A History of Science, vol 1 | Page 4

this principle or that in a
given sequence is no accident. Galileo and Keppler must precede
Newton. Cuvier and Lyall must come before Darwin;--Which, after all,

is no more than saying that in our Temple of Science, as in any other
piece of architecture, the foundation must precede the superstructure.
We shall best understand our story of the growth of science if we think
of each new principle as a stepping-stone which must fit into its own
particular niche; and if we reflect that the entire structure of modern
civilization would be different from what it is, and less perfect than it is,
had not that particular stepping-stone been found and shaped and
placed in position. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones lead us up
and up towards the alluring heights of an acropolis of knowledge, on
which stands the Temple of Modern Science. The story of the building
of this wonderful structure is in itself fascinating and beautiful.

I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE
To speak of a prehistoric science may seem like a contradiction of
terms. The word prehistoric seems to imply barbarism, while science,
clearly enough, seems the outgrowth of civilization; but rightly
considered, there is no contradiction. For, on the one hand, man had
ceased to be a barbarian long before the beginning of what we call the
historical period; and, on the other hand, science, of a kind, is no less a
precursor and a cause of civilization than it is a consequent. To get this
clearly in mind, we must ask ourselves: What, then, is science? The
word runs glibly enough upon the tongue of our every-day speech, but
it is not often, perhaps, that they who use it habitually ask themselves
just what it means. Yet the answer is not difficult. A little attention will
show that science, as the word is commonly used, implies these things:
first, the gathering of knowledge through observation; second, the
classification of such knowledge, and through this classification, the
elaboration of general ideas or principles. In the familiar definition of
Herbert Spencer, science is organized knowledge.
Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that the veriest savage must
have been an observer of the phenomena of nature. But it may not be so
obvious that he must also have been a classifier of his observations--an
organizer of knowledge. Yet the more we consider the case, the more

clear it will become that the two methods are too closely linked
together to be dissevered. To observe outside phenomena is not more
inherent in the nature of the mind than to draw inferences from these
phenomena. A deer passing through the forest scents the ground and
detects a certain odor. A sequence of ideas is generated in the mind of
the deer. Nothing in the deer's experience can produce that odor but a
wolf; therefore the scientific inference is drawn that wolves have
passed that way. But it is a part of the deer's scientific knowledge,
based on previous experience, individual and racial; that wolves are
dangerous beasts, and so, combining direct observation in the present
with the application of a general principle based on past experience, the
deer reaches the very logical conclusion that it may wisely turn about
and run in another direction. All this implies, essentially, a
comprehension and use of scientific principles; and, strange as it seems
to speak of a deer as possessing scientific knowledge, yet there is really
no absurdity in the statement. The deer does possess scientific
knowledge; knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the
knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its
intelligence, less logical, less scientific in the application of that
knowledge, than is the man. The animal that could not make accurate
scientific observations of its surroundings, and deduce accurate
scientific conclusions from them, would soon pay the penalty of its lack
of logic.
What is true of man's precursors in the animal scale is, of course, true
in a wider and fuller sense of man himself at the very lowest stage of
his development. Ages before the time which the limitations of our
knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had
reached a high stage of development. As a social being, he had
developed all the elements of a primitive civilization. If, for
convenience of classification, we speak of his state as savage, or
barbaric, we use terms which, after all, are relative, and which do not
shut off our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close association with
our own ideals. We know that, even in the Stone Age, man had learned
how to domesticate animals and make them useful to him, and that he
had also learned to cultivate the soil. Later on, doubtless by slow and