Author: T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
Release Date: March 4, 2005 [EBook #15253]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of this project gutenberg
EBOOK advance of science ***
Produced by Digital & Multimedia Center, Michigan
State University Libraries, Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe,
and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
BY
T.H. Huxley, F.R.S.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1889
[Sidenote: Recent industrial progress]
The most obvious and the most distinctive features
of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty
years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production
by the application of machinery, the improvement of
old technical processes and the invention of new ones,
accompanied by an even more remarkable development
of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication.
By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities
and conveniences of existence, the general standard
of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence
and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles,
which time and space offer to mutual intercourse,
have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown
to former ages. The diminution or removal of
local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common
interests among the most widely separated peoples,
and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation
of the commonwealth against those of political or
social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence
on the present and future fortunes of mankind the
full significance of which may be divined, but cannot,
as yet, be estimated at its full value.
[Sidenote: caused by the increase of physical
science]
This revolution—for it is nothing less—in
the political and social aspects of modern civilisation
has been preceded, accompanied, and in great measure
caused, by a less obvious, but no less marvellous,
increase of natural knowledge, and especially of that
part of it which is known as Physical Science, in
consequence of the application of scientific method
to the investigation of the phenomena of the material
world. Not that the growth of physical science
is an exclusive prerogative of the Victorian age.
Its present strength and volume merely indicate the
highest level of a stream which took its rise, alongside
of the primal founts of Philosophy, Literature, and
Art, in ancient Greece; and, after being dammed up
for a thousand years, once more began to flow three
centuries ago.
