The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Ruskin John

18

'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering on its own account.'—I am under correction in this statement by the Lucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules of bodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more natural than to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferous ether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules of sensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, swinging on their own account, produce vibrations in the luminous ether, and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of these vibrations depend upon the periods in which the molecules are disposed to swing." ('On the Changes of Refrangibility of Light,' p. 549.)

It seems to me a pleasant conclusion, this, of recent science, and suggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there be light' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there be a disposition of the molecules to swing,' and the destinies of mankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, depend thereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at all events not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition!

Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so high mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word 'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of the body?

It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as the writer in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affect the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised) "command of language"—of never allowing a sentence to pass proof in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is able properly to say anything,—and secondly, whether his conceit permits him to say anything properly.

Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative statement that he rejoices as a strong man to run his course, is one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the stove's workmanship,—and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own coal-scuttles.

Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the 'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the present world is concerned,—by clothing in a "properly scientific garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can penetrate through oak-wood or through water—or (alas! that it should be so often tried) through the human body; and this power of penetration" (italics now mine) "is the distinguishing characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity. Let us define by the term 'Energy,' this power which the rifle ball possesses of overcoming obstacles, or of doing work."

Now, had Mr. Stewart been a better scholar, he would have felt, even if he had not known, that the Greek word 'energy' could only be applied to the living—and of living, with perfect propriety only to the mental, action of animals, and that it could no more be applied as a 'scientific garb,' to the flight of a rifle ball, than to the fall of a dead body. And, if he had attained thus much, even of the science of language, it is just possible that the small forte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have been energized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertly moving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world, is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights and velocities; that the effect of their impact depends—not merely on their pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms and stability of the substances they encounter, and that there is no more quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in the swiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in the deliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat's proboscis, or a seamstress' needle.

Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, do not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,—for a bad writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into one,—but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that of a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo the damage.