THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE
It is quite a popular misconception that credits Science with exact
methods and certain knowledge on all matters concerning which it has
given an opinion. There is, in fact, a slavish reverence for the dicta
of Science which is as inconsistent as formerly was the submission of
the public mind to religious dogmatic teaching. And if, as some writers
assert, there still exists a conflict between Religion and Science it is
at least satisfactory to see that to-day Science appears to be getting
its own back to a creditable extent. If Science makes appeal to the
popular imagination or proves its claim to public recognition and
support on the grounds of utility, Religion has only itself to blame if
it fails to come into line with the established facts of scientific
discovery and lacks the enterprise which is necessary to give it a
modern representation. Instead of mumbling orthodoxies about the saving
of souls, Religion could very profitably concern itself with the task of
proving that man has a soul to save. It could use the argument afforded
by modern experimental psychology. It could observe the scientific
method, and could without loss of dignity employ the facts of Science in
the upbuilding of a scheme of thought which has man’s spiritual welfare
as the end in view. When we recognize the fact that it is our conception
of God and of our relations with Him that is alone effective in the work
of regeneration and reform, and that this altered view-point is largely
due to the widening of the mental horizon by scientific discovery and a
philosophy adapted thereto, then religiously-disposed people do wrongly
to ignore the facts of Science, however much they may appear to conflict
with orthodox notions of the relations of God to man. It is little more
than three centuries ago that the custodians of religious belief burned
Giordano Bruno at the stake for daring to declare that there were more
worlds than one. In his _Della Causa Principio ed Uno_ (Of the First and
Only Cause) Bruno says: “The divine Omnipotence is more aptly expressed
in an infinity of worlds of various dimensions than in the production of
a single world of infinite dimensions.... Infinite variability is the
eternal juvenescence of God.” That which happened to Bruno in the name
of Holy Religion was barely escaped by Copernicus because of his heresy
in declaring the Sun to be the centre of the system and the Earth one of
its satellites moving about it. It was a pagan doctrine and belonged
properly to Pythagoras. The history of Science reveals many such
persecutions of its devotees, and yet in modern times it cannot be said
that Science is without its prejudices. It nearly killed religious
belief in the nineteenth century owing to its recognition of the
Materialistic hypothesis.
Yet when we come to examine the claims of modern Science, or what
popularly goes by that name, we find that it is largely hypothetical and
that sciences which are usually known as “exact” are by no means so.
Science has no certain knowledge of the origin of life and
consciousness. Many distinguished men have sought to define life. Dr.
Alfred R. Wallace in his _World of Life_ points out how inadequate are
all these definitions, and wisely refrains from adding to them.
Consciousness as a by-product of organic matter was quite correct
science fifty years ago. To-day, in the presence of many well-attested
facts which go to prove the possibility of consciousness apart from
organism as we know it, the man of science is not at all sure that
consciousness is anything of the sort. Modern psychology is a new leaf
in the book of Nature which until quite recently had not been
deciphered. We are getting our facts sporadically, a few at a time, and
each new discovery changes our ideas concerning things which had passed
for correct theory. The facts remain; our views of them are changed. We
really have no certain scientific knowledge about the wonderful
conversion of inorganic to organic matter. The alchemy of Nature baffles
us.
Even the cosmic theory is incomplete and full of anomalies. In the
vortex theory there is nothing to show why some swirls of cosmic matter
became suns and others planets. There are two theories regarding the
solar system diametrically opposed to one another. There are similarly
two theories regarding the Moon. The most recent theory is that the Moon
acts as a brake upon the Earth by causing the tides, which run contrary
to the axial rotation of the earth, thereby slowing down its rotation
and causing a longer day than formerly. But the same theory requires
that the Moon is gradually enlarging its own orbit and getting farther
away from the Earth, which is inconsistent with our records of ancient
observations of eclipses, etc., for in order to agree our calculations
with the observed positions of the Moon at these ancient epochs, we have
to augment the _present_ mean motion of the Moon in its orbit by a
quantity equal to about 10´´t₂, which means ten seconds for the first
century and the same quantity multiplied by the square of the centuries
for times anterior. In other words, the Moon was moving quicker in a
smaller orbit in former days. But this supplemental theory is wholly
destructive of the first regarding the Moon’s tidal action. For if the
Moon is getting farther away from us, its tidal influence is also
decreasing, and the “brake” power being lessened, the Earth’s axial
rotation must be increasing in velocity and the day must be getting
shorter than formerly, which is the exact converse of what was argued in
the first place. Hence we see how, in their efforts to explain observed
facts, scientific men can put up two mutually destructive theories. Only
recently, in the Solar eclipse of 17th April, 1912, we had an
illustration of an exact science blundering in practice. The
_Connaissance des Temps_, the official organ of the French astronomers,
gave this eclipse as total, while the _Nautical Almanac_ gave it
correctly as partial, the apparent diameter of the Moon, depending on
its anomaly, being some 20´´ less than that of the Sun.
