SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION--HUXLEY
When the ancient Humanist, Protagoras, said, “Man is the measure of
all things,” he probably did not mean that all things may be measured
by man, for in his following sentence he is sceptical of our knowledge
of many things. He meant rather that all our measurements are human.
This independence of supernaturalism was not always characteristic
of educated minds of antiquity, but it is one of the distinguishing
features of the educational tradition which we have derived from Greece
and Rome. Thus Aristotle would establish ethics in the life of reason.
This same naturalistic bias also inspires those early attempts at
science which were broken off under the influence of Christianity.
The Renaissance was accompanied by a re-awakened interest in nature,
and in human nature as part of nature as a whole. The trend toward
naturalism is seen in art, in the resumption of scientific research and
experimentation, and in the effort to supplant scholastic theology by
the study of human letters. To Da Vinci, for instance, science, art,
and letters were but the varied aspects of the same cultural awakening.
But for the greater number of those who felt the influence of the
Renaissance, science and letters became quite separate interests.
The new learning of the Humanists was almost exclusively a literary
scholarship. Erasmus and his followers had very little interest in
natural science. They found in classic literature a body of mature
wisdom ready to hand. Science on the contrary, was obliged to begin
_de novo_, and slowly construct its instruments of thought, building,
gradually a new system of knowledge. The brunt of the conflict with
scholastic education fell upon the humanists. The real renaissance of
science did not take place until the seventeenth century.
Meanwhile the Reformation had caused a revival of religious interest,
and in Protestant countries like England, and later America, the
influence of religion upon higher learning remained powerful. It
permitted the classical tradition to survive in letter rather than in
spirit. The naturalistic implications of the classics were ignored;
commentators whenever possible read into the texts the conventional
beliefs and sentiments of Protestantism. Humanism became “traditional
education,” a new scholasticism, formal and innocuous, a mark of
intellectual respectability, a “refining” influence, an embroidery of
familiar quotation in the speech of parsons and country squires.
Successive generations of grown-up schoolboys in Gothic halls,
laboriously translated, over and over again, hackneyed passages from a
literature that in the fifteenth century had been carried about like
the fire of Prometheus, kindling defiance to Heaven all over Europe.
Often men could think of no better reason for the study of the ancient
classics than that in the tedium and monotony of language drill there
was a “discipline” which was good for the soul. The student’s attention
was centered upon the niceties of construction and upon the task of
memorizing rules of grammar and a vocabulary, all stuffed into his head
in the most artificial manner conceivable. He was not likely to be
puzzled over the discovery that there might be something spiritually
irreconcilable between Lucretius and the Thirty Nine Articles, or
between the dialectic of Socrates and the Westminster confession of
faith.
There is a world of difference between this _denatured_ Humanism and
that of Erasmus or Montaigne. That this traditional education made
for polish and good breeding cannot be denied. Neither, I think,
can it be denied that there was something sterile and illiberal in
Protestant-classical education. It is significant that both the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the progress of science in
the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries took place chiefly outside the
established universities and sometimes in spite of their opposition.
I do not see how the situation could well have been otherwise. In the
first place the older Humanists themselves dealt the naturalism of
the ancients and such of it as was again coming to life a severe blow
when they championed letters and remained indifferent to science.
In the second place, the Reformation quite side-tracked the revival
of learning, superseded it, and took over into its own service only
so much of it as it found congenial to its religious interests. It
was a mass movement, an attempt at a restatement of Christianity in
terms of the philosophy of the common man, a philosophy to which
the questioning, enlightened common sense and worldly wisdom of a
Montaigne, a Voltaire or a Hume is never very congenial. Santayana
says, “The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him
no pleasure, yet he cannot do without her, and resents any aspersions
that strangers may cast on her character.
“Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief;
really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the
outer ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for
that very reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being
attacked there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at
being attacked at all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not
naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual
habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily
confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single
coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as
certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and
policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly
because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next
century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because,
when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like
poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon
learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety
and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to conform
to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn
current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without
philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense
suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which
is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and
insecure.”
Speaking of the Reformation and its relation to science, Whitehead
says, “We cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human
life.” Perhaps he is inclined to over-emphasize the assertions of
the Reformers that they were only restoring what had been forgotten.
But he says, “It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science.
In every way it contrasts with the contemporary religious movement.
The Reformation was a popular uprising and for a century and a half
drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement
were confined to a minority among the intellectual élite.”
It is doubtless because the Humanists remained relatively indifferent
to science, that its early struggles with theology were comparatively
mild. It was permitted to make remarkable progress in the seventeenth
century without raising an issue too great for its strength. It is
interesting to note that when in the nineteenth century the conflict
of natural science with theology became acute, science was at the same
time engaged in a struggle for recognition by the official educational
system in which the classical tradition held sway.
The outstanding public champion of science in this conflict was Thomas
H. Huxley. He could say of university education in England in the year
1868, that the colleges no longer promoted research in science, and
were hardly more than “boarding schools for bigger boys.” Once they
had been homes for the life study of the most abstruse and important
branches of knowledge.
“I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner who should wish
to become acquainted with the scientific, or the literary, activity
of modern England, would simply lose his time and his pains if he
visited our universities with that object.
