Scientific men and their duties : the president's address before the Philosophical Society of Washington, December 4, 1886 / by John S. Billings.

  • Billings, John S. (John Shaw), 1838-1913.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Scientific men and their duties : the president's address before the Philosophical Society of Washington, December 4, 1886 / by John S. Billings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    on the services one may have rendered, on cleverness, judgments strength, or official position, and to feel secure in these, is to court the fate of the clam. There are not very many men of science, and there are no satis- factory means of increasing the number; it is just as useless to ex- hort men to love science, or to sneer at them because they do not, as it is to advise them to be six feet three inches high or to condemn a man because his hair is not red. While the ideal man of science must have a clear, cold, keen intellect, as inevitable and as merciless in its conclusions as a logic engine, it would seem that, in the opinion of some, his greatness and superiority consists not so much in the amount of knowledge he possesses, or in what he does with it, as in the intensity and purity,of his desire for knowledge. This so-called thirst for knowledge must be closely analogous to an instinctive desire for exercise of an organ or faculty, such as that which leads a rat to gnaw, or a man of fine physique to delight in exercise. Such instincts should not be neglected. If the rat does not gnaw, his teeth Avill become inconvenient or injurious to himself, but it is not clear that he deserves any special eulogium merely because he gnaws. It will be observed that the definition of a scientific man or man of science, says nothing about his manners or morals. We may infer that a man devoted to science would have neither time nor inclination for dissipation or vice; that he would be virtuous either because of being passionless or because of his clear foresight of the consequences of yielding to temptation. My own experience, however, would indicate that either this inference is not correct or that some supposed scientific men have been wrongly classified as such. How far the possession of a scien- tific mind and of scientific knowledge compensates, or atones for, ill-breeding or immorality, for surliness, vanity, and petty jealousy, for neglect of wife or children, for uncleanliness, physical and mental, is a question which can only be answered in each individual case; but the mere fact that a man desires knowledge for its own sake appears to me to have little to do with such questions. I would prefer to know whether the man's knowledge and work is of any use to his fellow-men, whether he is the cause of some happiness in others which would not exist without him. And it, may be noted that while utility is of small account in the eyes of some eulogist,