CHAPTER VII.

VIEWS ON THE PURSUIT OF SCIENCE AND ON EDUCATION.

Between Faraday and the scientific men of his time there subsisted many various relations. The influence which he exerted as a lecturer and as an experimental investigator was unique; but, apart from such influences, those relations were mainly confined to individual friendships. With the organisation of science he had relatively very little to do. We have seen how highly he prized the honour of admission to the Fellowship of the Royal Society; and it remains to be told of the gratification with which he accepted the scientific honours which he received from almost every academy and university in Europe. Yet he took little part in the work of scientific societies as such. Four years after his election as F.R.S. he served on the Council, and he remained on till 1831. He served again in 1833 and 1835. He was not, however, satisfied with the management of the Royal Society, nor with the way in which its Fellowship was at that time bestowed on men who had no real claims on science, but were nominated through influence. Echoes of this discontent are to be found in various pamphlets of the day by Moll, Babbage, South, and others. Faraday, who edited Moll’s pamphlet on the “Decline of Science,” is believed to have had an even larger share in its production. In 1830 the really scientific men amongst the Fellows desired to place Sir John Herschel as President; the less scientific preferred the Duke of Sussex. Faraday took the unusual step of speaking on the question, advocating the principle that eminence in science should be the sole qualification for the Presidency. At the same meeting Herschel moved, and Faraday seconded, a plan for reforming the Council by nominating a list of fifty Fellows from whose number the Council should be chosen. They carried their plan, and Faraday’s name was amongst those so selected to serve. But the presidential election went in favour of the Duke of Sussex by 119 to 110 votes. After 1835 Faraday never served again on the Council. In 1843 he wrote to Matteucci:--

I think you are aware that I have not attended at the Royal Society, either meetings or council, for some years. Ill health is one reason, and another that I do not like the present constitution of it, and want to restrict it to scientific men. As these my opinions are not acceptable, I have withdrawn from any management in it (still sending scientific communications if I discover anything I think worthy). This, of course, deprives me of power there.

[Sidenote: REFORM IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY.]

Two months earlier he wrote to Grove, who at that time was carrying out the long-needed reforms, sympathising, but declining to co-operate:--

Royal Institution, December 21, 1842.

MY DEAR GROVE,--... As to the Royal Society, you know my feeling towards it is for what it has been, and I hope may be. Its present state is not wholesome. You are aware that I am not on the council, and have not been for years, and have been to no meeting there for years; but I do hope for better times. I do not wonder at your feeling--all I meant to express was a wish that its circumstances and character should improve, and that it should again become a desirable reunion of _all_ really scientific men. It has done much, is now doing much, in some parts of science, as its magnetic observations show, and I hope will some day become altogether healthy.

Ever, my dear Grove, yours sincerely, M. FARADAY.

Though he continued down to 1860 to send researches for publication to the Royal Society, he seldom attended its meetings.[56] He was not even present in November, 1845, on the occasion of the reading of his paper on the action of the magnet on light. In 1857 he declined the Presidency, though urged by the unanimous wish of the Council, as narrated on p. 225.

Though in the meridian of his active life, he took no part in the founding of the British Association in 1831, but was at the Oxford meeting in 1832, being one of the four scientific men (p. 65) selected to receive the honorary degree of D.C.L. on that occasion. He also communicated a paper on Electro-chemical Decomposition to the B.A. meeting at Cambridge in 1833. He acted as president of the Chemical Section of the Association in 1837 at Liverpool, and in 1846 at Southampton; and he was chosen as vice-president of the Association itself in the years 1844, at York (p. 224); 1849, at Birmingham (p. 256); and 1853, at Hull. He delivered evening discourses in 1847, at Oxford, on Magnetic and Diamagnetic Phenomena; and in 1849, at Birmingham, on Mr. Gassiot’s Battery. He also contributed to the proceedings at the meetings at Ipswich in 1851 and at Liverpool in 1854.