“The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of
Lyell, and Darwin, to go no further back than the contemporaries of
men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. England
can show now, and she has been able to show in every generation
since civilization spread over the West, individual men who hold
their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of her
intellectual eminence.
“But in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in virtue
of their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character
which will not recognise impediments. They are not trained in the
courts of the Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice
in all sorts of irregular ways, and with much loss of time and power,
in order to obtain their legitimate positions.
“Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do not offer
them positions, in which it should be their highest duty to do,
thoroughly, that which they are most capable of doing; but, as far as
possible, university training shuts out of the minds of those among
them, who are subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in
the world for which they are specially fitted.--Imagine the success
of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I
have mentioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence,
the successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of
Ciceronian prose!”
Twelve years later Huxley was still waging his contest for the
admission of science to the curricula of school and college against an
opposition the obstinacy of which is a little difficult for us today to
understand.
“For I hold very strongly by two convictions--The first is, that
neither the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education
is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to
justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second
is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively
scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively
literary education.
“I need hardly point out to you that these opinions, especially the
latter, are diametrically opposed to those of the great majority of
educated Englishmen, influenced as they are by school and university
traditions. In their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal
education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not merely with
education and instruction in literature, but in one particular form
of literature, namely, that of Greek and Roman antiquity. They hold
that the man who has learned Latin and Greek, however little, is
educated; while he who is versed in other branches of knowledge,
however deeply, is a more or less respectable specialist, not
admissable into the cultured caste. The stamp of the educated man,
the University degree, is not for him.”
“The representatives of the Humanists, in the nineteenth century,
take their stand upon classical education as the sole avenue to
culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of Renascence. Yet,
surely, the present intellectual relations of the modern and the
ancient worlds are profoundly different from those which obtained
three centuries ago. Leaving aside the existence of a great and
characteristic modern literature, of modern painting, and, especially
of modern music, there is one feature of the present state of the
civilized world which separates it more widely from the Renascence,
than the Renascence was separated from the middle ages.
“This distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast and
constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge. Not
only is our daily life shaped by it, not only does the prosperity
of millions of men depend upon it, but our whole theory of life has
long been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the general
conceptions of the universe, which have been forced upon us by
physical science.”
“The scientist, no longer disposed to remain on the defensive with
the usual apology for science, carries the battle into the opposing
camp and indicts the opposition, with some justice I think, for
its failure even when judged by its own traditional standards of
education.
“There is no great force in the _tu quoque_ argument, or else the
advocates of scientific education might fairly enough retort upon
the modern Humanists that they may be learned specialists, but that
they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of life as
deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to be
cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought this reproach
upon themselves, not because they are too full of the spirit of the
ancient Greek, but because they lack it.
“The period of the Renascence is commonly called that of the “Revival
of Letters,” as if the influences then brought to bear upon the
mind of Western Europe had been wholly exhausted in the field of
literature. I think it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of
science, effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous, was
not less momentous....
“We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks
unless we know what they thought about natural phenomena. We cannot
fully apprehend their criticism of life unless we understand
the extent to which that criticism was affected by scientific
conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their
culture, unless we are penetrated, as the best minds among them were,
with an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in
accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching
truth.
“Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our modern Humanists
to the possession of the monopoly of culture and to the exclusive
inheritance of the spirit of antiquity must be abated, if not
abandoned.”
Huxley was one of the few educators of his time who ought to have seen
clearly that in the education of the ancients there was no conflict
of interest between science and letters; the two were one in the
naturalistic minds of the Greeks. He is aware of the fact that both
science and letters were revived by the Renaissance, but it would seem
that he permits his zeal in the cause of scientific training to force
him at times into a rather one-sided and partisan position.
“But for those who mean to make science their serious occupation;
or who intend to follow the profession of medicine; or who have to
enter early upon the business of life; for all these, in my opinion,
classical education is a mistake; and it is for this reason that I
am glad to see ‘mere literary education and instruction’ shut out
from the curriculum of Sir Josiah Mason’s College, seeing that its
inclusion would probably lead to the introduction of the ordinary
smattering of Latin and Greek....”
“The great peculiarity of scientific training, that in virtue of
which it cannot be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever,
is this bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and
practising the intellect in the completest form of induction; that is
to say, in drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by
immediate observation of nature.”
The struggle for recognition of the liberalizing educational value of
science was carried to successful issue in the nineteenth century.
In backward communities, Fundamentalism still sets its face against
certain of the anti-supernaturalist implications of science, and it is
always possible that if at any time the populace now dazzled by the
“wonders” of science, should suspect the full meaning of the world-view
which science would substitute for the older anthropomorphic ideas
about the universe, there may be a wide-spread popular reaction against
it in the name of religion. But at present in educational institutions
generally, scientific courses tend to predominate over the classical.
Most of the struggles for “academic freedom” and most of the live
problems in education revolve about the teaching of the sciences.
A vastly greater number of minds are today set free from dogma and
superstition and childish deference to authority by methods of
scientific research than by the study of the classics. The latter is on
the decline and I suppose must continue to be so until Humanism again
possesses that vitality and naturalism, and independence of judgment
which men had when the Greeks set out to discover the Good Life.
