The Will to Doubt Part 3

Limitations or opportunities? Error or truth? In the familiar ill.u.s.tration the tracks which limit the locomotive to a certain course are essential to its successful movement, and something of the same kind may be true of science. A man's vices and virtues are never really far apart, and, again, the same may be true of science. But for the moment we are to approach science from the standpoint of its limitations; we are to see how its own natural ideals, as suggested by our characterization of the scientific view, are evidence of its inadequacy.

So doing we shall take a most important step towards a thorough-going confession of doubt.

Among scientific men it is a commonplace that for accuracy and genuineness or purity, that is to say for complete abstraction, science must be (1) independent of "life," all the subjective interests, whether personal or social, the interests of politics, industry, morality, or religion, being science's most unsettling influences; (2) specialistic, the "Jack of all trades" in science being anything but _persona grata_ among scientific men; and (3) agnostic or "positivistic," all conceits [p.075] about what is beyond positive experience, and even all dogma about what seems really present to experience, being most arrant heresy; and every one of these ideals, besides being derived from the habits or instincts, commonly unrecognized and unappreciated, of the ordinary consciousness, is wholly in accord with the conclusions of the preceding chapter. The att.i.tude of science, as there disclosed, involved a looking to an external world--the objectivism; a division of the field--the specialism; and an experimental, adventurous mind--the agnosticism or positivism. It involved other things, too, but these three are now selected, so to speak, as three determining points of science's circ.u.mference. Consideration of them, to whatever results it may lead, should meet all the demands of the present task. As for the results, these will show fundamental difficulties, very like to those of ordinary experience, to lurk in each one of the three ideals. The scientific consciousness is abstract and just for being in consequence objectivistic, specialistic, and agnostic it is artificial and unreal, though perhaps only relatively or not unmixedly unreal, and especially it is honeycombed with paradoxes and contradictions, with the translated but not transcended contradictions of ordinary life.

To the examination, therefore, of these difficulties, or limitations, we must now turn, taking the three ideals in order.

I. SCIENCE WOULD BE OBJECTIVE.

The ideal of a purely objective science is in many ways a great delusion, for it may effectually blind [p.076] science to its necessary subjectivism, so far as it gets any substance or content, and to its necessary formalism, so far as it acts upon a merely external world.

With regard, for example, to the last point, just so far as the ideal of objectivism is realized, science becomes merely so much technique. By technique here is meant everything that makes scientific work purely mechanical. A purely mechanical procedure is the inevitable, the natural and necessary method of a pure objectivism. Scientists have their formal etiquette about pre-empted problems or fields of research, their notions about originality as dependent merely on working a new field--hence the pre-emption to prevent transgression or theft of originality, their conceits about bibliographical information, linguistic proficiency and technical phraseology, their satisfaction over "publication,"

"contribution," "production," and "research," and an almost Gaston-Alphonse deference of each to each among the different branches of scientific inquiry; and under technique all these things, as well as the more familiar matters of method and apparatus and material, are here included. Physicians, we are told, and not infrequently also their patients, suffer from a professional ritual and etiquette, but they are far from being alone in their misery. Scientists, would-be objective scientists, and all who appeal to them, are a close second. Technique must have its real uses, but plainly it has its limitations. It is one of the enabling conditions, a _sine qua non_ of science, if science is to be objective, but it takes the life out of science. A science that gets no further, that is only "objective," that is, "pure" and "inductive" [p.077] is wholly vain, being like a domestic animal which is only a pet, or rather like a vigorous plant that runs luxuriously to leaves, never bearing either flowers or fruit. Its much vaunted observation and experiment may fill a good many pages and a good many volumes, but material, even material in books, and experiments, even carefully, minutely reported experiments, are neither roses nor apples.

A fruitful science relates itself to something more than a mere independent object. A fruitful science involves synthesis, not formal, but real synthesis, as well as a.n.a.lysis, its decomposed object being also only the separated details of some organizing activity. Indeed, however unconsciously, or even however against its own avowed interest and desire, science has that organizing activity in the real life. The "real life" has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part of this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a distinct cla.s.s and the a.s.sumption of a professional garb, is witness to this relations.h.i.+p. Again, fruitful science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in general the instrument of adaptation to environment, this sometimes takes visible, wholly material form; sometimes it appears as a method in the practical arts or in the fine arts or in education or government; sometimes it is only an [p.078] atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but whatever it is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its invention as something that is widely distinguished from mere receptive observation, if this be even possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's primary justification.