His comparative aloofness from scientific organisations arose probably from the exceedingly individual nature of his own researches--to which allusion was made on p. 242--rather than from any lack of sympathy. He had no jealousy of co-operation in science. To Tyndall, then at Marburg, he wrote in 1850 rejoicing at the circumstance that the work on the magnetic properties of crystals was being taken up by others. “It is wonderful,” he says, “how much good results from different persons working at the same matter. Each one gives views and ideas new to the rest. When science is a republic, then it gains; and though I am no republican in other matters, I am in that.” Other causes there were, doubtless, tending to his isolation, amongst them an old jealousy, now long dead, against the Royal Institution on the part of some of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Above all, probably, was his detestation of controversy.

[Sidenote: PRIORITY IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY.]

[Sidenote: PRIORITY IN PUBLICATION.]

Priority in scientific discovery was a matter which deeply concerned one whose life was devoted to scientific pioneering. To any question as to scientific priority between himself and other workers he was keenly sensitive. This was, indeed, natural in one who had voluntarily relinquished fortune, and retired from lucrative professional work, in the sole and single aim of advancing natural knowledge. His single-minded and sensitive nature made him particularly scrupulous in all such matters, and his early experiences must have added to the almost excessive keenness of his perceptions. Having had in 1823, when still merely assistant to Davy, to bear the double burden of a serious misunderstanding with Dr. Wollaston as to the originality of his discovery of the electro-magnetic rotations, and of a serious estrangement from his master arising out of the liquid chlorine discovery--an estrangement which threatened to cause his election to the Royal Society to be indefinitely postponed--he was in later life especially precise in dating and publishing his own researches. In 1831 there arose, concerning his great discovery of magneto-electric induction, a curious misunderstanding. His discovery was, as we have seen, made in September and October. He collected his results and arranged them in the splendid memoir--the first in the series of “Experimental Researches in Electricity”--which was read at the Royal Society on November 24th. The _résumé_ of his work, which he wrote five days later to Phillips, is given on pages 114–117. A fortnight later he wrote a shorter and hasty letter in the same way to his friend, M. Hachette of Paris--a letter which Faraday subsequently well termed “unfortunate,” in view of the consequences that followed. M. Hachette, a week later, communicated Faraday’s letter to the Académie des Sciences on December 26th. It was published in _Le Temps_ of December 28th. At that date the complete memoir read to the Royal Society was not yet printed or circulated. The consequence was that two Italian physicists, MM. Nobili and Antinori, seeing the brief letter, and “considering that the subject was given to the philosophical world for general pursuit,” immediately began researches on magneto-electric induction in ignorance of Faraday’s full work. Their results they embodied in a paper, in which they claimed to have “verified, extended, and, perhaps, rectified the results of the English philosopher,” accusing him of errors both in experiment and theory, and even of a breach of good faith as to what he had said about Arago’s rotations. This paper they dated January 31st, 1832; but it was published in the belated number of the _Antologia_ for November, 1831, where its appearance at an apparently earlier date than Faraday’s original paper in the _Philosophical Transactions_ made many Continental readers suppose that the researches of Nobili and Antinori preceded those of Faraday. In June, 1832, Faraday published in the _Philosophical Magazine_ a translation of Nobili’s memoir, with his own annotations; and later in the year he wrote to Gay Lussac a long letter on the errors of Nobili and Antinori. He showed how, in spite of his efforts to clear up the misunderstanding, in spite of his having sent several months previously to MM. Nobili and Antinori copies of his original papers, no correction or retractation had been made by them; and he concluded by a dignified protest that none might say he had been too hasty to write that which might have been avoided. It may be taken that the rule now recognised as to priority of scientific publication--namely, that it dates from the day when the discoverer communicates it formally to any of the recognised learned societies--was virtually established by Faraday’s example. It will be remembered that writing to De la Rive in 1845, to tell him of his diamagnetic discoveries, he begged him to keep the matter secret, adding: “I ought (in order to preserve the respect due to the Royal Society) not to write a description to any one until the paper has been received or even read there.” To younger men he inculcated the necessity of proper and prompt publication of their researches if they would reap the benefit of their work. To Sir William Crookes, then a rising young chemist, he said: “Work, Finish, Publish.” Writing in 1853 to Professor Matteucci, who had been annoyed with him for allowing Du Bois Reymond, with whom Matteucci had had some controversy about priority, to dedicate his book to him, Faraday says: “Who has not to put up in his day with insinuations and misrepresentations in the accounts of his proceedings given by others, bearing for the time the present injustice, which is often unintentional, and often originates in hasty temper, and committing his fame and character to the judgment of the men of his own and future time?”... “I see that that moves you which would move me most--namely, the imputation of a want of good faith--and I cordially sympathise with any one who is so charged unjustly. Such cases have seemed to me almost the only ones for which it is worth while entering into controversy.”... “These polemics of the scientific world are very unfortunate things; they form the great stain to which the beautiful edifice of scientific truth is subject. _Are they inevitable?_”