Dewey says that without initiation into the scientific spirit one is
not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised
for effectively directed reflection. In it may be realized that desire
for exact knowledge as different from mere opinion which the ancients
sought. It tests all things in the light of experiment and by appeal
to cold objective fact. It is often said that science is Reason in
contrast with Faith. Certainly the scientist cannot in his research
permit himself to be swayed by religious belief and remain scientific.
He must accept no conclusion on authority or because he wishes to
believe it. But the scientific mind is not, as a matter of fact, as
strictly rationalistic as was the scholastic mind. The logic of the
latter is a formal vindication of The Truth conceived in advance of
knowledge of fact. The reasoning of the former proceeds by a succession
of shrewd guesses which are held to be mere hypothesis until verified
by the facts. This necessity of holding judgment in abeyance, and
of being willing to discard any belief or postulate that may not be
confirmed by objective reality, has the greatest educational value. In
spite of the everlasting deceitfulness and conceit of human nature and
notwithstanding the fact that pompous ignorance and fraud are often
palmed off upon the public as scientific knowledge, I should say,
precisely because of these things, training in scientific methods is
the best device available to the educator for instilling into the human
mind some measure of respect for truth.
To this end Huxley would introduce scientific experimentation into the
elementary school and would establish “scientific Sunday schools,”
“Would there really be anything wrong in using part of Sunday for
the purpose of instructing those who have no other leisure, in a
knowledge of the phenomena of Nature, and of man’s relation to
Nature?
“I should like to see a scientific Sunday-school in every parish,
not for the purpose of superseding any existing means of teaching
the people the things that are for their good, but side by side with
them. I cannot but think that there is room for all of us to work in
helping to bridge over the great abyss of ignorance which lies at our
feet.
“And if any of the ecclesiastical persons to whom I have referred
object that they find it derogatory to the honour of the God whom
they worship, to awaken the minds of the young to the infinite wonder
and majesty of the works which they proclaim His, and to teach them
those laws which must needs be His laws, and therefore of all things
needful for man to know--I can only recommend them to be let blood
and put on low diet. There must be something very wrong going on in
the instrument of logic if it turns out such conclusions from such
premises.”
There is an intellectual cleanness, something downright and honest
about the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and this uncompromising
mental integrity characterizes everything that Huxley said and did.
There is nothing shifty in a mind trained as his was. His is like a
cool north breeze on one of those clear summer days that sometimes
follow a period of sultriness, fog and rain. If things are a little too
sharply outlined, they are at least recognized for what they are. No
evasive mistiness obscures the landscape. To Huxley the foundation of
morality is to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no
evidence. He held that the lowest depths to which the human race could
fall--after knowing what science now reveals of nature--would be to go
back and deceive itself with comforting fictions. You will remember
his correspondence with Kingsley when death had entered his home. The
grief-stricken Huxley refused the consolations of a faith in which he
could not whole-heartedly believe. Like Socrates and Montaigne and
many educated men today, Huxley was candidly agnostic with respect to
matters which lie beyond the radius of human knowledge.
Huxley was a determinist, but it is doubtful if he was a materialist.
At least he held to a materialism which in one sense might be
reconciled with a form of idealism. In the address in honor of Joseph
Priestley he said,
“Without containing much that will be new to the readers or Hobbs,
Spinoza, Collins, Hume, and Hartley, and indeed, while making no
pretensions to originality, Priestley’s ‘Disquisitions relating to
Matter and Spirit,’ and his ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
Illustrated,’ are among the most powerful, clear, and unflinching
expositions of materialism and necessarianism which exist in the
English language, and are still well worth reading.
“Priestley denied the freedom of the will in the sense of its
self-determination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct
from the body; and as a natural consequence, he denied the natural
immortality of man.
“In relation to these matters English opinion a century ago was very
much what it is now.
“A man may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than
that implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism,
though very shocking, having a note of Calvinistic orthodoxy; but,
if a man is a materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and
must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he
acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the
natural immortality of man, respectable folks look upon him as an
unsafe neighbour of a cashbox, as an actual or potential sensualist,
the more virtuous in outward seeming, the more certainly loaded with
secret ‘grave personal sins.’
“... I must confess that what interests me most about Priestley’s
materialism, is the evidence that he saw dimly the seed of
destruction which such materialism carries within its own bosom. In
the course of his reading for his ‘History of Discoveries relating
to Vision, Light, and Colours,’ he had come upon the speculations of
Boscovich and Michell, and had been led to admit the sufficiently
obvious truth that our knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its
properties; and that of its substance--if it have a substance--we
know nothing. And this led to the further admission that, so far
as we can know, there may be no difference between the substance
of matter and the substance of spirit (‘Disquisitions, p. 16’).
A step farther would have shown Priestley that his materialism
was, essentially, very little different from the Idealism of his
contemporary, the Bishop of Cloyne.”
Perhaps William James may have had Huxley or his type in mind when
he wrote his famous passage about learning “to stand this universe.”
Yet I suspect that Huxley’s universe was more simple and benevolent,
more naïvely conceived than was that of James. Huxley was to the end a
rationalist, and lived and worked in a period when Nature was thought
to be essentially reasonable. Man need only learn the laws of nature
and obey them to become wise and happy and good. The aim of education
was to acquaint the student with the laws of nature.
“Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty
game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect
in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things
and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the
affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move
in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor
less than this....
“Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every
one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing
a game of chess. Don’t you think that we should all consider it to
be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the
pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the
means of giving and getting out of check?
“Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of
those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something
of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than
chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man
and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or
her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena
of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws
of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know
that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to
our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest
allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest
stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which
the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is
checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.
“My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which
Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul.
Substitute for the mocking friend in that picture a calm, strong
angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than
win--and I should accept it as an image of human life....
“That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and
does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it
is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with
all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready,
like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature
and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is
full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to
heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has
learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all
vileness, and to respect others as himself.
“Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education;
for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He
will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together
rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her
conscious self, her minister and interpreter.”
But surely liberal education is more than becoming the mouthpiece
of a benevolent nature. It seems to me that Huxley omits one of the
essentials. Just as the nineteenth century Humanists, because of
their neglect of science, possessed only a distorted and one-sided
view of Humanist education, so it would seem to me that nineteenth
century science in its opposition to traditional education, failed to
see that science is itself a part of Humanism. It is not merely the
discovery of given “Laws” which exist independently in a benevolent
and rational universe. It is the observation of certain relationships
and recurrences and the statement of these things in general terms
that will give them significance for _human beings_. What nature is
aside from the fact that we are interested spectators does not concern
us. Science grows out of the fact that we are more interested in
some things than in others. It is a human achievement; it is one of
the answers that mankind gives to the riddle of existence. It is not
existence which gives that answer, it is man. And education must not
only seek knowledge of the facts of nature, but having obtained such
knowledge, _must try to understand what to do about it_. Now that we
understand our natural environment, what kind of life can we best
achieve with it? What valuations have men put upon deeds and things?
What values is it possible to achieve? Our education is not done when
we have learned Nature’s _yes_ and _no_; we have our own _yes_ and _no_
to give.
Scientists quietly observing certain aspects of reality--those which
lend themselves to knowing as a specialized undertaking--are happy
to find that their abstract conceptions mutually imply and support
one another in an ordered system of knowledge. Their own reason which
they are thus able to impose upon nature, they believe they have
discovered in nature itself. Hence nature appears to be more ordered
than it really is, and to be essentially reasonable and beneficent.
Compare Huxley’s picture of nature as a beneficent mother of whom the
educated mind “makes the best, and she of him,” he “her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter,” with William James’ statement
about “this partially hospitable and ‘stepmotherly’ world of ours.”
The latter is surely the more profound and correct view. Water is not
only H₂O, it may drown you or quench your thirst. Fire is not merely
a process of oxidation, it is hot. It may be your willing servant, or
your relentless enemy. The modification of species which nineteenth
century scientists held to be the outcome of natural selection is not
what natural selection means to the organisms which experienced it.
To them it is a relentless struggle for a precarious and fleeting
existence in which satisfactions and victories are mingled with terror
and starvation and agony. And man placed in the midst of such a world
seeks education not only that he may interpret its happenings to an
intelligence which is part of the natural process, but that he may
select wisely among the alternatives which Nature presents to him, lift
himself above chaos and the slime, and achieve an existence that, at
least while it lasts, has some significance and quality of decency and
worth.
It is to this end that science is education; a true Humanism is
impossible without it. Such a Humanism is as anti-supernaturalistic as
determinism. But it is naturalism with mankind, however, not merely
pictured as a passive resultant of natural forces, but actively
selecting and creating value. As Huxley himself says, its aim is to
provide criteria for a “criticism of life.”
“Moreover this scientific ‘criticism of life’ presents itself to
us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to
authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to
nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are
more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for
the truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the
assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.”
He saw a new culture in process of development, one which would enlist
the whole spiritual life of mankind,
“The scenes are shifting the great theatre of the world. The act
which commenced with the Protestant Reformation is nearly played out,
and a wider and deeper change than that effected three centuries
ago--a reformation, or rather a revolution of thought, the extremes
of which are represented by the intellectual heirs of John of Leyden
and of Ignatius Loyola, rather than by those of Luther and of
Leo--is waiting to come on, nay, visible behind the scenes to those
who have good eyes. Men are beginning, once more, to awake to the
fact that matters of belief and of speculation are of absolutely
infinite practical importance; and are drawing off from that sunny
country ‘where it is always afternoon’--the sleepy hollow of broad
indifferentism--to range themselves under their natural banners.
Change is in the air. It is whirling feather-heads into all sorts
of eccentric orbits, and filling the steadiest with a sense of
insecurity. It insists on reopening all questions and asking all
institutions, however venerable, by what right they exist, and
whether they are, or are not, in harmony with the real or supposed
wants of mankind.”
Huxley’s services to education were more than his struggle for the
recognition of the educational value of science. His own contributions
to the science of biology and his able championing of the case which
Darwin had made in favor of the hypotheses of evolution did much to
place the biological sciences in their present position of preëminence
and to aid in placing both education and modern thought upon the basis
of a philosophy of evolution.
After receiving his degree in medicine, Huxley was appointed to the
position of assistant surgeon in the British navy. As he cruised about
on the war-ship ‘Rattlesnake,’ he began his studies of marine animals.
Darwin, you will remember, had also spent long months on southern seas
as government naturalist assigned to the Beagle. During the years that
followed each had risen to a high position as a British scientist,
conducting research, publishing papers, making new discoveries, all of
which contributed to make the nineteenth century, as John Fiske said,
“the century of science.”