The theory of what is called the attraction of gravitation is one of the
scientific facts which have recently been abandoned as unsatisfactory.
It is found that the theory of “attraction” does not answer to the facts
as experimentally determined. Theories that are inelastic are apt to be
negatived by the discovery of new facts or modified beyond recognition
by extended observations. The Earth itself is a huge magnet whose radial
influence extends some fourteen feet beyond its surface, and this fact
has to be taken into account in all local magnetic observations.
The permeability of matter was a fact that had been under scrutiny for a
long time before the discovery of the Röntgen rays. Sir David Brewster
notes the passage of carbon through solid wood by means of electric
fluid, and by an electric current an acid may be separated from its
sodium base and passed through dilute syrup of violets without changing
the colour of the vegetable solution. The question then arises, in what
form was the carbon in the one case and the acid in the other when they
passed through the respective media? Obviously their atomic vibrations
were temporarily raised in such degree by electrical action as to change
them from their normal characters. I suggest to psychologists that
something of the same or a similar nature may occur in the case of
individuals when acting under the influence of hypnotism or spiritual
afflatus, ecstasy, etc. The question is whether they can be rendered
permanent effects.
But these are not by any means the whole of the problems confronting
modern Science, which nevertheless has a tendency to become dogmatic in
other matters with which it is not officially concerned, as one may
learn from a reading of Häckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_. In Ernst
Häckel we see probably the last of the old school of materialistic
philosophers. Another problem is that of atomic arrangement. It has been
observed that two chemical bodies composed of exactly the same number of
atoms of the same elements assume entirely different characteristics by
reason of their respective atomic arrangement. This fact, while wholly
unexplained, opens up many interesting psychological issues and serves
by analogy to explain why two human beings compounded of exactly similar
cosmic elements, manifest different characters and faculties. Science
has too long neglected the free use of its own hypothesis of the
solidarity of the system, and while astronomy employs interplanetary
action in all its calculations, it scouts the idea of astro-meteorology
and relegates astrology to the limbo of antiquated superstitions. Yet
both these concepts are necessary and logical dependents of the cosmical
hypothesis.
Up to the present day Science has ignored psychology and opposed the
claims of psycho-therapeutics. Medical science other than that depending
on surgery will soon find that the process of readjustment in the human
organism rendered necessary by the rapidly changing conditions of modern
civilization and the opening-up of new centres of activity in the
mind-sphere of the world, will present a new series of pathological
conditions to which the prescriptions of the Pharmacopoeia are
altogether inadequate. The psychic origin of disease will have to be
admitted and provided against. The x-factor in human pathology which
defies the action of drugs and evades the scalpel, call it by what name
we may, will increasingly assert itself, and medical men will have
perforce to take it into their counsels, make friends with it and get to
understand its vagaries. The plurality of worlds and the habitability of
the other planets in the solar system, taught by Pythagoras in the sixth
century B.C., has received a certain speculative recognition by
astronomers, notably Camille Flammarion, Richard Proctor, Schiaparelli
and Sir Robert Ball, in recent years. It was affirmed as fact by that
remarkable man of science and inspiration, Baron Swedenborg. But in a
contemporary issue of the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of
Canada, Prof. Aitken, of the Lick Observatory, states, as the result of
his researches, that the Moon is a dead world, with the exception
perhaps of low forms of vegetable life sustained by water vapour exuding
from the Moon’s interior; Mercury gets seven times as much heat as the
Earth and keeps the same face towards the Sun, offering the alternative
of an eternal night or an equally unending tropical heat and daylight,
from which it is not protected by any atmosphere. Venus, having many
characteristics similar to the Earth, is admitted to be problematical,
since it is not yet decided whether its day and year are equal or not.