Controversy whether in religion or science was to him alike detestable. He took no part in politics. A letter to Tyndall (see “Faraday as a Discoverer,” p. 39), written after the latter had told him of a rather heated discussion at the British Association meeting in 1855, speaks of his own efforts at forbearance. He says:--

These great meetings, of which I think very well altogether, advance science chiefly by bringing scientific men together and making them to know and be friends with each other; and I am sorry when that is not the effect in every part of their course.... The real truth never fails ultimately to appear.... It is better to be blind to the results of partisanship, and quick to see good will. One has more happiness in oneself in endeavouring to follow the things that make for peace. You can hardly imagine how often I have been heated in private when opposed, as I have thought unjustly and superciliously, and yet I have striven, and succeeded I hope, in keeping down replies of the like kind. And I know I have never lost by it.

[Sidenote: HATRED OF CONTROVERSY.]

During the years when he was examining the apparatus of rival inventors for lighthouse illumination, he could calmly hear them described as Mr. So-and-So’s electric lights, all the while knowing that it was his own discovery of magneto-electric induction which had made the mechanical production of electric light possible. Yet he fired up if anyone dared to revive the priority dispute between Davy and Stephenson as to the invention of the safety lamp. “Disgraceful subject,” was his own comment. In his dispute with Snow Harris as to the design of lightning rods, in which, as it is now known, Snow Harris was right; in his dispute with Airy over the curved lines of force; in his minor difficulties over Hare’s pile and Becquerel’s magnetic observations, none could either assert his own position with more simple dignity, nor admit with greater frankness the rights of his rival.

To Hare he wrote:--

You must excuse me, however, for several reasons from answering it [Hare’s letter] at any length; the first is my distaste for controversy, which is so great that I would on no account our correspondence should acquire that character. I have often seen it do great harm, and yet remember few cases in natural knowledge where it has helped much either to pull down error or advance truth. Criticism, on the other hand, is of much value.

When we reflect how large a part of his experimental researches was devoted to establishing the relations between the various forces of nature, we cannot but think that Faraday must have regarded with somewhat mixed feelings the publication in 1846 of Sir William Grove’s volume on the Correlation of Forces. He had, in June, 1834, given a course of lectures on the mutual relation of chemical and electrical phenomena, and had dealt therein with the conversion of chemical and electrical power into heat, and had speculated on the inclusion of gravitation in these mutual relations. In 1853 Faraday marked the old lecture notes of these lectures with his initials, and endorsed them with the words “Correlation of Physical Forces.” Probably none rejoiced more than he that Grove had undertaken the work of popularising the notion which for a score of years had been familiar to himself. Yet he was keen to resent an unjust reflection, as is shown by his letter to Richard Phillips, republished in Vol. II. of the “Experimental Researches,” p. 229, respecting Dr. John Davy’s Life of Sir Humphry.