But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and sentiment of the sort that quite destroys science, making real science, serious and accurate science, quite impossible. Well, it does of course dispense with a purely objective science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the uncomfortable idea, that, as in some other departments in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the a.s.sertion be not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is not hopelessly unscientific. Is a man less interested in having a proper edge on his razor because eventually he must use it on himself? Nothing but a keen edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but the truth, the more accurate it be the better, can ever set anybody free.

Still, all questions of sentiment or of sharp razors or of the accuracy that liberates aside, we can get support for our scepticism about a science that, if purely objective, must be also empty and mechanical from science itself. The consistent evolutionist is obliged to deny pure objectivity to any scientific knowledge, just as in general he is obliged to think of all consciousness as never something by itself, but one of the positive conditions of organic development. To [p.079] be an evolutionist, and at the same time to think of consciousness as only an external ornament of life, or in its higher development as the exclusive privilege of a distinct cla.s.s, to think of it as an aside in life, perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also a condition of development, to suppose science to be solely objective and for its own sake, is nothing more or less than simply to stultify oneself completely. Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or not, whose great business is to remind us that what is here or what is now is not all, the devotion to science for its own sake, which also in other times has possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can be at best only a local and a pa.s.sing phenomenon. Finally, apart from the standpoint of evolution or history, it is to be said that human society at large is sure to resent what may be styled the aristocratic temper which pure, objective science is all too likely to acquire from the exclusiveness of its ritual or technique, or say from its abstract and academic dress, and the resentment of society is important evidence always. Aristocratic temper, whatever its direction, is certainly as desirable in social life as it is necessary; it is incident to the development of all inst.i.tutions--political, ecclesiastical, industrial, ceremonial, educational, and, to add to the familiar list, epistemological; but the resentment which it is sure to awaken is not one whit less serviceable to society, ensuring as it does, among other things, the extension of science, the translation of science into life.

So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties [p.080] have now appeared as affecting the objectivism of science. The first, that of burial in technique, gave us our starting-point, and the second has come to light with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a would-be objective science, through its bondage to technique, made formal and empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a would-be objective science materially--that is, for its scientific doctrines--and formally--that is, for its motives and methods--is always in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and so not purely, or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be empty, a matter merely of dead rites and dry symbols and irrelevant ideas, or it must be pertinent and practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence is gone. A purely objective science seems to get only subjectivity for its pains.

Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is far from denying any meaning to such words as object or objectivity. The object is denied only as an external independent existence. The object still remains to experience as possibly of mediative value to its beholders, mediating between the actual in their life and the possible, between the partial life and the whole life, the old and the new, the social, which is always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or, conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is an independent, wholly external world, but [p.081] that there is a whole or a possible or a personal. "Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona Macleod. "It is a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its own whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of man its word, and the heart of woman its silence." We are all one. Man and nature, which man beholds, or the subject and the object, of which the subject is conscious, are one; but an objective science would hide this from us, not tell it to us.

But besides burying science in technique, and besides involving it in an only disguised, albeit a socially significant subjectivity, the ideal of wholly objective knowledge has also made science conservative in a way that must have peculiar interest here. Reference is not now made to the double truth or the double life which an objective science sanctions so cordially that men can hold so-called advanced scientific ideas without feeling them in any serious conflict with the traditional teachings of religion and morality, but to something else perhaps not wholly unrelated to this, and certainly not less suggestive of contradiction.

While science is commonly supposed to be advanced and radical and up to date, if anything is, it is so only in a way which calls for a very important qualification, for it manages to perpetuate, not indeed the letter, but the spirit of old views. At its best a purely objective science can give only a new material content, or a new arrangement perhaps of an old content, to existing and time-worn forms of thought; it cannot possibly do that in which real progress must always consist, namely, develop, recognize, and adopt new forms of thought, new categories; [p.082] it cannot do that without betraying its own ideal of mere objectivism. Objective science--to give a commonplace example--has said relatively to a certain doctrine of creation that spirit did not precede matter, but instead matter preceded spirit, and--except for the excitement of the drawn battle which such a startling declaration has precipitated--this can hardly be said to have involved any great advance. Cause and effect have indeed been made to change places by the new deal, and perhaps in common fairness it was high time that a change be made, but no new conception of causation itself has been recognized.

