Restless and erratic, Davy hurried across Europe in search of scientific truth. All was fish that came to his net. At Genoa he made electric experiments on the torpedo fish. At Florence he borrowed the great burning-glass of the Grand Dukes and, with its aid, set a diamond on fire. At Rome he analysed the pigments employed by the artists of antiquity. At Naples he made experiments on iodine and excursions up Vesuvius. With him went Michael Faraday as ‘assistant in experiments and writing.’ Lady Davy, however, tried to use him as courier and confidential servant as well. Young Faraday found the position a little trying.
It was only the consciousness that he was being given an unrivalled opportunity to educate himself that decided him to keep his post. Sir Humphry’s character might not be entirely estimable (indeed, Faraday was known to remark in later years that ‘the greatest of all his great advantages was that he had had, in Davy, a model to teach him what he should avoid’); but he was, undoubtedly, a mine of scientific learning. To be with him constantly, as Faraday was, during those eighteen months of travel, was a liberal education. Young Faraday knew it and put up with Lady D.
At Pietramala, then, they stopped in the pouring rain—and doubtless in the howling wind as well—to look at the natural fireworks. Specimens of the gas were bottled and taken down to Florence for analysis. Sir Humphry concluded, correctly, that it was a light hydrocarburet, pure.
To this desolate little village on the crest of the Apennines Faraday devotes a couple of pages in his journal. To Florence, except in so far as it was a town where there were facilities for making experiments, he gives no space at all. Faraday paid little attention to the works of man, however beautiful. It was the works of God that interested him. There is a magnificent consistency about him. All that he writes in his journal or letters is perfectly in character. He is always the natural philosopher. To discover truth is his sole aim and interest. His purpose is unalterably fixed.
He never allows himself to be distracted—not by art, which he almost completely ignores; not by politics, which in the tremendous closing scenes of the Napoleonic drama he mentions casually once or twice, not at all by the delights of casual social intercourse, though he always found time for friendship—but pursues his course steadily, perseverantly, modestly, disinterestedly, and withal triumphantly as a conquering man of genius.
Outside science his great interest was religion. The battle between science and dogmatic theology, which was waged during the latter half of the nineteenth century, created an impression, which still survives, that there is a certain radical incompatibility between science and religion. History shows that, as a matter of fact, no such incompatibility exists. If we read the biographies of the three most genial (in the French sense) men of science that England has produced—Sir Isaac Newton, Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell—we shall find that all three were profoundly religious. Sir Isaac devoted the greater part of a long life to the interpretation of Biblical prophecy.
Faraday was an earnest and ardent Christian of the Sandemanian sect. Clerk Maxwell was a great mystic as well as a great man of science; there are letters of his which show him to have been of the company of Boehme and Swedenborg (himself, by the way, a scientific man of great distinction). There is nothing in all this that should surprise us. ‘An infidel astronomer is mad’; tempered, this piece of rhetoric is something like a truth. For it is certainly impossible to study nature at all closely without becoming convinced of the extraordinary strangeness and mysteriousness of the familiar world in which the mass of human beings unquestioningly pass their lives. The further our knowledge extends and the more completely we realize its implications, the more mysterious this universe is seen to be.
A man must be crass and unimaginative indeed if he can study the intricacies of life, the movements of the stars, the intimate constitution of matter without feeling from time to time a sense of awe and amazement. In the ranks of the professional scientists such men undoubtedly find their place; there are unimaginative men in all professions, from that of the jockey to that of the bishop. But they are not, in general, the best at their jobs. Without imagination, without sensitiveness it is impossible to be a successful man of science. It would be difficult to find any great scientific man who had not been touched by this sense of wonder at the strangeness of things. It betrays itself in different ways according to the upbringing and temperament of those who feel it.
In some, as quiet and orthodox religion; in others, unwilling to commit themselves definitely about the nature of the mystery which surrounds them, as agnosticism; in others again (Clerk Maxwell and Swedenborg are examples) the man of science is endowed with the peculiar mental qualities of the mystic; in yet other cases we find men possessing these same mystical qualities, but unrefined and somehow coarse (for there are good mystics and poor mystics just as there are good and poor artists), and then we have, not Clerk Maxwell with his delicate and beautiful mysticism, but Newton the interpreter of the prophetic books. For Faraday the corollary and complement of science was protestant Christianity. His sense of wonder, his awe in face of the beautiful mystery of the world, expressed itself in the terms of Sandemanian meetings and Bible reading. He stands in the scale of mystics somewhere about half-way between Maxwell and Newton, not very highly gifted but at the same time not vulgarly gifted, a sort of Andrea del Sarto between Giotto on the one hand and Caravaggio on the other. A Cherubini between Mozart and Strauss.
That king who, in Anatole France’s fable, was only to be cured of his melancholy by putting on the shirt of a happy man, would have been well advised to apply to Faraday. A shirt of his would have been specific against the king’s malady. For if any man was happy it was surely he. All his life long he did, professionally, the things he desired to do. To know, to discover the truth—that was his desire. And it is a desire whose fulfilment does not lead to disappointment and boredom, as does the fulfilment of almost every other human longing. For there is no end to truth; each part of it reveals, when found, yet other parts to be discovered.
The man who desires knowledge knows no satiety, for the knowable is perpetually new. He might live innumerable lives and never grow weary. True, the knowable world is not everything. There is also the world of feelings; there is also that which is humanly unknowable. In our relation to these two worlds there is plenty of scope for unhappiness. But Faraday was also emotionally happy. His marriage was an unqualified success; he had good friends; the tenour of his life was even and he did not desire more than what he possessed. He was equally fortunate in his relation to the unknowable.
The problems of life, as they are called, never troubled him. The religion in which he was brought up offered a solution of them in advance; he passed through no crisis such as that which drove Tolstoy almost to suicide. It is interesting to note that he separated the domain of science sharply from that of religion, the knowable from the unknowable. ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,’ says Wittgenstein. And again: ‘For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.’ ‘The riddle does not exist. . . . The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)’ Faraday was happy in that he never doubted, never tried to put an inexpressible question for which there it no possible answer.
How the world is, he set himself to discover, with more success than attends most investigators. He did not torture his intellect with the question why or what it is. His religion offered him the explanation why; or to be more exact (for there is no explanation) it helped him to ‘contemplate the world sub specie aeterni, as a limited whole.’ ‘The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.’ Faraday had that feeling; not perhaps in its most exquisite form, but had it genuinely. His relations with the unknowable therefore were as satisfactory as his relations with what can be known.
Among the natural philosophers Faraday is by no means unique in his happiness. Indeed, as a class, I should say that men of science were happier than other men. A priori, and almost by definition, they ought to be. And when one reads their lives one