Faraday has himself left on record (p. 10) that when he wrote to Davy asking to be taken into his employment, his motive was his desire “to escape from trade, which I thought vicious and selfish, and to enter into the service of Science, which, I imagined, made its pursuers amiable and liberal.” Davy had smiled at this boyish notion, and had told him that the experience of a few years would correct his ideas. Years afterwards he spoke of this matter to Mrs. Andrew Crosse in an interview which she has recorded:--

After viewing the ample appliances for experimental research, and feeling much impressed by the scientific atmosphere of the place, I turned and said, “Mr. Faraday, you must be very happy in your position and with your pursuits, which elevate you entirely out of the meaner aspects and lower aims of common life.”

He shook his head, and with that wonderful mobility of countenance which was characteristic, his expression of joyousness changed to one of profound sadness, and he replied: “When I quitted business and took to science as a career, I thought I had left behind me all the petty meannesses and small jealousies which hinder man in his moral progress; but I found myself raised into another sphere, only to find poor human nature just the same everywhere--subject to the same weaknesses and the same self-seeking, however exalted the intellect.”

These were his words as well as I can recollect; and, looking at that good and great man, I thought I had never seen a countenance which so impressed me with the characteristic of perfect unworldliness.

[Sidenote: HONOURS AND TITLES.]

Probably few men have ever been recipients of so many scientific honours as Faraday. Beginning in the year 1823 with his election as a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences of Paris, and as an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the list of his diplomas and distinctions--some ninety-seven in number--ended in 1864 with his election as Associate of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Naples. It included honours from almost every academy and university of Europe. These honours Faraday valued very highly; and whilst he consigned his various gold medals to a mere wooden box, his diplomas were kept with the utmost care in a special diploma book, in which they were mounted and indexed. To Mr. Spring Rice, who in 1838 asked him for a list of his titles, he replied, enclosing the list, and adding this remark: “One title, namely that of F.R.S., was sought and paid for; all the rest are spontaneous offerings of kindness and goodwill from the bodies named.” Years afterwards he was asked by Lord Wrottesley to advise the Government as to how the position of science or of the cultivators of science in England might be improved. The letter is so characteristic that it cannot be spared:--

Royal Institution: March 10, 1854.

MY LORD,--I feel unfit to give a deliberate opinion on the course it might be advisable for the Government to pursue if it were anxious to improve the position of science and its cultivators in our country. My course of life, and the circumstances which make it a happy one for me, are not those of persons who conform to the usages and habits of society. Through the kindness of all, from my Sovereign downwards, I have that which supplies all my need; and in respect of honours, I have, as a scientific man, received from foreign countries and sovereigns those which, belonging to very limited and select classes, surpass in my opinion anything that it is in the power of my own to bestow.

I cannot say that I have not valued such distinctions; on the contrary, I esteem them very highly, but I do not think I have ever worked for or sought after them. Even were such to be now created here, the time is past when these would possess any attraction for me....

Without thinking of the effect it might have upon distinguished men of science, or upon the minds of those who, stimulated to exertion, might become distinguished, I do think that a government should, _for its own sake_, honour the men who do honour and service to the country. I refer now to honours only, not to beneficial rewards. Of such honours, I think, there are none. Knighthoods and baronetcies are sometimes conferred with such intentions, but I think them utterly unfit for that purpose. Instead of conferring distinction, they confound the man who is one of twenty, or perhaps fifty, with hundreds of others. They depress rather than exalt him, for they tend to lower the especial distinction of mind to the commonplace of society. An intelligent country ought to recognise the scientific men amongst its people as a class. If honours are conferred upon eminence in any class, as that of the law or the army, they should be in this also. The aristocracy of the class should have other distinctions than those of lowly and high-born, rich and poor, yet they should be such as to be worthy of those whom the sovereign and the country should delight to honour; and, being rendered very desirable, and even enviable, in the eyes of the aristocracy by birth, should be unattainable except to that of science. Thus much, I think, the Government and the country ought to do, for their own sake and the good of science, more than for the sake of the men who might be thought worthy of such distinction. The latter have attained to their fit place, whether the community at large recognise it or not....

