necessarily a misanthrope, who must have abandoned all human
interests, and betaken himself to abstractions so far removed from the
world of life and action that he has become insensible alike to the
attractions of pleasure and to the claims of duty.

In the present day, men of science are not looked upon with the same
awe or with the same suspicion. They are supposed to be in league
with the material spirit of the age, and to form a kind of advanced
Radical party among men of learning.

We are not here to defend literary and historical studies. We admit
that the proper study of mankind is man. But is the student of
science to be withdrawn from the study of man, or cut off from every
noble feeling, so long as he lives in intellectual fellowship with men
who have devoted their lives to the discovery of truth, and the
results of whose enquiries have impressed themselves on the ordinary
speech and way of thinking of men who never heard their names? Or is
the student of history and of man to omit from his consideration the
history of the origin and diffusion of those ideas which have produced
so great a difference between one age of the world and another?

It is true that the history of science is very different from the
science of history. We are not studying or attempting to study the
working of those blind forces which, we are told, are operating on
crowds of obscure people, shaking principalities and powers, and
compelling reasonable men to bring events to pass in an order laid
down by philosophers.

The men whose names are found in the history of science are not mere
hypothetical constituents of a crowd, to be reasoned upon only in