Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 61:241 (Jan 1904)
Article: The Development Of Scientific Thought In The Nineteenth Century
Author: James Lindsay

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 47

The Development Of Scientific Thought In The Nineteenth Century

Rev. James Lindsay

The nineteenth century was preeminently the century of science, as the eighteenth was the philosophical century,—the century of Voltaire and the Illumination. A thing of deep and delightful interest is the development of nineteenth-century scientific thought. But the nineteenth-century developments must be looked at in connection with the rise of modern science. Its rise was in our own country. One may very well claim to be heretical enough to dissent from the currently accepted view which makes Lord Bacon, in some sort, the father of all modern scientific achievements, and the pioneer of all scientific movement. Such a view stands in need of correction and serious modification. No doubt it was the merit of Bacon to have presaged and prophetically announced the new ideal and spirit of scientific advance, and to have given useful and healthy directions for the goal being attained. It was Bacon’s great merit to have brought into view an empirical principle capable of general application. But his was the defect to have failed to carry out that principle to any fruitful or corporeal issue. He had not, in fact, the patience and the exactitude of a great scientific mind; and he really missed the goal to which he aspired, when it came to the working out of his great visions of reality in actual investigations. Indeed, the Baconian way of gathering facts first, and leaving theorizing to come afterwards, is too easily capable of proving a

BSac 61:241 (Jan 1904) p. 48

rather disastrously fallacious one for research of any sort. It would not be difficult to show how thinkers, early and late,— Aristotle, Hegel, and Tennyson, for examples,—have caught glimpses of really truer modes of thinking. It was Newton who, by his actual scientific patience and brilliant power, laid down the guiding lines of scientific principle, and gave these principles splendid application, so that they rested on sure and permanent basis. The law of universal gravitation associated with Newton in the seventeenth century and the “law of Watt” in the eighteenth, which determined the latent heat of steam condensation at different temperatures and pressures, bring us, in the briefest way, to the nineteenth century. It was the triumph of the nineteenth century to have made science no more a merely national thing, but something international—a European thing; one result of which is, that a truncated or disjointed view of the developments of its scientific thought can be avoided only by looking, not at British science alone, but at the developments of France, Germany, and Britain. This we shall do briefly in turn.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, France had become the chosen home o...