I have the honour to be, my lord, your very faithful servant,

M. FARADAY.

[Sidenote: HOW SCIENCE CAN BE HONOURED.]

To Professor Andrews he wrote in 1843 in a similar strain:--

I have always felt that there is something degrading in offering rewards for intellectual exertion, and that societies or academies, or even kings and emperors, should mingle in the matter does not remove the degradation, for the feeling which is hurt is a point above their condition, and belongs to the respect which a man owes to himself.... Still, I think rewards and honours _good_ if properly distributed; but they should be given for what a man has done, and not offered for what he is to do.

When a friend wrote to him on hearing a rumour that he had himself been knighted, his reply, published years after in the _London Review_, was: “I am happy that I am not a Sir, and do not intend (if it depends upon me) to become one. By the Prussian knighthood[57] I do feel honoured; in the other I should not.”

On one occasion he commented rather sarcastically upon the British Government and its stinginess as compared with those of all other civilised countries in its aids to scientific progress. This complaint is equally justified to-day. To many it may be news that England pays to its Astronomer Royal--who must obviously be a person of very high scientific qualifications--a salary less than those paid to the five assistant under-secretaries in the Colonial and Foreign Offices; less than that paid to the sergeants-at-arms in the Houses of Parliament; less than that paid to the person appointed Director of Clothing in the War Office. Enlightened England!

Faraday did not deem the pursuit of science to be necessarily incompatible with what he termed “professional business”--that is, expert work. Until the day when he abandoned all professional engagements, so as to devote himself to researches, he had been receiving a considerable and growing income from this source. But he objected to the indignities to which this work exposed him from lawyers, who would not understand that he took no partisan view. He could not endure the browbeating of cross-examining counsel. The late Lord Cardwell was witness to a gentle but crushing reproof which he once administered to a barrister who attempted to bully him. A writer in the _British Quarterly Review_ attributes to a specific case his determination to cease expert work.

He gave evidence once in a judicial case, when the scientific testimony, starting from given premises, was so diverse that the presiding judge, in summing up launched something like a reproach at the scientific witnesses. “Science has not shone this day,” was his lordship’s remark. From that time forth no one ever saw Faraday as a scientific witness before a law tribunal.

[Sidenote: UNIVERSITY DEGREES IN SCIENCE.]

Amongst the honours received by Faraday there was one of which, in 1838, he said that he felt it equal to any other he had received--namely, that of Member of the Senate of the University of London, to which position he was nominated in 1836 by the Crown. For twenty-seven years he remained a senator, and when, in 1859, the project for creating degrees in science was on foot, he was one of the committee who drew up a report and scheme of examination for the Senate. To the Rev. John Barlow he wrote on this matter:--

The Senate of the University accepted and approved of the report of the Committee for Scientific Degrees, so that that will go forward (if the Government approve), and will come into work next year. It seems to give much satisfaction to all who have seen it, though the subject is beset with difficulties; for when the depth and breadth of science came to be considered, and an estimate was made of how much a man ought to know to obtain a right to a degree in it, the amount in words seemed to be so enormous as to make me hesitate in demanding it from the student; and though in the D.S. one could divide the matter and claim eminence in one branch of science, rather than good general knowledge in all, still in the B.S., which is a progressive degree, a more extended though a more superficial acquaintance seemed to be required. In fact, the matter is so new, and there is so little that can serve as a previous experience in the founding and arranging these degrees, that one must leave the whole endeavour to shape itself as the practice and experience accumulates.

When, in 1863, his feebleness impelled him to resign this position, he wrote to Dr. Carpenter:--

The position of a senator is one that should not be held by an inactive man to the exclusion of an active one. It has rejoiced my heart to see the progress of the University, and of education under its influence and power; and that delight I hope to have so long as life shall be spared to me.