During the years when Darwin was patiently elaborating the theory of
“descent with modification” which was destined within his own lifetime
to bring about a revolutionary transformation in the philosophy of
nature, Huxley did much to organize the science of Biology as a
definite branch of natural history. His great energy and industry, his
passion for exact knowledge and his genius for clear and comprehensive
statement made him one of the outstanding scientists of England. As
professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines, and later in
the Royal College of Surgeons, and as publicist and member of numerous
commissions on science and education, he was in a position to throw
a tremendous weight of influence to the support of his convictions,
should he be drawn into a scientific controversy.
When in 1859 Darwin published the “Origin of Species,” Huxley was one
of the small group of eminent scientists whose favorable judgment
Darwin felt would be necessary if the theory of natural selection were
to command the attention of the scientific world. Darwin did not invent
the doctrine of evolution. This idea had from time to time suggested
itself to men’s minds whenever a naturalistic account of creation was
attempted. The increase of knowledge of comparative anatomy, of geology
and of zoölogy, and the discovery of certain structural likenesses
and differences among both living organisms and the fossil remains
which were found in the several layers of the earth’s surface, could
not fail to suggest to many minds the thought that perhaps all forms
of life might be related in one comprehensive evolutionary process.
Although the evidence against the dogma of special creation was rapidly
accumulating, no valid explanation had been found. Lamarcks’ theory
that the structural modifications which characterize the various
species of organisms were the result of effort and use and of special
energizing and development of various organs, was under discussion.
The theory did not, however, interest Huxley, because it implied that
modifications which occurred as a result of effort and use could be
inherited, a belief for which there was not sufficient evidence.
Darwin’s book put the whole problem in a new light, and stated the
hypotheses of organic evolution as an alternative to “special creation”
in terms which were comprehensible to a mind trained in natural
science. Heretofore a mysterious principle of development had been
substituted for a miracle of creation. Darwin did not invoke any such
principle but with good scientific logic sought his explanation of the
origin of species in the casual connections among observable facts.
It is not my purpose now to enter upon a discussion of Darwinism, or
its present status in biology, a general understanding of which I think
should be part of the education of a modern man. I suspect that many
moderns who “believe in evolution” merely cherish a popular faith in
some mystical law of unusual progress, such as is expressed in the
verse, “Some call it evolution and some God.”
Huxley was uncompromisingly opposed to all such romantic theologizing
in science. He was moreover, aware, as Darwin himself was, of the
difficulties of Darwin’s theory. But he grasped the significance of
what Darwin had done and saw the ground upon which he had placed the
discussion of the problem, and he held that in the main Darwin was
correct. Gracefully and courageously he took his stand at Darwin’s
side. In various addresses, essays, books, he drew upon his extensive
knowledge for evidence in support of the theory. In “Man’s Place in
Nature” he uncompromisingly placed the origin and development of the
human race within the process of the evolution of animal organisms. He
did not remain indifferent to the storm of ecclesiastical indignation
and popular abuse and ridicule with which a grateful humanity greeted
the most important scientific discovery of the century. He accepted
the challenge, and during the decades that followed 1860 he was
probably the outstanding champion in England, not only of evolution,
but of science itself. In 1925, upon the centennial of his birth, his
grandson, Julian Huxley wrote,
“Of the general truth of the evolutionary hypothesis, its enormous
value to biology, and the necessary reorientation which it would give
to the general current of thought, he had no doubts; nor did he spare
himself in the cause. It is sometimes as well, in these easier-going
and theologically more tolerant days, when we are reaping what he
and others like him sowed, and may sometimes be tempted to think of
his criticism as essentially destructive, to remember what power of
inertia, what violence of the odium theologicum there was in the
opposition. ‘Professor Huxley’ became a sort of bogy in orthodox
lower middle-class families, almost as ‘Boney’ had done for the
nation in earlier days. He was attacked as irreligious, immoral,
unscrupulous, on the platform, in the press, by letter. That sort of
opposition cannot be persuaded; it must die out or be destroyed.”
The scholar confronted by the fury and stupidity of the mob, and
counted a fool for his pains when he strives to induce it to listen to
reason, has often turned aside in disgust. Henceforth he will write and
speak for the learned few. Let the masses, who think that a scientific
demonstration may be satisfactorily refuted with derision and slander,
consume themselves in their own ignorance. They have made it clear
that learning is not for such as they. In the Theatetus Plato tells
us of the discomfiture of the philosopher in the marketplace. As “the
rabble” is in all times heedless or hostile to reason, there has often
developed the idea that any belief that is popular is thereby shown
to be untrue and vulgar. Cato at once became suspicious of himself
when any utterance of his met with applause. Among would-be educated
minds this suspicion becomes a cult. Anything is “refined” and true
to the extent that it is unpopular--and for the reason that it is not
shared by the many. Today this attitude--which is really intellectual
snobbishness--gains plausibility from the fact that much of the
popularization of science is base caricature and misrepresentation.
