private lives. Thus far between fifty and sixty per cent. of women college graduates have at some time taught. In the country at large more than seventy per cent. of the teaching is done by women; in the North Atlantic portion over eighty per cent. Even in the secondary schools, public and private, more women than men are teaching, though in all other countries the advanced instruction of boys is exclusively in the hands of men. Never before has a nation intrusted all the school training of the vast majority of its future population, men as well as women, to women alone. Merely to meet successfully this tremendous venture nothing less than the vast extension which women's education has undergone in our time could suffice.

THE CENTURY'S GREAT MEN IN SCIENCE

How

By C. S. PEIRCE

OW shall we determine that men are great? Who, for instance, shall we say, are the great men of science? The men who have made the great and fruitful discoveries? Such discoveries in the nineteenth century have mostly been made independently by two or more persons. Darwin and Wallace simultaneously put forth the hypothesis of natural selection. Clausius, Rankine, and Sadi-Carnot, perhaps Kelvin, worked out the mechanical theory of heat. Krönig, Clausius, Joule, Herapath, Waterston, and Daniel Bernouilli independently suggested the kinetical theory of gases. I do not know how many minds besides Robert Mayer, Colding, Joule, and Helmholtz hit upon the doctrine of the conservation of energy. Faraday and Joseph Henry brought magnetoelectricity to light. The pack of writers who were on the warm scent of the periodic law of the chemical elements approached two hundred when the discovery itself, a most difficult inference, was partly achieved by Lothar Meyer, wholly by Mendeléef. When great discoveries were thus in the air, shall that brain necessarily be deemed great upon which they happened earliest to condense, or the man supereminent who, by the unmeaning rule of priority of publication, gets the credit in brief statements? No, this method of estimation, natural as it is to make success the standard of measure, will not do. Shall we, then, by a logical analysis draw up an abstract definition of greatness, and call those men great who con

form to it? If there were no dispute about the nature of greatness, this might probably prove the most convenient plan. It would be like a rule of grammar adduced to decide whether a phrase is good English or not. Nor would the circumstance that the definition could not be as explicit and determinate as a rule of grammar constitute a serious difficulty. Unfortunately, however, among the few writers who have seriously studied the question, the most extreme differences prevail as to the nature of great men. Some hold that they are fashioned of the most ordinary clay, and that only their rearing and environment, conjoined with fortunate opportunities, make them what they are. The heaviest weight, intellectually, among these writers maintains, on the other hand, that circumstances are as powerless to suppress the great man as they would be to subject a human being to a nation of dogs. But it was only the blundering Malvolio who got the notion that some are born great; the sentence of the astute Maria was: "Some are become great, some atcheeves greatnesse, and some have greatnesse thrust uppon em. Amid this difference of opinion, any definition of greatness would be like a disputed rule of grammar. Just as a rule of grammar does not render an expression bad English, but only generalises the fact that good writers do not use it, so, in order to establish a definition of greatness, it would be necessary to begin by ascertaining what men were, and what men were not, great; and, that having been done, the rule might as well have been dispensed with. My opinion will, I fear, be set down by some intellectual men as foolishness, though it has not been lightly formed, nor without long years of experimentation,—that the way to judge of whether a man was great or not is to put aside all analysis, to contemplate attentively his life and works, and then. to look into one's heart and estimate the impression one finds to have been made. This is the way in which one

would decide whether a mountain were sublime or not. The great man is the impressive personality; and the question whether he is great is a question of impression.

The subject admits of much interesting discussion, but the pertinent point here is to confess that the judgments herein expressed have been formed in this way; and if I make general remarks about the great men of the century, these are not deductions from any preconceived principles, but are simply inductions from such pure æsthetic estimations. Although I call them æsthetic, and, no doubt, the "subjective," or personal, factor in them is considerable (but it is, indeed, quite impossible to determine how far they are “objective," that is, representative of the ultimate judgment of posterity), yet I think I am warranted in saying that I have ascertained that a large majority of the educated Americans of the present day would, if thoroughly trained in the practice of this delicate method of pure æsthetic estimation, reach judgments about great men which, if based on the same information, would show a degree of concordance that would surprise most people not a little.

The glory of the nineteenth century has been its science; and its scientific great men are those whom I mean here to consider. Their distinctive characteristic throughout the century, and more and more so in each succeeding generation, has been devotion to the pursuit of truth for truth's sake. In this century we have not heard a Franklin asking, "What signifies a philosophy which does not apply itself to some use?"- -a remark that could be paralleled by utterances of Laplace, of Rumford, of Buffon, and of many another well-qualified spokesman of eighteenth-century science. It was in the early dawn of the nineteenth that Gauss (or was it Dirichlet?) gave as the reason of his passion for the Theory of Numbers that "it is a pure virgin that never has been, and never can be, prostituted to any practical application

whatsoever." It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm of the scientific generation of Darwin, most of the leaders of which at home I knew intimately, and some very well in almost every country of Europe. I particularise that generation without having any reason to suspect that that flame has since burned dimmer or less purely, but simply because if a word belonged to one's mother tongue, one may be supposed to know unerringly the meaning the teachers of one's boyhood attached to it.

The word science was one often in those men's mouths, and I am quite sure they did not mean by it" systematised knowledge," as former ages had defined it, nor anything set down in a book, but, on the contrary, a mode of life; not knowledge, but the devoted, well-considered life-pursuit of knowledge; devotion to Truth-not" devotion to truth as one sees it," for that is no devotion to truth at all, but only to party-no, far from that, devotion to the truth that the man is not yet able to see but is striving to obtain. The word was thus, from the etymological point of view, already a misnomer. And so it remains with the scientists of to-day. What they meant, and still mean, by "science" ought, etymologically, to be called philosophy. But during the nineteenth century it was only a metaphysical professor of a now obsolescent type, as I hope, who could sit in his academic chair, puffed up with his " systematised knowledge," no true philosopher, but a mere philodoxer. For a snapshot at the nineteenth-century man of science, one may take Sir Humphry Davy, willing, as early as 1818, seriously to investigate the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius; or John Tyndall, with scientific ingenuousness proposing that prayer-test to which no clerical Elijah has yet been found with the faith and good faith to respond; or William Crookes, devoting years of his magnificent powers to examining the supposed evidences of the direct