The new creationalism, the materialistic, has no essential advantage over the old. Again, while deposing the First Cause, an objective science has made all things causes after the same plan--individual, arbitrary, antecedent causes; and this is only to multiply indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, the offensive creationalism. "Not so," says some one; "there is a splendid democracy in it, and it implies a great deal more than mere multiplication. Indefiniteness, or at least infinity, transforms anything or everything to which it is applied. By making all things causes one forces into science the important principle of the equation of action and reaction, everything being seen as acted upon as well as acting, and this principle, as if by turning creationalism fatally against itself, yields a new standpoint, that of mechanicalism."

Granted, and granted cordially, but has a purely objective science any right to change its standpoint?

Possibly this does not mean very much. Then approach the matter from another side, risking a [p.083] reference to one of science's pet conceits, the "question of fact." It has been for science a question of fact, of mere objective fact, whether matter made mind or mind made matter; whether this or that thing is or is not a cause of some other thing; whether certain very low, perhaps unicellular organisms show purpose in their activities or do not, are gifted with a natural tendency to social life, a real interest in their kind, or are not so gifted; or--to take just one more case--whether the changes in the brain that precede bodily movement are or are not directed by consciousness, consciousness being in one case in causal relation with the brain, and in the other only an idle, external accompaniment, an "epi-phenomenon"; but in each of these questions of objective fact we see the scientist only standing in his own light, obscuring the view of what above all else it is important to see. Are mind and matter, cause and effect, purpose, society, brain-processes and consciousness such well-established conceptions, are they such independent constants in the scientist's formulae, that wholly uncritical questions of fact are all that one needs to ask about them? Why, when one really thinks about it, to a.s.sume, as the questions of fact of an objective science are made to a.s.sume, that anything either is or is not something else, is about as blinding and ill-advised as could well be. It has the pleasing form of open-mindedness, but only the form. It is very much as if some earnest, yearning truth-seeker should exclaim: "I would see clearly; therefore I will not open my eyes." No doubt it keeps the scientist busy, eternally busy, dealing and redealing his facts or data, as busy indeed as the playful [p.084] cat that so hotly pursues her own tail, but it does not contribute much that is positive and progressive. The very best that one can say for it is that it turns the kaleidoscope of human experience, leading as it usually does to a new arrangement of hard, unchanging things. To the question, for example, about lower organisms showing purpose or social feeling in their activity, the scientist, after most careful experiments, may answer in the negative, and be quite emphatic in his answer too; but almost at once he--or some one for him--will appreciate that mankind, when scrutinized and experimented upon in the same way, under the same instruments and through the same laboratory methods, is similarly deficient; and then, somehow, the wind is taken out of his sails, since social feeling and purpose refuse to be so easily disposed of. In this case, as in all cases, the question of mere objective fact simply returns, as importunate as ever, for another reckoning, with Sh.e.l.ley's cloud silently laughing at its own cenotaph.

And what is the difficulty? Once more the difficulty is in the a.s.sumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions.

Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions of meaning. Thus, not: Are low organisms, or any organisms, social or purposive? but: What, if anything, do the processes of their [p.085]

lives testify as to the real nature of society or purpose?

The conservative character of objective science, or the view-point in its question of fact which the conservatism determines, is the chief source of the negative att.i.tude of science so familiar to all and so often an object of complaint. To take, perhaps, the most widely interesting case, for science to suppose that G.o.d either is or is not--because he must either be or not be the particular thing men have thought him--is to beg the theological question altogether. Indeed, for this question of G.o.d's existence and for any other question of objective fact a negative answer is almost, if not quite, a foregone conclusion, since the very putting of the question is, _ipso facto_, evidence that a new idea of the thing inquired about--of G.o.d, perhaps, or purpose or society--is at least just below the horizon of man's consciousness, and so that the old idea has already lost its validity. Nothing ever is where you seek it, or what you seek in it, for the simple reason that your conscious seeking has changed it. Why, then, look--perhaps with a telescope after a G.o.d in the skies--for what you should know you cannot find? Why despair when a question meets a "no" of its own dictation? The real questioner lives in a living world, in which all things change and die, yet only for rebirth, while the "objective" questioner simply cannot see that the negative of his answer can be only relative to what is already pa.s.sing.

In so many ways, then, a would-be objective science is open to criticism, and affords in consequence a cause for doubt. Only subjectivity can make it fruitfully [p.086] and worthily scientific.

Only a change in the form of its question can make it substantially as well as formally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative answers to a merely relative meaning can make it honest. It is looking at what is not, and in a way which is artificial, and it sees everything only in the clear light of its own shadow. Surely to be scientific is human; to be objective is to rival the lover's unselfishness.