It is obvious that the wider the circulation of pseudo-science, the
greater is the need of genuine instruction in the elements of science
and of general culture. I can see no other way by which modern learning
or modern civilization may be sustained. The man on the street has
power to determine which values shall survive in our common life, and
which shall perish, to a degree that he never had before. He exercises
this influence upon our culture in many ways both direct and indirect,
and his sway is not likely to be diminished in an industrial society
which increasingly tends to give social power to the various groups
which compose it in direct proportion to their numerical strength.
Moreover, it is not likely that a strictly esoteric intellectualism can
survive at all, much less attain that leadership which is the proper
function of intelligence in human affairs in a world organized as ours
is. As I have said before, our intellectual hold upon reality, even
for the best trained minds, is more precarious than we think. A slight
general shifting of emotional interest or of perspective--the spread,
let us suppose, of Fundamentalism through lower middle class minds
generally,--a sudden spasm of popular disillusionment regarding the
“wonders” of science or of hostility toward scientific methods which
are ever upsetting the consolations of faith,--might conceivably occur
at any time, and bring the beginning of the end of all that scholars
have struggled for since the Renaissance. If as Huxley said, the epoch
which began with the Reformation is about played out, it is not by
any means a foregone conclusion what the sequel is to be. If science
and letters are to join forces in the achievement of a truly Humanist
culture, this culture must be rooted in the life and thought of the
community. It will not likely be again a fifteenth century Italian
mimicry of the age of Cicero; neither can it support itself like a
bridge over an illiterate and enslaved populace, after the fashion of
ancient Athenian Humanism. This modern public can read, it is very
vociferous, it has votes and purchasing power and it pays to flatter
it. But there is in the modern public a small and growing minority,
scattered throughout all classes in the community, who honestly desire
knowledge of science and the humanities.
Professional scholarship has in the example of Huxley a splendid
precedent for any attempts it may care to make to ally itself with
this teachable minority. I once invited a neighboring biologist to
participate with other research scholars, in a course of lectures at
Cooper Union on scientific methods. He declined, because he believed
that a scientist who lectured to popular audiences cheapened his
reputation. I wondered if he had forgotten the great service to science
rendered by Huxley, who did not think it beneath the dignity of one
who was perhaps the leading biologist of England to wage the struggle
for scientific advance in the presence of a public which was much
less trained in the principles of natural science than the people who
regularly attend the lectures at Cooper Union.
Huxley seemed to believe that the outcome of the struggle of evolution
against popular ignorance and superstition was inseparable from the
fate of science itself. He set himself to make knowledge of the
principles of science universal. He did a work of adult education
that has not been surpassed in modern times. If today there is greater
freedom for scientific research and teaching, and in general a more
liberal and tolerant attitude on the part of official and popular
religion toward scientific discovery, our generation is in no small
measure indebted to Huxley.
In reply to the commonly expressed fear that liberal education may give
us a type of mind which is sceptical and ineffective, I offer Huxley.
The educated man may not perhaps take sides on the ever recurrent
question who is to profit at another’s expense, nor easily give his
devotion to the particular Utopian scheme of social reorganization
which happens to be the fashion of the reformers of his day. But if he
is like Huxley, he will be alert enough when he finds that intellectual
integrity and cultural progress are at stake. Like Erasmus, Huxley
survives in the philosophy of modern education as a symbol of
enlightenment in its struggle against obscurantism. Both insist upon
the recognition of the value of one aspect of a developing educational
tradition which has its origin in ancient Greece, and is in sharp
contrast both with popular opinion and with mediæval scholasticism.
As I have indicated, it was unfortunate that these two educational
interests did not develop out of the Renaissance, as one, for a
well-rounded Humanism is an integration of both. Erasmus champions the
cause of “human letters” and in the end classical education degenerates
into a species of Protestant scholasticism. Huxley champions science,
but is unable to liberate science itself from a mechanistic philosophy
which became associated with it two centuries earlier. The struggle
of science with theology was but a continuation of the spirit of the
Renaissance. The struggle of science against an entrenched classical
tradition meant that _the Renaissance had become divided against
itself_. This dualism is reflected in science down to the present time.
It is revealed in Huxley’s type of agnosticism, which is really naïve
in comparison with the sophisticated, mellow scepticism of Montaigne or
Hume, or in our own day with that of Mr. Santayana, who sees that all
knowledge is faith.
It was not so with Huxley; about the finality of the knowledge that
can be brought within the scope of scientific method he had no doubt
whatever. Of other knowledge he is sceptical because of want of
evidence. This is courageous and honest, and, from the standpoint
of the struggle in which science was then engaged with theological
rationalism, the issue cannot be compromised without the surrender of
science to superstition. Although Huxley is an evolutionist and clearly
sees that human intelligence is part of the behavior of an organism
which is itself a cross-section as it were of a process of nature,
he seems to hold that morality and truth are absolute and eternal
principles which exist outside the process and constitute the very
basis of existence. Reason which knows these eternal principles and
in which they inhere, must then also exist outside the process. But
we have seen that reason is a function of the behavior of an animal.
Huxley is thus a Rationalist; as much so as any Scholastic. The body
of scientific knowledge which we possess is the revelation of the
true nature of the facts which we experienced. It is the intellectual
equivalent of reality.
