impulse which is lacking in the uneducated; the purpose can only be to
enlarge the scope of those that human nature provides, by increasing
the number and variety of attendant thoughts, and by showing where the
most permanent satisfaction is to be found. Under the impulse of a
Calvinistic horror of the "natural man," this obvious truth has been
too often misconceived in the training of the young; "nature" has been
falsely regarded as excluding all that is best in what is natural, and
the endeavour to teach virtue has led to the production of stunted and
contorted hypocrites instead of full-grown human beings. From such
mistakes in education a better psychology or a kinder heart is
beginning to preserve the present generation; we need, therefore,
waste no more words on the theory that the purpose of education is to
thwart or eradicate nature.
But although nature must supply the initial force of desire, nature is
not, in the civilised man, the spasmodic, fragmentary, and yet violent
set of impulses that it is in the savage. Each impulse has its
constitutional ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection,
through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, and
temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying impulse which may be
called wisdom. In this way education destroys the crudity of
instinct, and increases through knowledge the wealth and variety of
the individual's contacts with the outside world, making him no longer
an isolated fighting unit, but a citizen of the universe, embracing
distant countries, remote regions of space, and vast stretches of past
and future within the circle of his interests. It is this simultaneous
softening in the insistence of desire and enlargement of its scope
that is the chief moral end of education.
Closely connected with this moral end is the more purely intellectual
aim of education, the endeavour to make us see and imagine the world
in an objective manner, as far as possible as it is in itself, and not
merely through the distorting medium of personal desire. The complete
attainment of such an objective view is no doubt an ideal,
indefinitely approachable, but not actually and fully realisable.
Education, considered as a process of forming our mental habits and
our outlook on the world, is to be judged successful in proportion as
its outcome approximates to this ideal; in proportion, that is to say,
as it gives us a true view of our place in society, of the relation of
the whole human society to its non-human environment, and of the
nature of the non-human world as it is in itself apart from our
desires and interests. If this standard is admitted, we can return to
the consideration of science, inquiring how far science contributes to
such an aim, and whether it is in any respect superior to its rivals
in educational practice.
II
Two opposite and at first sight conflicting merits belong to science
as against literature and art. The one, which is not inherently
necessary, but is certainly true at the present day, is hopefulness
as to the future of human achievement, and in particular as to the
useful work that may be accomplished by any intelligent student. This
merit and the cheerful outlook which it engenders prevent what might
otherwise be the depressing effect of another aspect of science, to my
mind also a merit, and perhaps its greatest merit--I mean the
irrelevance of human passions and of the whole subjective apparatus
where scientific truth is concerned. Each of these reasons for
preferring the study of science requires some amplification. Let us
begin with the first.
In the study of literature or art our attention is perpetually riveted
upon the past: the men of Greece or of the Renaissance did better than
any men do now; the triumphs of former ages, so far from facilitating
fresh triumphs in our own age, actually increase the difficulty of
fresh triumphs by rendering originality harder of attainment; not only
is artistic achievement not cumulative, but it seems even to depend
upon a certain freshness and _naïveté_ of impulse and vision which
civilisation tends to destroy. Hence comes, to those who have been
nourished on the literary and artistic productions of former ages, a
certain peevishness and undue fastidiousness towards the present, from
which there seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism which
ignores tradition and in the search after originality achieves only
the eccentric. But in such vandalism there is none of the simplicity
and spontaneity out of which great art springs: theory is still the
canker in its core, and insincerity destroys the advantages of a
merely pretended ignorance.
The despair thus arising from an education which suggests no
pre-eminent mental activity except that of artistic creation is wholly
absent from an education which gives the knowledge of scientific
method. The discovery of scientific method, except in pure
mathematics, is a thing of yesterday; speaking broadly, we may say
that it dates from Galileo. Yet already it has transformed the world,
and its success proceeds with ever-accelerating velocity. In science
men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which
they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the
appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the
successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one
man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can
apply it. No transcendent ability is required in order to make useful
discoveries in science; the edifice of science needs its masons,
bricklayers, and common labourers as well as its foremen,
master-builders, and architects. In art nothing worth doing can be
done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can
contribute to a supreme achievement.
In science the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method.
The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can
apply the method with fresh vigour, unimpaired by the previous labour
of perfecting it; but the mental calibre of the thought required for
their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the
first inventor of the method. There are in science immense numbers of
different methods, appropriate to different classes of problems; but
over and above them all, there is something not easily definable,
which may be called _the_ method of science. It was formerly customary
to identify this with the inductive method, and to associate it with
the name of Bacon. But the true inductive method was not discovered by
Bacon, and the true method of science is something which includes
deduction as much as induction, logic and mathematics as much as
botany and geology. I shall not attempt the difficult task of stating
what the scientific method is, but I will try to indicate the temper
of mind out of which the scientific method grows, which is the second
of the two merits that were mentioned above as belonging to a
scientific education.
The kernel of the scientific outlook is a thing so simple, so obvious,
so seemingly trivial, that the mention of it may almost excite
derision. The kernel of the scientific outlook is the refusal to
regard our own desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to
the understanding of the world. Stated thus baldly, this may seem no
more than a trite truism. But to remember it consistently in matters
arousing our passionate partisanship is by no means easy, especially
where the available evidence is uncertain and inconclusive. A few
illustrations will make this clear.