II. SCIENCE WOULD BE SPECIALISTIC.

But, secondly, there is the scientist's ideal of specialism, which is at once not less earnestly cherished and not less strikingly at constant war with itself. What specialism for science means is known at least in a general way to everybody, and that an objective science must be made up of numberless independent inquiries needs only mention, since the objective world, if really innocent of all personal or subjective relations, is necessarily manifold and discrete, being made up of a number of wholly separate details, and being approachable in every one of its parts from a number of wholly separate standpoints. The objective world apart from a subject is like a workshop without a workman--a collection of unused and so unconnected tools and materials each one of which may have an infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage--may I be forgiven that mark--might view the lifeless shop, seeing now this thing, now that, but never the living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as soon as the self or subject is removed and the world is turned objective, all things and all views of things must fall [p.087] apart, and science as the observation of such a world can be only "special."

Not so clear, however, or at least not so commonly appreciated, is the peculiar fallacy and contradiction of specialism to which attention is asked here. Once more is science to be seen as in a sense standing in its own light, since it cannot be at once special and directly and literally true and adequate.

To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's vision as well as the sensuous vision, dim or distorted. It may even be said to induce a species of blindness or, as virtually the same thing, to create in consciousness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, seen not with the natural eye at all, but with the imagination, always so ingenious and so original, and one might almost add so hypnotic, in its power of suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons neither unknown nor unappreciated by most men, specialism even closes one's eyes and makes one dream. It makes the specialist among physicians see his special ailment in every disorder, and every disorder in his special ailment, and this so truly that merely to consult him may be to fall his victim. True, he may never be, perhaps can never be, wholly wrong, and his transgressions, conscious or unconscious, have often helped discovery, but nevertheless his situation, not to say that of his patient, is full of humour, and always among other troubles he is under the error of partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally the specialist always does and always must dream. His dreams may be waking dreams, but he is always transgressing his own proper bounds without ever [p.088] clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, be it admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a wholly unmixed evil to science. However unfavourably it may reflect on the final, literal validity of any special science, it only shows nature, or reality, preserving her unity against the attempted violence of specialism. It shows that in spite of the specialist being all eyes for his own peculiar object, the mind that is within him and that is above all else--such, apparently, is the nature of mind--responsible not exclusively to the special and sensuous, but to the all-inclusive and essential, and is therefore bound to conserve for experience the interests of an indivisible universe in every particular thing, leads him, devotee that he is, patiently repeating his sacred syllable, into most wonderful visions. For the sake of inclusiveness and reality his mind projects his would-be special consciousness into regions of strange subtlety and marvellous logical construction; as Oriental priest or Occidental scientist he is a specialist, yet not without a mind, or a real, ever-present world, which refuses to be special, and as he dreams he comes to see, yet knows not that he sees, the whole universe. A seeing blindness, then, is this specialism; a monomania too, but, of course, conventional and respectable.

Mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology and psychology, not to say also the social sciences, all depend upon the far-seeing mystical visions of the mind, if not of the eye, upon the subtle, logical constructions which their would-be scientific specialism, their desire to know all things narrowly, forces upon them. Each one may be special, but each as it [p.089] gains precision and as it becomes truly an account of the facts, under the guidance of an exacting mind that at any cost must present the whole to consciousness, conserves within itself the common universe of them all by developing under what is called the "scientific imagination" all sorts of indirections, disguises, abstractions, logical constructions for the things and view-points of the others. Each to be veracious has no choice but to be also voracious, and when, for example, a physical scientist insists on seeing his world only physically, while in reality it is of course, to say no more, a world of chemical process also, and even of vital and mental character, he is sooner or later constrained to admit to his thinking what above were called abstractions or logical constructions, but what also pa.s.s under the name of "working hypotheses." These are formally true to his physical standpoint, but any outsider in order to explain why they are hypotheses that _work_ must call them compensating or conserving conceptions--in short, logical constructions that are, or that in part involve, subst.i.tutes for the neglected points of view, being, as it were, the secret agents of a universe refusing to be divided. To characterize them in just one more way, a science's working hypotheses, results as they are of science's blind but brilliant dreaming, many or all of them, are doors in the panelling by which the other sciences are quietly admitted to a room seemingly tightly closed to all comers. Every science, and this the more as it becomes scientific, must entertain all the others, however unwittingly. Tennyson's "flower in the crannied wall," so often plucked, is nothing in [p.090] all-inclusiveness when compared with a well-developed special science. No science, physical or psychical, biological or social, ever does or ever can live to itself alone. It may will to, but it does not and it cannot. All the others live with it and for it--nay, they all live in it.