If they are, then it is uninhabitable. Mars has a rare atmosphere, and
there is not enough water on the planet to fill an American lake. It has
a low temperature, and there may be vegetable and animal life there, but
no beings of intelligence. The “canals” may be natural or artificial
canals or merely earthquake markings. Jupiter is a semi-sun, its
development is in a state of chaos, and it is probably gaseous
throughout with matter distributed as on the Sun, there being no defined
surface or crust. Saturn resembles Jupiter, but probably is not so far
advanced, and it is even less fitted for human habitation than Jupiter.
We see therefore that as between the teaching of Pythagoras and that of
Prof. Aitken there is a great gulf fixed. It will probably be bridged by
a little freer use of the scientific imagination that Prof. Huxley
extolled. The great American astronomer has argued humanity out of
existence in a manner so complete as to warrant the instant dismantling
of the statue of Bruno by the Vatican. But alas for the shortcomings of
dogmatic science, we have not yet been told how or why the Earth alone
is favoured by the presence of humanity. We are left to speculate upon
the question as to what has become of the Moon’s humanity, supposing
this dead orb was once alive and afforded habitable conditions. We are
left wondering why conservative Nature evolved the planets Neptune and
Uranus—which “are so far away from the Sun that its light and heat can
hardly be effective in protecting life upon them, even should life in
any way originate there”—if they are never to come within the life-belt
limit of the solar rays! These vapourings are altogether unworthy of the
name of Science, and are, in their way, as fanciful and speculative as
any of the superstitions of a primitive religion. Who gave the
astronomer to know that man as we see him is the only sort of humanity
or intelligent being that can exist? It is open to him to remark that
even should there be forms of intelligent life on other planets we
should not recognize them as human. That is beside the mark; we do not
recognize the human by its form, we do not confound the man with the
animal part of him; and we may even speak of discarnate humanity. In
every possible way we protest that articulate language, which infers
articulate thought and intelligence, is the criterion of the human, and
in this category we include for sociological reasons all that are of
human generation, whether intelligent and articulate or not. Of the
“infinite variability” of God as expressed in Nature, the astronomer
takes no count. Here on this globe of ours we find the human persisting
in temperatures varying from over + 150° to - 30°, and we have no reason
for suggesting that the power of adaptation to environment is at the
maximum in this world. Violent ophthalmia and even madness would result
in us if “the earth’s green livery” were suddenly and permanently
changed to red. But a very little alteration in the chemical
constitution of the vitreous fluid in the eye would render us immune
from these evils, and we have every reason for thinking that were such a
colour-change to take place, Nature would not be long in adapting
herself to the new conditions. But she would first be sure that they
were likely to be permanent, for although very amicable, the old lady is
extremely cautious and prudent! What we know as solar light and heat
have no existence outside the earth’s atmosphere, and even within it
they only have the values that our sensation-consciousness gives to
them; so that all we can scientifically assume in regard to those
planets that have no atmosphere is that their humanities, if they have
any, must be physiologically different from man as we know him. We
cannot argue that he does not exist or that he cannot exist on them.
The sum of the matter is this, we have need of a Religion that is
scientific, and equally of a Science that is religious. What we do not
positively know we may logically infer, but we have to guard ourselves
against the tendency to take the inference for fact and to dogmatize
about things which are wholly unrelated to our personal experience. The
many curious observations I shall have occasion to make in the course of
these pages are so remote from general experience and so far removed
from scientific scrutiny as to belong to the category of things called
“occult,” and it was therefore expedient that the reader should have a
fairly clear idea that all the statements of orthodox science do not
rest upon the immovable rock of observed fact, and for this reason are
not so well founded as many of the conclusions of occult science. It is
advisable also that the reader should discern between the theoretical
value of a statement and its experimental value. Many things which
appear reasonable will not respond to test, and others that seem
unreasonable are found nevertheless to be true.