But is scientific knowledge knowledge of facts taken in their
wholeness, or is it in each instance knowledge of some special _aspect_
of the facts--fact reduced to abstract quality, to number and point in
space and to a multiple of smaller and “more real” units all conceived
in logical relationship rather than as experienced? Suppose we should
say that scientific ideas do not exist independent of the minds that
think them, are not equivalents of independent truths which reason
discovers, but are the devices which an unusually intelligent animal
constructs out of the many kinds of relationships it is able to notice
amongst the objects which interest it.
From this point of view, the one most consistent, I believe, with
a biology and a psychology which must take evolution into account,
scientific ideas are seen to be humanly created symbols, not cerebral
photographs of the ultimate nature of things. Why should the ultimate
nature of a lobster be the fact that a morphologist discovers it to be
an “articulate,” anymore than that I discover that it turns red when
put in boiling water? Scientific ideas are instruments. Abstraction and
classification are in a sense labor-saving devices, according to which
we may hold that what is true for one object or event is true for all
of its kind.
But the success of our thinking depends upon which of these many
aspects and relationships we observe and hence how we classify them.
All aspects and relationships are equally true, as James said, if true
at all. Correct thinking is the thinking which seizes upon those which
are relevant to our interest and purpose. And the interest and purpose
are human, not inherent in the world of things. Hence the order science
finds in nature is not _given_; it is the order of human thought
itself. Thus science also is “human letters.”
The humanist, or organic, view of the world of science differentiates
the twentieth century philosophy of nature from the mechanistic
philosophy of earlier science. Mechanism, which is faith that the
universe is reducible to Reason is, I hold, a survival from the old
religious dualism, according to which matter and spirit were separate
entities each belonging to its own world of phenomenon. The existence
of Reason as an entity in itself could be taken for granted, because
Reason belonged to the realm of spirit or mind, which though it existed
outside the material order of being, had yet established this order in
conformity to Reason.
Huxley’s agnosticism properly denies that man can have knowledge of
this world of spirit, yet retains from that realm the principle of
reason which it re-discovers in the world of material phenomena. Hence
Huxley was more religious than he knew. It is not the agnostic who is
the non-religious man, but the naïve realist who sees every fact and
situation uncolored by fancy or theory or illusion. For such a mind,
spiritual values do not exist. This kind of materialism is a different
thing from philosophical materialism, which is very theoretical and
fanciful. There are persons who approach this naïve realism, but I
doubt if anyone is wholly lacking in poetry and fancy. Certainly Huxley
was not.
Ordinarily we see our environment in a perspective of wish-fancy and
traditional myth and magic. To more logical minds the world of objects
is colored by the “sentiment of Rationality.” The universe appears to
them to be governed, not by an indulgent or harsh imaginary Father, but
by a principle of Reason. In each case, the fiction of security gives
the feeling of salvation. In a wholly rational universe salvation is
explanation. Everything is reasonable, hence right, if only we could
explain it and show its place in the whole. Nineteenth century science
could conceive of the world order as a mechanism and believe that it
had passed from faith to knowledge in its agnosticism of the things of
the spirit, but as Whitehead says, “the faith in the possibility of
science generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific
theory is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”
The conflict in the nineteenth century on behalf of science has
effected education in various ways. It has not emptied the churches,
but it has had a marked liberalizing influence, causing various groups
of believers to seek to modify the public expressions of their faith
in the light of modern knowledge. It has given the average educated
person of today a very different conception of his world from that
commonly held a century ago. It has to some extent revived the Socratic
insistence upon clear and accurate thinking as the first requirement
of an educated mind. It has brought a greater degree of objectivity
and wholesomeness of outlook to bear upon the formation of the mental
habits of students. It is by its insistence upon the biological point
of view, causing marked changes in men’s ideas of human nature and
society, gradually turning their thought away from the political dogma
of the eighteenth century to a less doctrinaire social philosophy.
On the other side, it may be said to be in part responsible for the
over-specialization common in our educational institutions. It has
left on the mind of the public the impression that science is a new
kind of magic, sometimes actually augmenting the general credulity and
gullibility. Almost any sort of nonsense may now find space in the
columns of the Sunday papers and pass current with the assertion that
it is “scientific.” Minds stuffed with a smattering of science may be
just as opinionated as minds stuffed with a smattering of theology.
A result which could perhaps not have been foreseen in 1875--and
which I believe twentieth century science is destined to remedy--grew
out of the one-sidedness of the Humanism of Huxley and others of his
day which I have discussed. The scientific interest tended to have
a mechanizing influence upon all life and culture, to ignore and
sometimes deny all values which resisted laboratory methods. And having
reduced all possible phenomena of life to a statement of the movements
of particles of matter which were said to underlie and cause all else,
this purposeless correlation of matter, space and movement expressed in
mathematical formulae was frequently given out as the true picture of
the nature of all existence--human life included.
Biologists and psychologists often have resorted to rather amusing
gestures and have deliberately ignored possible lines of inquiry
in order to imitate as closely as possible the physicists and the
astronomers. Just as matter was thought to consist of combinations
of atoms, so living organisms consisted of cells, and complex acts
of behavior were seen to consist of combinations of simple reflexes.
The cell and the reflex, being the irreducible minimum of physiology
and of psychology, were said to be the realities which constituted
the nature of the organism and its acts. All phenomena of life were
but combinations of these elemental realities. Find the smallest
particles in the combination, show how by a mechanical principle
they are inevitably placed in certain temporal and spacial and
other quantitative relationships, and behold, science has led you
to _Reality_. All this seemed to be very certain in the nineteenth
century; it alone was _knowledge_, all else was mere opinion and error.