Yet in actual practice, what are these working hypotheses that work because they are compensating conceptions or doors in the panelling? No veracity without unrestrained voracity is interesting as a formula, but how verify it? Verification, or ill.u.s.tration, is now imperative.

Ill.u.s.tration, however, is very difficult for a reason which the scientists now on trial must allow me to mention. The scientists know too much about the sciences, or at least of them, while I know too little. Still, as too much knowledge is often the source of obscurity, and so only a form of ignorance, my situation is not altogether hopeless. Thus, while it is true that the scientists are likely to insist, even in the face of a mind bound to preserve the unity of an indivisible universe in all the varied studies and conclusions of science, that physics is only physics and chemistry only chemistry and biology only biology and psychology only psychology, and while also all ill.u.s.trations must come from the field of their special studies, and may therefore only set them more firmly in the wilful blindness of their specialism, still the principle of a conserving mind, or an eternally conserved truth or an indivisible reality, is a disturbing influence which they cannot evade. Then, too, I am forgetting and allowing them to forget a very important fact in scientific work to-day. In these [p.091]

times the running together or merging of different sciences, as if through something of the nature of a chemical reaction, is a very familiar phenomenon. It is as familiar, although not so loudly heralded, as that of the railroads and industrial companies; and it has been taking place with such persistence and confidence as actually to suggest a natural affinity, each of the sciences involved having the rich experience of discovering itself already in the others. This fact, then, must make ill.u.s.tration less difficult, since, in a way that must appeal to the scientist as no merely theoretical considerations can, it proves or goes very far toward proving what is to be ill.u.s.trated. Moreover, specific ill.u.s.tration is hardly necessary in the sphere of the different physical sciences, or again, in that of the social or the psychological sciences, for within each one of these groups the affinity but just now referred to has been very clearly exemplified, as in the interesting case of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, which nowadays are one science, not three, and which can be held apart only on methodological grounds, not metaphysically. Ill.u.s.tration, accordingly, appears, after all, to be needed only for the specialism that separates the physical and the psychical sciences.

Physiological psychology and physically experimental psychology, both of them suggestive of nothing less incongruous than seething ice, are sure to come to mind at once; but also there is a mathematical psychology, comparable with a developmental mechanics and biometrics in biology, and hardly a single field of science, however apparently distant and alien in nature and interest, has not contributed something [p.092] to psychology or to epistemology, the general science of knowledge. But now it is likely to be objected by some one that just because sciences, whether in clearly related or in widely separated fields, are useful to each other, just because they can serve, as they do, in the role of methods of each other, they are not necessarily in any real and natural affinity. May not their a.s.sociation be purely one of utility, involving no surrender of special individuality and requiring in any case only temporary relations.h.i.+p? The question is absurd. Any means that really serves an end must have something in common with the end it serves; and, again, an end that really sanctions a means, whatever the means be, must itself be, at least potentially, which is after all to say essentially, in and of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even physics and psychology, or natural science and theology, cannot be even temporarily methods of each other without partaking in some way, under some disguise or other, through some peculiarity in their conceptions or in the relations of their conceptions, of each other's subject-matter.

In view of this fact of mutual partic.i.p.ation of nature and idea among the sciences that use each other, I have myself conceived, and in another place have given expression to, what appropriately may be called a physical psychology or epistemology.'[1] This new hybrid science is especially concerned with nothing more nor less than those subst.i.tutes, disguises, or [p.093] indirections, really present in all the physical sciences, for the peculiar nature, for the peculiar sort of unity, intensive instead of extensive or qualitative instead of quant.i.tative, or say also even vital and spiritual instead of physical, which is always a.s.sociated with mind. In conservation of matter, energy, what you will, in plenitude, in motion as only relative and so as always under a principle of uniformity and constancy or even immobility, in motion too as inclining to vibration, which suggests poise or tension, or to rotation, in which we see rest as well as motion, and finally, not to extend what might be a long list, in the infinity of s.p.a.ce and time or of quant.i.ty, the physical sciences have hidden entrances for the silent, usually unnoticed admission of what is psychical. But I may seem to be jumping too far, to be presuming too much. Then put the case in this way--not quite so direct, but to the same goal. All of these conceptions, so necessary to a "working" physical science, need very little examination to be seen to be treacherous to the physical standpoint and its peculiar categories. One might as well try to make water unsupported a.s.sume definiteness of form as to conceive the conservation of energy or plenitude or the relativity of motion in the character of what is physical, or at least of what is properly and conventionally physical. Being treacherous, then, to the physical science that has conceived them, they are, as was said, doors for what is not physical; hidden doors, perhaps, but certainly doors to be opened at will; and by them mind is bound to enter the physical world and its sciences. To those familiar with the history of philosophy, the speculation [p.094] of the early Greek thinkers, notably Anaximander, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras, will afford ill.u.s.tration of the physical view running, in spite of itself, into treacherous conceptions, and eventually reaching the discovery of their treachery and with it the idea of mind or _Nous_.[2]

