Such were Faraday’s fondest dreams of what might be, and to many a philosopher they would have been sufficient basis for the writing of a great book. But Faraday’s imagination was within his full control; as he himself says, “Let the imagination go, guarding it by judgment and principle, and holding it in and directing it by experiment.” His dreams soon took a very practical form, and for many days he laboured with ceaseless energy, on the staircase of the Royal Institution, in the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, or at the top of the Shot Tower in Southwark, raising and lowering heavy weights, and combining electrical helices and wires in every conceivable way. His skill and long experience in experiment were severely taxed to eliminate the effects of the earth’s magnetism, and time after time he saved himself from accepting mistaken indications, which to another man might have seemed conclusive verifications of his theory. When all was done there remained absolutely no results. “The experiments,” he says, “were well made, but the results are negative;” and yet, he adds, “I cannot accept them as conclusive.” In this position the question remains to the present day; it may be that the effect was too slight to be detected, or it may be that the arrangements adopted were not suited to develop the particular relation which exists, just as Oersted could not detect electro-magnetism, so long as his wire was perpendicular to the plane of motion of his needle. But these are not matters which concern us further here. We have only to notice the profound conviction in the unity of natural laws, the active powers of inference and imagination, the unbounded licence of theorising, combined above all with the utmost diligence in experimental verification which this remarkable research exhibits.
Reservation of Judgment.
There is yet another characteristic needed in the philosophic mind; it is that of suspending judgment when the data are insufficient. Many people will express a confident opinion on almost any question which is put before them, but they thereby manifest not strength, but narrowness of mind. To see all sides of a complicated subject, and to weigh all the different facts and probabilities correctly, require no ordinary powers of comprehension. Hence it is most frequently the philosophic mind which is in doubt, and the ignorant mind which is ready with a positive decision. Faraday has himself said, in a very interesting lecture:10 “Occasionally and frequently the exercise of the judgment ought to end in absolute reservation. It may be very distasteful, and great fatigue, to suspend a conclusion; but as we are not infallible, so we ought to be cautious; we shall eventually find our advantage, for the man who rests in his position is not so far from right as he who, proceeding in a wrong direction, is ever increasing his distance.”
Arago presented a conspicuous example of this high quality of mind, as Faraday remarks; for when he made known his curious discovery of the relation of a magnetic needle to a revolving copper plate, a number of supposed men of science in different countries gave immediate and confident explanations of it, which were all wrong. But Arago, who had both discovered the phenomenon and personally investigated its conditions, declined to put forward publicly any theory at all.
At the same time we must not suppose that the truly philosophic mind can tolerate a state of doubt, while a chance of decision remains open. In science nothing like compromise is possible, and truth must be one. Hence, doubt is the confession of ignorance, and involves a painful feeling of incapacity. But doubt lies between error and truth, so that if we choose wrongly we are further away than ever from our goal.