A passage from the Inaugural Lecture given by James Clerk Maxwell as Professor of Experimental Physics in the University of Cambridge, in October 1871, by way of

FOREWORD

“WE ARE NOT HERE TO DEFEND LITERARY AND HISTORICAL STUDIES. We admit that the proper study of mankind is man. But is the student of science to be withdrawn from the study of man, or cut off from every noble feeling, so long as he lives in intellectual fellowship with men who have devoted their lives to the discovery of truth, and the results of whose enquiries have impressed themselves on the ordinary speech and way of thinking of men who never heard their names? Or is the student of history and of man to omit from his consideration the history of the origin and diffusion of those ideas which have produced so great a difference between one age of the world and another?

It is true that the history of science is very different from the science of history. We are not studying or attempting to study the working of those blind forces which, we are told, are operating on crowds of obscure people, shaking principalities and powers, and compelling reasonable men to bring events to pass in an order laid down by philosophers.

The men whose names are found in the history of science are not mere hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in masses. We recognize them as men like ourselves, and their actions and thoughts, being more free from the influence of passion, and recorded more accurately than those of other men, are all the better materials for the study of the calmer parts of human nature.

But the history of science is not restricted to the enumeration of successful investigations. It has to tell of unsuccessful enquiries, and to explain why some of the ablest men have failed to find the key of knowledge, and how the reputation of others has only given a firmer footing to the errors into which they fell.

The history of the development, whether normal or abnormal, of ideas is of all subjects that in which we, as thinking men, take the deepest interest. But when the action of the mind passes out of the intellectual stage, in which truth and error are the alternatives, into the more violently emotional states of anger and passion, malice and envy, fury and madness; the student of science, though he is obliged to recognise the powerful influence which these wild forces have exercised on mankind, is perhaps in some measure disqualified from pursuing the study of this part of human nature.

But then how few of us are capable of deriving profit from such studies. We cannot enter into full sympathy with these lower phases of our nature without losing some of that antipathy to them which is our surest safeguard against a reversion to a meaner type, and we gladly return to the company of those illustrious men who by aspiring to noble ends, whether intellectual or practical, have risen above the region of storms into a clearer atmosphere, where there is no misrepresentation of opinion, nor ambiguity of expression, but where one mind comes into closest contact with another at the point where both approach nearest to the truth.”