He had little sympathy with either text-book science or with mere examinations. “I have far more confidence,” he wrote, “in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets error right, gives an absolute advancement in knowledge.” In another place he wrote:--“Let the imagination go, guarding it by judgment and principles, but holding it in and directing it by experiment.” For book-learned chemistry and mere chemical theory, apart from experimental facts, he had an undisguised contempt. Writing to General Portlock on the subject of chemical education, he stated that he had been one of the Senate of the University of London appointed to consider especially the best method of examination. They had decided on examination by papers, accompanied by _vivâ voce_. “We think,” he added, “that no numerical value can be attached to the questions, because everything depends on _how they are answered_.” Then, referring to the teaching at Woolwich, he says, “My instructions always have been to look to the note-books for the result.” “Lectures alone cannot be expected to give more than a general idea of this most extensive branch of science, and it would be too much to expect that young men who at the utmost hear only fifty lectures on chemistry should be able to answer with much effect, in writing, to questions set down on paper, when we know by experience that daily work for eight hours in _practical laboratories_ for _three months_ does not go very far to confer such ability.”

[Sidenote: SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITIES.]

He had, at an earlier date, declined to be appointed as examiner in the University. He had previously declined the professorship of chemistry in University College; and he had also declined the chemical chair in the University of Edinburgh. This was not, however, from any want of sympathy with university work, or failure to appreciate the ideal of a university as a seat of learning. Writing to Tyndall, in 1851, about another university--that at Toronto--he said: “I trust it is a place where a man of science and a true philosopher is required, and where, in return, such a man would be nourished and cherished in proportion to his desire to advance natural knowledge.”

At the same time he had an exceeding repugnance to the custom of expecting candidates for professorial chairs to produce “testimonials” of their qualifications. When his intimate friend Richard Phillips was a candidate for the very chair which Faraday refused at University College, Faraday declined on principle to give a testimonial. “I should indeed have thought,” he added, “his character had been known to be such that it would rather have been degraded than established by certificates.”

Similarly, in 1851, he told Tyndall, then an applicant for the Chair of Physics at Toronto, that he had in every case refused for many years past to give any on the application of candidates. “Nevertheless,” he added, “I wish to say that when I am asked about a candidate by those who have the choice or appointment, I never refuse to answer.”

[Sidenote: SCIENCE IN EDUCATION.]

On general education, Faraday’s ideas were much in advance of his time. From the epoch when as a young man he lectured to the City Philosophical Society on the means of obtaining knowledge and on mental inertia, down to the close of his career, he consistently advocated the cultivation of the experimental method and the use of science as a means of training the faculties. A concise account of his views is to be found in the lecture he gave in 1854 before the Prince Consort on “Mental Education,” a lecture which prescribes the self-educating discipline of scientific study and experiment as a means of correcting deficiency of judgment. It included a powerful plea for suspense of judgment and for the cultivation of the faculty of proportionate judgment. In 1862 he was examined at some length by the Royal Commissioners upon Public Schools. With them he pleaded strongly for the introduction of science into the school curricula; and when asked at what age it might be serviceable to introduce science-teaching, replied: “I think one can hardly tell that until after experience for some few years. All I can say is this that at my juvenile lectures at Christmas time I have never found a child too young to understand intelligently what I told him; they came to me afterwards with questions which proved their capability.”

One passage from the close of a lecture given in 1858 deserves to be recorded for its fine appreciation of “the kind of education which science offers to man”:--

It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the _small_ beginnings--they precede of necessity _all great things_.... It teaches a continual comparison of the _small and great_, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey _law_, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us, first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past. Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces.

All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under _law_, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.

[Sidenote: ON MATHEMATICS.]

