How We Encourage Research

The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose
disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have
invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid
to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased
to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service done
in her honour: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of
flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even
lifelong maiming. Less than formerly; but so long as this sort of
truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand
nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule,
it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as
little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old time,
with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects.

One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman.

Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a conveyancer with a
practice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron's rod, seemed not
destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he
occupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a
multifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted
him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage of
not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingenious
arguments superannuated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition: he
put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contended
without unpleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the
personality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on the
origin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the right moment such
subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementary
substances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, or
even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the
outbreak of revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally
much helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system,

he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult
topics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the
same desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domestic
enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very
moderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious and
agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ventured to hope
for him, their chief regret on his account being that he did not
concentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at least
half-a-dozen of the subjects over which he scattered