Popular scientific lectures. Ernst Mach
I have now conducted you, by many paths and by-ways, rapidly over hedge and ditch, to show you what wide vistas we may reach in every field by the rigorous pursuit of a single scientific fact. A close examination of the two eyes of man has conducted us not only into the dim recesses of humanity's childhood, but has also carried us far beyond the bourne of human life.
It has surely often struck you as strange that the sciences are divided into two great groups; that the so-called humanistic sciences, belonging to the so-called "higher education," are placed in almost a hostile attitude to the natural sciences.
I must confess I do not overmuch believe in this partition of the sciences. I believe that this view will appear as childlike and ingenuous to a matured age as the want of perspective in the old paintings of Egypt does to us. Can it really be that "higher culture" is to be gotten only from a few old pots and palimpsests, which are at best mere scraps of nature, or that more is to be learned from them alone than from all the rest of nature? I believe that both these sciences are simply parts of the same science, which have begun at different ends. If these two ends still act towards each other as the Montagues and Capulets, if their retainers still indulge in lively tilts, I believe that after all they are not in earnest. On the one side there is surely a Romeo, and on the other a Juliet, who, some day, it is hoped, will unite the two houses with a less tragic sequel than that of the play.
Philology began with the unqualified reverence and apotheosis of the Greeks. Now it has begun to draw other languages, other peoples and their histories, into its sphere; it has, through the mediation of comparative linguistics, already struck up, though as yet somewhat cautiously, a friendship with physiology.
Physical science began in the witch's kitchen. It now embraces the organic and inorganic worlds, and with the physiology of articulation and the theory of the senses, has even pushed its researches, at times impertinently, into the province of mental phenomena.
In short, we come to the understanding of much within us solely by directing our glance without, and vice versa. Every object belongs to both sciences. You, ladies, are very interesting and difficult problems for the psychologist, but you are also extremely pretty phenomena of nature. Church and State are objects of the historian's research, but not less phenomena of nature, and in part, indeed, very curious phenomena. If the historical sciences have inaugurated wide extensions of view by presenting to us the thoughts of new and strange peoples, the physical sciences in a certain sense do this in a still greater degree. In making man disappear in the All, in annihilating him, so to speak, they force him to take an unprejudiced position without himself, and to form his judgments by a different standard from that of the petty human.
But if you should ask me now why man has two eyes, I should answer:
That he may look at nature justly and accurately; that he may come to understand that he himself, with all his views, correct and incorrect, with all his haute politique, is simply an evanescent shred of nature; that, to speak with Mephistopheles, he is a part of the part, and that it is absolutely unjustified,
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