So for science is the material world, what properly it is often said to be, a sort of dark mirror of man's inner life, of his psychical nature.

Physical science as consciousness of the outer material world is not, and has itself shown that it cannot be, merely and exclusively physical.

By virtue of its working hypotheses, which are as secret doorways, it is psychical also. Though darkly and indirectly it is our human self-consciousness. Perhaps it is our self-consciousness rendered impersonal or the self seen through the mirror of not-self or through the disguise of what a photographer would call a "negative"; and, if it may be so described, we are reminded of Burns:--

O wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion.

Only the bonnie Robert himself was too much of a specialist in poetry to see that natural science was the very thing he prayed for.

And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so [p.095] in like manner there is a psychological or epistemological physics, which in its turn is concerned with the indirections, or doors in the panelling, present in all the psychical sciences, for those very physical things quant.i.ty and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, of the physical on the plane of the psychical. Sensationalism, too, as a psychological theory in the history of thought has always been a.s.sociated with materialism.

With regard, then, to the separation even of the psychical and the physical sciences, which obviously has at its base the distinction between mind and matter, we observe that our principle of affinity and mutual partic.i.p.ation still holds. By a sort of projection or reproduction mind and matter both appear, the one openly, the other in disguise, in each kind of science. However unawares, the physical entertains mind; the psychical matter; and specialism, so far as standing for anything more than scientific method, has to withdraw from its last stronghold. The very dreaming of the scientific imagination is its undoing.

For other evidence against the integrity and adequacy of specialism, showing how mind defies specialism and conserves its indivisible universe, there are the following simple but certainly interesting facts. All the different sciences, however special and however apparently alien in subject matter, are wont to use the same general methods--as, for example, the laboratory or experimental method or the historical [p.096] method, the fatal consequences of which to the cause of pure specialism may easily be inferred. History is famous for overcoming differences. The common interest in mathematics must also be mentioned, for mathematics, through its latest developments in danger of turning into a pure logic, is quite independent of all those material differences that separate the different sciences. It is formal and universal, not special; so that the special science that would also be mathematical appears somehow to be at least in aim as universal as it is special. Perhaps mathematics more than anything else has fed the voracity which we have seen veracity to exact. Has it not been the chief agent in the virtual annihilation of the barriers between physics and chemistry? This particular mingling of the special sciences has been mentioned here already, but mathematics is threatening the party-walls of all the other sciences also. Further, what are we to infer from the idea that all sciences seek law? Certainly law is not special as science has seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically, could any one suppose that G.o.d made the laws of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a supposition he had been a strange G.o.d indeed, lacking the very thing, unity of being and character, which men have come to a.s.sociate with divinity, and what theology demands of G.o.d, science, even against its own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, [p.097] the way in which by implication, when not openly, one science is given to handing over its hardest problems to another is very instructive as well as amusing. Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, a good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious conference of biologists, physiologists, and psychologists, and the addresses then made have often reminded me of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons: A closed ring of political grafters, none other than the notorious Tweed and his followers, each pointing to his neighbour and putting on him the responsibility of a very embarra.s.sing situation. "Find the rogue" was the artist's inscription; but with apologies for the a.s.sociation, we can easily change it to "Find the special science." And, lastly, in this list of the simple evidences against an adequate specialism there are the conspicuous a.n.a.logies other than those of common method or common interest in law, which are always easily traced among the sciences, even the sciences in the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any particular time. Atomism in physics is contemporary with atomism in psychology and with individualism in political philosophy; a monarchical politics with an anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also monarchical physically centred astronomy, whether heliocentric or geocentric; and a Newtonian astronomy, which really makes a law or force instead of an individual body the centre and control of the solar system, with democracy or const.i.tutionalism, and with inductive instead of deductive logic and naturalistic instead of dogmatic theology; so that at no time, whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his [p.098] special syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal sympathy with others.

