Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

His latter years were signalized by acts of unequivocal public service. He is designated by Lord Brougham, and no one can have a better right to be informed of the fact, as the real founder of the African Association. – His lordship also regards him as the real founder of the colony of Botany Bay. – He was the first to suggest the transfer of the tropical fruits to the West India islands. – British horticulture owed him great services. – And the British Museum, during forty-two years of his trusteeship, was the object of his peculiar care, and finally received the bequest of his excellent library and of all his collections.

His career, however, was now, by the course of nature, drawing to its close. Yet, he had lived seventy-eight years in this anxious and disappointing world, in opulence, in peace, and in public estimation. But his lot had been singularly fortunate. Few men are without their share of those troubles which characterize the general condition of human nature. Sir Joseph Banks had his trial, in physical suffering. In the first portion of his life he had been remarkable for robust health and activity; but, from about his fortieth year, he suffered severely from attacks of gout, which increased so much, that for his last fourteen years he was scarcely able to walk. His robust mind, however, enabled him to encounter his disease by increased and extreme temperance. He gave up all fermented liquors and animal food. He seems to have derived considerable benefit from D'Huisson's medicine. But his hour was come; and on the 19th of June 1820, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, he died – just one year after his honoured and royal friend, George III.

Thus passed through the world one of those men who are among the most useful in their generation. It would be idle to pronounce him a genius, a discoverer, or a profound philosopher. But he served an important purpose in society; he suggested philosophical enterprise, he protected the honourable ambition of men whose career, without that protection, might have closed in obscure suffering: he gave the philosophy and literature of his time a leader, and formed it into a substantial shape. In this spirit he employed his life; and he accomplished his purpose with the constancy and determination of a sagacious and systematic mind. He might not be a pillar of the philosophical temple of his country, nor its architrave; but he performed the office of the clamp – he bound together the materials of both pillar and architrave, and sustained the edifice alike in its stateliness and in its security.

Lord Brougham's biography of D'Alembert commences with a brief dissertation on the interest which the mind takes in the study of mathematics. This study he regards as superior in gratification to every other, from its independence of external circumstances. In all other studies, he observes truly, that a large portion of the researches must depend upon facts imperfectly ascertained from the reports of others, and upon knowledge impeded by the capricious chances of things; while in pure science, the principles, the premises, and the conclusions, are wholly within our own power.

In a passage exhibiting the affluence of the noble lord's language, he says, "The life of a geometrician may well be supposed an uninterrupted calm, and the gratification which is derived from its researches, is of a pure and also of a lively kind – whether he contemplates the truths discovered by others, with the demonstrative evidence on which they rest, or carries the science further, and himself adds to the number of the interesting truths before known. He may be often stopt in his researches by the difficulties that beset his path; he may be frustrated in his attempts to discover relations, depending on complicated data, which he cannot unravel or reconcile; but his study is wholly independent of accident, his reliance is on his own powers. Contestation and uncertainty he never can know; a stranger to all controversy, above all mystery, he possesses his mind in unruffled peace. Bound by no authority, regardless of all consequences as of all opposition, he is entire master of his conclusions as of his operations, and feels even perfect indifference to the acceptance or objection of his doctrines, because he confidently looks forward to their universal and immediate admission the moment they are comprehended."

All this is strikingly expressed, yet it is after all but a showy hypothesis. That pure mathematics have nothing to do with external existence, may be easily granted; but that mathematicians are exempt from controversy, is no more a matter of experience than that all mathematical assertions are self-evident. The history of science is a direct contradiction of this halcyon hypothesis. The bitterest controversies, and the most ridiculous too, have been raised on mathematical opinions. Universal experience tends strongly to the proof, that no exclusive exertion of the mind is more fatal to its general vigour, more apt to narrow its range of conception; more distinctly operative, by its very exclusiveness, and by its making minute truths the especial object of the mind, in rendering it incapable of those loftier and broader truths on which depend all the great concerns of society, all the efficient progress of civilisation, and all the nobler growth of human powers – than the mere study of mathematics. A spider drawing his web out of his own fibres, and constructing his little lines and circles in his dusty corner, is the fittest emblem of the mere mathematician. In this language, we acknowledge the use of the science; we protest only against its pretence of superiority. Every man's experience of college studies may supply him with examples; but we have room but for one, and that of a sufficiently high order.

When Napoleon assumed the French throne, in his ambition of being regarded as the universal patron of science he appointed the author of the Méchanique Céleste a member of his privy council. But La Place, then and since, the first scientific name of France, was found utterly inadequate to even the almost sinecure duties of his office. Napoleon soon found that he could make no use of him. He accordingly consulted him no longer. "I found his mind," said he, "like his book, full of infiniments petits ." Or if we look for further illustration among the French geometers – the only men among whom the trial can be made, from their opportunities of power in the Revolution – there was not one of them who exhibited any qualification for the higher duties of public life. Bailly, Condorcet, and their tribe, proved themselves utterly feeble, helpless, and trifling, where manliness, activity, and intelligence of mind were required. The Savans were swept away like a swarm of mice, or crushed like musquitoes, when they dared to buzz in the presence of the public. That they were first-rate mathematicians there can be no question; that they quarrelled about their mathematical theories with the bitterness, and not a little in the style of village gossips, is equally certain; and that, though the Encyclopedists had chiefly died off before the Revolution, their successors and imitators were extinguished by their preposterous combination of an avarice of power, and of an inadequacy to exertion, is a fact written unanswerably in the history of their trifling career, and of their early scaffolds. The ridiculous figure made in politics by the first astronomer of France, at this moment, only strengthens the conclusion.

The life of D'Alembert is, however, one of the happiest illustrations of the use to which science may be applied, in raising an obscure individual into public fame. Yet, it is not to be forgotten, that D'Alembert's European celebrity commenced only when he had laid aside the exclusive study of mathematics, and devoted himself to general literature, and, shaking off the dust of his closet, he became a man of the world.