A peculiar interest attaches to Faraday’s attitude towards the study of mathematics. He who had never had any schooling beyond the common school of his parish had not advanced beyond the simplest algebra in his mastery over symbolic reasoning. Several times in his “Experimental Researches” he deplores what he termed “my imperfect mathematical knowledge.” Of Poisson’s theory of magnetism he said: “I am quite unfit to form a judgment.” Dr. Scoffern repeats a pleasantry of Faraday’s having on a certain occasion boasted that he had once in the course of his life performed a mathematical operation--when he turned the handle of Babbage’s calculating machine. Certain it is that he went through the whole of his magnificent researches without once using even a sine or a cosine, or anything more recondite than the simple rule-of-three. He expressed the same kind of regret at his unfamiliarity with the German language--“the language of science and knowledge,” as he termed it in writing to Du Bois Reymond--which prevented him from reading the works of Professor “Ohms.” Nevertheless he valued the mathematical powers of others, and counselled Tyndall to work out his experimental results, “so that the mathematicians may be able to take it up.” Yet he never relaxed his preference for proceeding along the lines of experimental investigation. His curious phrase (p. 239) as to his pique respecting mathematics is very significant, as is also his note of jubilation in his letter to Phillips (p. 117) at finding that pure experiment can successfully rival mathematics in unravelling the mysteries which had eluded the efforts of Poisson and Arago. He himself attributed to his defective memory his want of hold upon symbolic reasoning. To Tyndall he wrote in 1851, when thanking him for a copy of one of his scientific memoirs:--

Such papers as yours make me feel more than ever the loss of memory I have sustained, for there is no reading them, or at least retaining the argument, under such deficiency.

Mathematical formulæ more than anything require quickness and surety in receiving and retaining the true value of the symbols used; and when one has to look back at every moment to the beginning of a paper, to see what H or A or B mean, there is no making way. Still, though I cannot hold the whole train of reasoning in my mind at once, I am able fully to appreciate the value of the results you arrive at, and it appears to me that they are exceedingly well established and of very great consequence. These elementary laws of action are of so much consequence in the development of the nature of a power which, like magnetism, is as yet new to us.

Again to Clerk Maxwell, in 1857, he wrote:--

There is one thing I would be glad to ask you. When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulæ? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as we to express them so--translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we also might work upon them by experiment? I think it must be so, because I have always found that you could convey to me a perfectly clear idea of your conclusions, which, though they may give me no full understanding of the steps of your process, gave me the results neither above nor below the truth, and so clear in character that I can think and work from them.

If this be possible, would it not be a good thing if mathematicians, writing on these subjects, were to give us their results in this popular useful working state as well as in that which is their own and proper to them?

The achievement of Faraday in finding for the expression of electromagnetic laws means which, though not symbolic, were simple, accurate, and in advance of the mathematics of his time, has been alluded to on page 217. Liebig, in his discourse on “Induction and Deduction,” refers to Faraday thus:--

I have heard mathematical physicists deplore that Faraday’s records of his labours were difficult to read and understand, that they often resembled rather abstracts from a diary. But the fault was theirs, not Faraday’s. To physicists who have approached physics by the road of chemistry, Faraday’s memoirs sound like an admirably beautiful music.

[Sidenote: MAXWELL AND VON HELMHOLTZ.]

Von Helmholtz, in his Faraday lecture of 1881, has also touched on this aspect.

Now that the mathematical interpretation of Faraday’s conceptions regarding the nature of electric and magnetic forces has been given by Clerk Maxwell, we see how great a degree of exactness and precision was really hidden behind the words which to Faraday’s contemporaries appeared either vague or obscure; and it is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula.

Two other passages from Von Helmholtz are worthy of being added:--

And now, with a quite wonderful sagacity and intellectual precision, Faraday performed in his brain the work of a great mathematician without using a single mathematical formula. He saw with his mind’s eye that magnetised and dielectric bodies ought to have a tendency to contract in the direction of the lines of force, and to dilate in all directions perpendicular to the former, and that by these systems of tensions and pressures in the space which surrounds electrified bodies, magnets, or wires conducting electric currents, all the phenomena of electrostatic, magnetic, electromagnetic attraction, repulsion, and induction could be explained, without recurring at all to forces acting directly at a distance. This was the part of his path where so few could follow him; perhaps a Clerk Maxwell, a second man of the same power and independence of intellect, was needed to reconstruct in the normal methods of science the great building the plan of which Faraday had conceived in his mind, and attempted to make visible to his contemporaries.

