their affirmations are unanswerable. We are not even called upon to give an answer to the best of our belief; nor bound to admit a bold assertion because we do not know to the contrary. No one is justified in claiming our assent to the spontaneous generation of insects, because we cannot circumstantially explain how a mite or the egg of a mite has entered into a particular bottle. Let those who affirm the exception to the general law of nature, or those others who upon the affirmation accept the result, work out the experimental proof. It has been done in this case by Schulze[1], and is in the negative; but how few among the many who make or repeat the assertion, would have the requisite self-abnegation, the subjected judgment, the perseverance, and the precision, which has been displayed in that research!
When men, more or less marked by their advance, are led by circumstances to give an opinion adverse to any popular notion, or to the assertions of any sanguine inventor, nothing is more usual than the attempt to neutralize the force of such an opinion by reference to the mistakes which like educated men have made.; and their occasional misjudgments and erroneous conclusions are quoted, as if they were less competent than others to give an opinion, being even disabled from judging like matters to those which are included in their pursuits by the very exercise of their minds upon them. How frequently has the reported judgment of Davy, upon the impossibility of gas-lighting on a large scale, been quoted by speculators engaged in tempting moneyed men into companies, or in the pages of journals occupied with the popular fancies of the day; as if an argument were derivable from that in favour of some special object to be commended! Why should not men taught in the matter .of judgment far beyond their neighbours, be expected to err sometimes, since the very education in which they are advanced can only terminate with their lives? What is there about them, derived from this education, which sets up the shadow of a pretence to perfection? Such men cannot learn all things, and may often be ignorant. The very progress which science makes amongst them as a body is a continual correction of ignorance, i. e. of a state which is ignorance in relation to the future, though wisdom and knowledge in relation
- ↑ Müller's Physiology, or Poggendorff's Annalen, 1836, xxxix. p. 487.
