering accompanies greater civilization. The increased humanity of the present age over that of previous ones, is largely due to the discovery and extension of new scientific knowledge. Science, by showing more clearly to man his true position in nature and in relation to his fellow-men and other animals, has rendered more evident the concrete fact, that the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and the happiness and welfare of all upon that of each individual. It has also operated in a more apparent, though less important way, by inculcating better systems of hygiene, improved sanitary arrangements, &c, &c. It is not to the zeal of "anti-vivisectionists," but to the well-directed labours of experimental medical men, that mankind are indebted for the discovery and invention of nearly every known method of preventing and alleviating animal suffering and of prolonging human life. This statement is true of vaccination, the use of chloroform in general surgery, dentistry, and midwifery, of carbolic acid spray in surgical operations; the abolition of the practice of searing amputated limbs with a red-hot iron; and many other improvements. Ferrier's comparatively recent vivisection experiments have already enabled medical men to treat more successfully those formidable diseases, epilepsy and abcess of the brain.

What this nation badly requires, is not less experimental research, but more. When famines result from insufficiency of Solar heat, instead of investigating the conditions of the Sun's surface to enable us to predict their occurrence and provide accordingly, we allow them to come upon us in our unprepared state and produce their fearful effects. When contagious disease overtakes us, what do we do? Instead of previously employing and paying scientific investigators to make experiments in physiological and chemical science, to enable us to combat it successfully, we vainly attempt to apply our present stock of chemical and physiological knowledge to ward off the difficulty. When high price of fuel intervenes, instead of previously giving discoverers the means of finding new principles relating to heat, and to chemical, and electrical action, we ineffectually endeavour by means of invention, to economise fuel. These are the pottering, short-sighted, and ignorant ways in which "the great English nation" temporises with great evils, and permits national welfare to be sacrificed to private gain, instead of employing for the discovery of new knowledge some of that superfluous wealth which in many instances is a curse to its possessors.

CHAPTER II.

The Scientific Basis of Mental and Moral Progress. 12

It is not highly necessary after what has been already said in these pages, to adduce much evidence to show that scientific discoveries, either directly or through the medium of the inventions based upon them, have been a great cause of mental and moral progress. As however there are many persons who do not perceive the dependence of such progress, and especially of moral advance, upon science, a few of the chief relations of those subjects to each other may be pointed out.

The dependence of mental progress upon science may be rendered manifest in several ways: – 1st. By showing that new scientific knowledge is continually extending and modifying our views of existing things. 2nd. That inventions based upon scientific discoveries have aided and extended our mental powers: – 3rd. That mental phenomena may be made the subject of experiment, observation, analysis, and inference: – 4th. That the criteria of truth, and the mental powers and processes employed for discovering and detecting truth, are the same in mental as in physical science, and, 5th. That mental action is subject to the great principles and laws of science. And moral progress may be proved to have a scientific basis: – 1st. By shewing that moral actions are a class of mental actions, and therefore subject to the same fundamental laws and influences: – 2nd. That the discovery of new scientific knowledge, and the use of inventions based upon it, often conduce to morality: – 3rd. That moral phenomena may be made the subject of experiment, observation, analysis, and inference: – 4th. That the criteria of truth, and the mental faculties and processes employed, in discovering truth, are the same in moral as in physical science: – 5th. That the fundamental rules of morality are subject to the great principles of science: – 6th. That moral improvement follows in the wake of scientific advance: – and 7th. By showing the moral influence of experimental research in imparting "the scientific spirit;" promoting a love of truth; dispelling ignorance and superstition; detecting error; imparting certainty and accuracy to our knowledge; inculcating obedience to law; producing uniformity of belief; aiding economy and cleanliness, promoting humanity, &c, &c. Each of these will be treated with extreme brevity.

MENTAL PROGRESS

The chief object of this chapter is only to shew that mental action is largely consistent with the great principles of science; not that in our present state of knowledge, mental phenomena can be entirely explained by them, or that mental actions involve nothing more than physical and chemical processes.

That mental progress is advanced by scientific discovery is a common circumstance. Our ideas of facts, our knowledge of general principles, our views of man, of nature, and of the Universe; and even our modes of thought, have been gradually and profoundly changed by the new knowledge acquired by means of scientific research. This truth is capable of being most extensively illustrated by a multitude of facts in the whole of the sciences, and in the arts, manufactures, and other subjects dependent upon science. For example, in astronomy, great changes, produced by the results of scientific discovery have taken place in our ideas respecting the magnitude of Space and of the Heavenly bodies, the constitution, form, and motion of the Earth, the functions of the Sun and Moon, the distances of the Sun and fixed Stars, the nature of eclipses and comets; and a great many other matters. In terrestrial physics, the mental advances have been equally great in our ideas respecting the causes of tides and of winds, the pressure of the atmosphere, the existence and course of the Gulf Stream, the physical conditions of the Equator and Poles, the conditions upon which day and night, summer and winter depend, the depth of the ocean, the height of the atmosphere, the cause of rainbows, of rain, hail, snow, mist and dew, of thunder and lightning, the composition of air, water, mineral, and organic substances, and other most numerous and varied phenomena. In the subjects of heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemistry, vegetable and animal physiology, psychology and morality, and the more concrete subjects depending upon them, such as politics, trade, commerce, government, &c., our ideas have equally advanced, in consequence of scientific research; and to fully describe the mental progress resulting from discovery in nearly all branches of human knowledge would require a series of books to be written on the History of all the Sciences.