your own philosophy of life by setting forth some facts which have influenced the beliefs of thinking men of recent generations. In the words of one of the wisest Frenchmen of his age, Charles Dunoyer, "Je n'impose rien, je ne propose mème rien: j'expose."

II

CHANGED CONCEPTIONS OF

THE

SCIENCE

HE period from 1815 to 1848 lies intellectually very far removed from the present. The science and the literature, the politics and the ethics of our grandfathers were radically different from our own. We see the extent of the change when we contrast the poetry of Byron with that of Kipling, the music of Mendelssohn with that of Wagner, the essays of Sydney Smith with those of Chesterton, or the political philosophy of Malthus with that of Morley. The age that followed the French Revolution was more remote from the world of today than the age that preceded it. Macaulay-a most characteristic product of his time-is farther away

from us than Edmund Burke or Adam

Smith.

If we try to find the common element in these illustrations I have cited, in order to construct for ourselves a picture of the feelings and habits of the time, the first thing we notice is a certain finality of statement and utterance. Lord Melbourne, a survival of an earlier period and the head of a ministry of which Macaulay was a brilliant member, once said with a sigh at the close of a cabinet meeting, "I only wish I were as sure of anything as young Tom Macaulay is of everything." I had in my hands a few months since a manuscript notebook of the first course of lectures on chemistry delivered by Professor Silliman at Yale College a century ago, after his return from a period of study with the great European masters. He said in substance: "Chemistry is to all intents and purposes a finished science. Whatever

may be done in the future, it is impossible that all ages to come, all put together, should ever make discoveries equal in number and importance to the things which have been found out in the last thirty or forty years." There is a similar utterance in Mill's Political Economy-all the more significant because Mill himself was one of the most modest of men in estimating his personal merits and achievements:

"Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete: the only difficulty to be overcome is that of so stating it as to solve by anticipation the chief perplexities which occur in applying it: and to do this, some minuteness of exposition, and considerable demands on the patience of the reader, are unavoidable."

This spirit of finality carried with it a

good deal of intolerance. It is doubtful whether there was as much real liberty of thought in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century as in the last half of the eighteenth. Physically, indeed, men were freer. There was less restriction of movement, less effort to circumscribe the emotions and dictate the actions of the people. But mentally, I suspect that men were less free-at any rate in the great centers of thought. It was harder rather than easier to do your thinking for yourself or to defy any of the manifold dictates of fashion. The eighteenth century had encouraged individuality of mind and of speech. It was fertile in novelties of every kind. The first half of the nineteenth century discouraged such individuality, whenever it seemed to threaten established social usages and conventions. The larger the man was, the more chance he had of achieving freedom in the eigh