decrees that certain people
shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain
hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy
their structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of pure
reasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory.
But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which
dictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world there
operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It has
sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than
in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to
German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had
written either in French or in English. This is due to a certain
encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German
industry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an
archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say,
on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who
has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to
end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but
writing down _all_ that is to be found out in all the authorities
bearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and,
taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tedious
for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed,
such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are
going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is the
element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to
science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have
added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often
lacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific
treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down
the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random,
and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing
German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and
Italian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if you
take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the
balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own,
and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and
especially