Aristotle, I understand, considered that the stars must move in
circles because the circle is the most perfect curve. In the absence
of evidence to the contrary, he allowed himself to decide a question
of fact by an appeal to æsthetico-moral considerations. In such a case
it is at once obvious to us that this appeal was unjustifiable. We
know now how to ascertain as a fact the way in which the heavenly
bodies move, and we know that they do not move in circles, or even in
accurate ellipses, or in any other kind of simply describable curve.
This may be painful to a certain hankering after simplicity of pattern
in the universe, but we know that in astronomy such feelings are
irrelevant. Easy as this knowledge seems now, we owe it to the courage
and insight of the first inventors of scientific method, and more
especially of Galileo.
We may take as another illustration Malthus's doctrine of population.
This illustration is all the better for the fact that his actual
doctrine is now known to be largely erroneous. It is not his
conclusions that are valuable, but the temper and method of his
inquiry. As everyone knows, it was to him that Darwin owed an
essential part of his theory of natural selection, and this was only
possible because Malthus's outlook was truly scientific. His great
merit lies in considering man not as the object of praise or blame,
but as a part of nature, a thing with a certain characteristic
behaviour from which certain consequences must follow. If the
behaviour is not quite what Malthus supposed, if the consequences are
not quite what he inferred, that may falsify his conclusions, but does
not impair the value of his method. The objections which were made
when his doctrine was new--that it was horrible and depressing, that
people ought not to act as he said they did, and so on--were all such
as implied an unscientific attitude of mind; as against all of them,
his calm determination to treat man as a natural phenomenon marks an
important advance over the reformers of the eighteenth century and the
Revolution.
Under the influence of Darwinism the scientific attitude towards man
has now become fairly common, and is to some people quite natural,
though to most it is still a difficult and artificial intellectual
contortion. There is however, one study which is as yet almost wholly
untouched by the scientific spirit--I mean the study of philosophy.
Philosophers and the public imagine that the scientific spirit must
pervade pages that bristle with allusions to ions, germ-plasms, and
the eyes of shell-fish. But as the devil can quote Scripture, so the
philosopher can quote science. The scientific spirit is not an affair
of quotation, of externally acquired information, any more than
manners are an affair of the etiquette-book. The scientific attitude
of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests
of the desire to know--it involves suppression of hopes and fears,
loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we
become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without
preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it
is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some
relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to
what we can easily imagine it to be.
Now in philosophy this attitude of mind has not as yet been achieved.
A certain self-absorption, not personal, but human, has marked almost
all attempts to conceive the universe as a whole. Mind, or some aspect
of it--thought or will or sentience--has been regarded as the pattern
after which the universe is to be conceived, for no better reason, at
bottom, than that such a universe would not seem strange, and would
give us the cosy feeling that every place is like home. To conceive
the universe as essentially progressive or essentially deteriorating,
for example, is to give to our hopes and fears a cosmic importance
which _may_, of course, be justified, but which we have as yet no
reason to suppose justified. Until we have learnt to think of it in
ethically neutral terms, we have not arrived at a scientific attitude
in philosophy; and until we have arrived at such an attitude, it is
hardly to be hoped that philosophy will achieve any solid results.
I have spoken so far largely of the negative aspect of the scientific
spirit, but it is from the positive aspect that its value is derived.
The instinct of constructiveness, which is one of the chief incentives
to artistic creation, can find in scientific systems a satisfaction
more massive than any epic poem. Disinterested curiosity, which is the
source of almost all intellectual effort, finds with astonished
delight that science can unveil secrets which might well have seemed
for ever undiscoverable. The desire for a larger life and wider
interests, for an escape from private circumstances, and even from the
whole recurring human cycle of birth and death, is fulfilled by the
impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else. To all these
must be added, as contributing to the happiness of the man of science,
the admiration of splendid achievement, and the consciousness of
inestimable utility to the human race. A life devoted to science is
therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very
best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate
planet.
III
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP[9]
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow
wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not
given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He
smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be
performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the
planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid
crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean,
and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest
trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters
breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the
monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of
thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for
worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world,
that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of
life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a
hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for
we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing
worthy of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving
that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And
when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from
his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to
forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until
he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been
appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that
thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the
strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible.
And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in
renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which
crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.
"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed
again.'"
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves
and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of
atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's
achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe
in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so
nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to
stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm
foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth
be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature
as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is
that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a
child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with
knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works
of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the
parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine,
to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in
the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in
this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his
outward life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence
before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he
respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before
his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship.
Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture,
of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating
the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is
most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be
appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch--as
such creeds may be generically called--is in essence the cringing
submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the
thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence
of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and
receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given
to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though
they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject
them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the
attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the
divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness
there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own
day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining
that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not
content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the
position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially
religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact
is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God,
all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should
be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to
us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our
God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of
our own conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and
Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the
result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile
universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of
our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us
respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false
"recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often
bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things
that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and
must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve
our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which
life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet
with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it
seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true
freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own
love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the
insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit
perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty
planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let
us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a
spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary
to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a
hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively
hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears
to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But
indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be
occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from
which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is
necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our
thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom
consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our
thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of
resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world
of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we
half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is
possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by
the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no
longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal
goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of
evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding
that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are
yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form
part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced
is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason
for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying
our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods,
when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To
every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the
young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the
whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not
credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of
duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for
us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may
nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune
comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away
our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is
not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.