Note 255 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 2)

Science, at its birth, is as much the child of imagination as curiosity; and, in rapture at the new instrument it has discovered, it impatiently magnifies its power. To the infant, all improvements are wonders; it chronicles even its dreams, and has often described what it never has seen, delightfully deceived; the cold insults of the cynics, the wits, the dull, and the idle, maliciously mortify the infant in its sports, till it returns to slow labour and patient observation. It is rather curious, however, that when science obtains a certain state of maturity, it is liable to be attacked by the same fits of the marvellous which affected its infancy;—and the following extract from one of the enthusiastic Virtuosi in the infancy of science, rivals the visions of “the perfectibility of man” of which we hear so much at this late period. Some, perhaps, may consider these strong tendencies of the imagination, breaking out at these different periods in the history of science, to indicate results, of which the mind feels a consciousness, which the philosopher should neither indulge nor check.

“Should these heroes go on (the Royal Society) as they have happily begun, they will fill the world with wonders; and posterity will find many things that are now but rumours, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence, a voyage to the southern unknown tracts, yea, possibly the Moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies, by sympathetic conveyances, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of grey hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length, be effected without a miracle; and the turning the now-comparative desert world into a paradise, may not improbably be expected from late agriculture.

“Those that judge by the narrowness of former principles and successes, will smile at these paradoxical expectations. But the great inventions of latter ages, which altered the face of all things, in their naked proposals and mere suppositions, were to former times as ridiculous. To have talked of a new earth to have been discovered, had been a romance to antiquity; and to sail without sight of stars or shores, by the guidance of a mineral, a story more absurd than the flight of Dædalus. That men should speak after their tongues were ashes, or communicate with each other in differing hemispheres, before the invention of letters, could not but have been thought a fiction. Antiquity would not have believed the almost incredible force of our cannons, and would as coldly have entertained the wonders of the telescope.”—Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, p. 133.