Such a.n.a.logies among the sciences, so often recognized and so absorbingly interesting to the students of the history of thought, if not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to make the panelled part.i.tions at least translucent if not unsubstantial and transparent.

But the most important fact in ill.u.s.tration of our case against specialism is yet to be considered, and unfortunately it takes us where to some the waters may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons already given and emphasized is the special science a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, except in so far as specialism be taken merely as an incident, not without its humour, of scientific method, but also for the same reasons (and chiefly because the truth and reality of the universe are bound to be conserved) every special science must sooner or later develop its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into tenets that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown, specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now a.s.serted, every special science a.s.suming precise form and real validity becomes a home of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific specialist. In the cases of physical epistemology and epistemological physics we have already seen doctrines working to this end. In those cases the real treachery to the avowed [p.099] standpoints lay in virtual when not open contradiction. And, for the general principles, is it not quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in any given point of view, or in the specific doctrines developed under it, can serve the interests of any other points of view? I have heard it said, but by whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or contradiction was only the mind on tiptoe struggling to look over a very high wall.

The point is just this. The special science, because special or partial and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity, that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. Its own peculiar view-point is relative, but that it may attain actual validity it is bound to overcome its relativity by admitting, secretly perhaps yet not less truly, other points of view; and paradox or contradiction is the natural door for such admissions, the original view-point being tenacious to the last. Physics says: "I will be physics through thick and thin; I will be physics though the heavens fall and though dreadful paradoxes arise"; and in like manner psychology cries aloud: "I will be psychology though I suffer from a splitting dualism for my pains." Have you, gentle reader, never held and held and held to some particular notion about things, modifying the details perhaps little by little, but always imagining yourself strictly loyal to the old, old view, and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive with contradictions? If you have, you know, possibly [p.100] too well, the natural history of every special science, and also you can sympathize deeply with the hen and her cherished chicks that proved ugly ducklings. The special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of becoming thoroughly divided against itself. Such hospitality is an obligation--call it logical if you will, or moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not if it only suggests coercion--which is not less binding upon the scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, always urgently present in you and me. You and I may be so special or exclusive as to drive strangers from our doors, but an impulse to call them back and give them entertainment always follows--an impulse that is only the necessary reaction of the expulsion. Humanity is indivisible in spite of our a.s.serted exclusiveness, and nature is indivisible, too, in spite of specialism. Partiality of any sort, along any line, in any field, can never long persist without, though often darkly and indirectly, though by the way of bold, unrecognized, or unconfessed paradox, receiving from outside all that it would exclude. I am not merely repeating. At first, we saw only that the scientific imagination brought to the special science as its working hypotheses certain conserving or compensating conceptions; then, that these conceptions involved treachery to the science that harboured them; but now we are face to face with the fact that their complete, their most effective form is the paradox.

Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case; perhaps, again, the very hopelessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal negation plainly involves, is also to the point; but, beyond all peradventure, we do accept the direct negative with a patience, even an indifference, that may greatly a.s.sist our natural conservatism, whether of thought or life, but that on being recognized certainly does arouse our wonder.

Good and its opposite evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and plurality, life and death, the indivisible and the divisible, rest and motion, plenum and vacuum, immaterial and material, actuality and illusion, lawfulness and lawlessness: these and so many other opposites are the common stock-in-trade of our living and thinking, and we accept and use them with a complacency that cannot easily be exaggerated. Yet the negative in each and every one of them holds the future of the universe in the palm of its hand. And the special scientist before his inevitable paradoxes is as conservative and as complacent as the rest of us.

But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out cogently and satisfactorily in every way, that the [p.102] special science, if both persistently special and honestly scientific, must be sooner or later inwardly contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. The actual cases, however, are more easily found than many are likely to suppose, and at mention they may even seem like forgotten memories, like things which at some time we have noticed but become callous towards. Thus the atom is through and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself real only because indivisible; and a science harbouring such an atom can hardly be said to be unmixedly physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quant.i.ty that is significant because not quant.i.tative; the sensation, a component element of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or ent.i.ty whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies dependence and an existence shared with something else: these are all also self-contradictions. And in view of them who must not see how the special sciences are always more than special, ever correcting [p.103]

in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves their partiality of view, ever responsible to the totality of things even while they would observe things only under selected view-points. Such contradictions, once more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are familiar with as the "universe of discourse." Even in science you cannot discourse about anything without at least implicitly discoursing about everything, although in order to do so you must speak in such paradoxes as the atom, the person, the biologist's "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and the like indefinitely.