Professor Whitehead says, “But the progress of biology and psychology
has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths.
If science is not to degenerate into a medley of _ad hoc_ hypotheses,
it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism
of its own foundations....
“There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed
scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an
irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in
a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless,
valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a
fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from
the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific
materialism.’”
“The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable
foundations of physics have broken up: also for the first time
physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as
distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought
are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether,
electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern,
function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking
about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by
mechanics?”
It is this disposition to find the real nature of the facts in the
smallest homogeneous particles, in other words, “atomism,” which
science in the twentieth century modifies. The parts themselves,
considered without regard to their position in the whole event, are
nothing. The reality is the organism, the situation as a whole. The
unity of a tree is very different from that of a machine, and even
physicists are beginning to suspect that they also deal with the
former kind of unity. The effect of this change of view upon education
is difficult to predict. I believe there are indications of a better
synthesis of science with general culture than that which obtained in
Huxley’s time. And as science modifies its mechanistic presuppositions,
there will doubtless be an increase of the importance of philosophy
in education, less pretense at finality, greater intellectual modesty
and more general appreciation of human worth than is possible when
educational philosophy is under the sway of a scientific dogma which
dehumanizes the individual, reduces him to atoms, and regards him as a
machine.
The recognition of the probability that much even of our established
scientific knowledge is a human convention, should have a liberalizing
effect upon the education of the present generation. Compare the
assurance of Huxley with the following passages which I quote from the
writings of Bertrand Russell, the first from his book on “Relativity,”
and the second from the closing words of “The ABC of Atoms.”
“What we know about the physical world, I repeat, is much more
abstract than was formerly supposed. Between bodies there are
occurrences, such as light waves; of the _laws_ of these occurrences,
we know something--just as much as can be expressed in mathematical
formulae--but of their _nature_ we know nothing. Of the bodies
themselves, as we saw in the preceding chapter, we know so little
that we cannot even be sure that they are anything: they _may_ be
merely groups of events in other places, those events which we should
naturally regard as their effects.... Perhaps an illustration may make
the matter clear. Between a piece of orchestral music as played, and
the same piece of music as printed in the score, there is a certain
resemblance, which may be described as a resemblance in structure.
The resemblance is of such a sort that, when you know the rules,
you can infer the music from the score or the score from the music.
But suppose you had been stone deaf from birth, but had lived among
musical people. You could understand, if you had learned to speak
and to do lip-reading, that the musical scores represented something
quite different from themselves in intrinsic quality, though similar
in structure. The value of music would be completely unimaginable to
you, but you could infer all its mathematical characteristics, since
they are the same as those of the score. Now our knowledge of nature is
something like this. We can read the scores, and infer just so much as
our stone-deaf person could have inferred about music. But we have not
the advantages which he derived from association with musical people.
We cannot know whether the music represented by the scores is beautiful
or hideous; perhaps, in the last analysis, we cannot be quite sure that
the scores represent anything but themselves.”
“The theory of relativity has shown that most of traditional dynamics,
which was supposed to contain scientific laws, really consisted of
conventions as to measurement, and was strictly analogous to the
‘great law’ that there are always three feet to a yard. In particular,
this applies to the conservation of energy. This makes it plausible
to suppose that every apparent law of nature which strikes us as
reasonable is not really a law of nature, but a concealed convention,
plastered on to nature by our love of what we, in our arrogance, choose
to consider rational. Eddington hints that a real law of nature is
likely to stand out by the fact that it appears to us irrational,
since in that case it is less likely that we have invented it to
satisfy our intellectual taste. And from this point of view he inclines
to the belief that the quantum-principle is the first real law of
nature that has been discovered in physics.
“This raises a somewhat important question: Is the world ‘rational,’
i. e., such as to conform to our intellectual habits? Or is it
‘irrational,’ i. e., not such as we should have made it if we had been
in the position of the Creator? I do not propose to suggest an answer
to this question.”
No, we do not know whether the world is such as we would have made
it if we had been in the position of the Creator. But it is possible
for us to gain some intelligent idea of what we can and should make
of our world so far as lies within our human power and understanding.
Throughout all historic times men have striven to attain that insight,
discrimination and foreknowledge which would enable them to become
“legislators of values”--to give their existence quality and their
experiences an order of preference that would lend beauty and harmony
and some permanence to the half-chaotic stream of events and objects
which swept through their lives. This is the aim of the pursuit of
knowledge. It is to give to existence an “order of rank.” What if the
order be a human one? General coöperation in its development is what we
mean by culture. And education is not mere perpetuation of the order of
the past. The hierarchy of values must be constantly recreated if it is
to survive. Knowledge of the past is the inspiration to such creative
effort and knowledge of nature is a guide to it. A generation ago
William James, whose philosophy of science was thoroughly Humanistic,
suggested that the fascination of the pursuit of knowledge was that
we might thus be in at the places where truth is actually in the
making, and that we should never know what sort of world this would be
“till the last man’s vote is in and counted.” What we are to make of
this unfinished world depends largely upon the power and wisdom and
appreciation of value which we may attain through our education.