Nobody can deny that this new theory of electricity and magnetism, originated by Faraday and developed by Maxwell, is in itself well consistent, in perfect and exact harmony with all the known facts of experience, and does not contradict any one of the general axioms of dynamics, which have been hitherto considered as the fundamental truths of all natural science, because they have been found valid, without any exception, in all known processes of nature.

And, after dealing with the phenomena discussed by Faraday, Von Helmholtz adds these pregnant words:--

Nevertheless, the fundamental conceptions by which Faraday was led to these much-admired discoveries have not received an equal amount of consideration. They were very divergent from the trodden path of scientific theory, and appeared rather startling to his contemporaries. His principal aim was to express in his new conceptions only facts, with the least possible use of hypothetical substances and forces. This was really an advance in general scientific method, destined to purify science from the last remnants of metaphysics. Faraday was not the first, and not the only man, who had worked in this direction, but perhaps nobody else at his time did it so radically.

Clerk Maxwell said of him:

The way in which Faraday made use of his lines of force in co-ordinating the phenomena of electric induction shows him to have been a mathematician of high order, and one from whom the mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods.

It is fitting to include in this review of Faraday’s place in relation to the mathematical side of physics some words of Lord Kelvin, taken from his preface to the English edition of Hertz’s “Electric Waves”:--

Faraday, with his curved lines of electric force, and his dielectric efficiency of air and of liquid and solid insulators, resuscitated the idea of a medium through which, and not only through which but _by_ which, forces of attraction or repulsion, seemingly acting at a distance, are transmitted.

The long struggle of the first half of the eighteenth century was not merely on the question of a medium to serve for gravific mechanism, but on the correctness of the Newtonian law of gravitation as a matter of fact, however explained. The corresponding controversy in the nineteenth century was very short, and it soon became obvious that Faraday’s idea of the transmission of electric force by a medium not only did not violate Coulomb’s law of relation between force and distance, but that, if real, it must give a thorough explanation of that law. Nevertheless, after Faraday’s discovery of the different specific inductive capacities of different insulators, twenty years passed before it was generally accepted in Continental Europe. But before his death, in 1867, he had succeeded in inspiring the rising generation of the scientific world with something approaching to faith that electric force is transmitted by a medium called ether, of which, as had been believed by the whole scientific world for forty years, light and radiant heat are transverse vibrations. Faraday himself did not rest with this theory of electricity alone. The very last time I saw him at work at the Royal Institution was in an underground cellar, which he had chosen for freedom from disturbance, and he was arranging experiments to test the time of propagation of magnetic force from an electromagnet through a distance of many yards of air to a fine steel needle, polished to reflect light; but no result came from those experiments. About the same time, or soon after, certainly not long before the end of his working time, he was engaged (I believe at the Shot Tower, near Waterloo Bridge, on the Surrey side) in efforts to discover relations between gravity and magnetism, which also led to no result.

[Sidenote: KELVIN’S APPRECIATION.]

Lord Kelvin, who was himself the first to perceive that Faraday’s ideas were not inconsistent with mathematical expression, and to direct Clerk Maxwell and others to this view, had, in 1854, delighted the old man by bringing mathematical support to the conception of lines of force. In 1857 he sent to Faraday a copy of one of his papers, and received in acknowledgment a letter of warm encouragement, which, however, does not appear to have been preserved. Lord Kelvin’s reply is its own best commentary:--

Such expressions from you would be more than a sufficient reward for anything I could ever contemplate doing in science. I feel strongly how little I have done to deserve them, but they will encourage me with a stronger motive than I have ever had before to go on endeavouring to see in the direction you have pointed, which I long ago learned to believe is the direction in which we must look for a deeper insight into nature.