Nor is the scientist the only dreamer of paradoxes among men. Ordinary practical life, as we have seen, teems with paradoxes. But, for purposes of ill.u.s.tration, not to say also of giving greater breadth and depth to the view, a reference to the situation in the religious consciousness will have peculiar value here. A religion that supplements reverence for a personal G.o.d, working miracles and caring for the elect, who even nowadays are more or less elect, with belief in a devil, even nowadays more or less personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it is besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is often declared, particularly by the scientists. Its two errors, just because opposed, conserve what is real, and no science can claim more than that. Indeed, a science, notably a special science, like a theology, might well be described as a system of mutually corrective errors, of abstractions that, because abstract, distort the reality of things, but that also because being at difference with each other and eventually [p.104]

falling into contradictory and so counteracting pairs are at least parties to what is real and true. By hook or crook, by the hook of abstraction or the crook of contradiction, every science gets in touch with the universe as a whole, and so even with its errors is a "working"

science. The errors of many a religion, by their working together, have not failed to save men.

So we may return to the a.s.sertion that in its specialism, as well as in its demand for objective knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and with this conclusion established the exposure of science already offers a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does this only to the extent and in the sense that contradiction warrants doubt. After all is said, have we been only exposing science? Has attack been our only procedure?

Do we not find, as we reflect, that in our exposure there has also been something very near to defence? Or, once more, through the science to which we have taken exception have we not seen a science in which we could believe? In the examination of science's objectivism we saw that technique buried science, but--though we did not say this in so many words--that there might be a resurrection. If fruitful in inventions serviceable to life, science was justified in spite of its cultivated objectivism, and the objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has further significance as possibly an earnest of wider social relations.h.i.+p, of broader and deeper life. The question of fact, too, if appreciated and so made subordinate to the question of meaning, was even allowed, and science, although at once formally conservative [p.105] and materially negative and destructive, seemed after all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and relative--it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the reality of things even in and through the relativity and contradiction under which the things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, even of our scientific knowledge, must ever have an indeterminate future; while rest or stability, ultimate reality or consistency is quite impossible to it, still its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different [p.106] quant.i.ties, such as four and two, and sixteen and eight, do not make the same sum, much less are they the same digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the working together, of the errors of science. Outwardly and materially changing with time and with people, a.s.suming ever new forms and comprising always new doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, as a positive resultant, is at least now conceivably always the same and applicable to the same life. Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy working together for truth, exactly as the heresies of pagan religion seem to have balanced each other to the preservation and the development of the life which we of the present day and the Christian civilization are pleased to call our own.

Accordingly the science we have to doubt is also manifest to us as at least a possible object of faith. The very causes of our doubt before our very eyes have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible bases of belief, and our confession of doubt as it proceeds is proving ever more worth making. We are trying to be such honest doubters. We are indeed such penitent believers.

III. SCIENCE WOULD BE AGNOSTIC.

Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to consider and appraise. Agnosticism confines knowledge to actual positive experience, and in its form of "positivism" to an only tentative acceptance of actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of [p.107] just those limitations which have been found to belong to science as objective and special. Objectivism and specialism have both shown science to be standing in its own light, or at least to be standing in the way of any direct and positive knowledge of reality. Whatever they make possible to our virtual as distinct from our positive consciousness, whatever indirectly or implicitly may through them belong to our conscious life, formally and visibly, positively and directly, we cannot know reality. In a word, science must and does recognize an unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is accordingly important among the three determining points of science's circ.u.mference. But here is now our problem: Does science put the right value upon, does it ascribe the right meaning to, its agnosticism? Is the implied scepticism of the sort that we can cordially accept?

Especially, does science have any due appreciation of the negative, not to say of the suggested dualism, in the opposition between the knowable and the unknowable?

Now both objectivism and specialism plainly involve aloofness, which is perhaps only another word for what in the preceding chapter was called abstraction. By the first of these two "isms" science is held aloof from life; by the second, through the many divisions, from itself, that is to say, part from part. Men who would be scientists withdraw, as we hear them boast, from affairs, and as they withdraw it is also as if they put on distorting and even discolouring gla.s.ses, through which in one and another "special" way they would behold the "objective" world. Their withdrawal [p.108] is thus not merely physical; it is also mental. To look out of the window one must turn one's head and lift one's eyes and adjust both head and eyes in other ways; but looking in general, whether from the needs of an objective or a special view, also demands certain pertinent adjustments, and the demanded adjustments make the resulting experience just so far aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted.