CHAPTER V

THE FAIRY HALLS OF SCIENCE

1. THE IDOLS OF THE TRIBE

Whenever I stand beside one of those wonders of modern achievement, a

great turbine engine, for example, smoothly and silently performing

the work of a myriad men, I feel like taking off my hat to the

geniuses (for the most part unnamed and unknown) who have made such

a thing possible. There may be two opinions about the social effect

of machinery, but there can be no two opinions about the prodigies of

intelligence which have gone into its making.

Everybody knows that machinery is scientific. And because of the vast

esteem which our master mechanics rightly enjoy, the word Science has

come to command a reverence once accorded only to the name of God.

It is no longer possible to advertise a toy or a tooth-brush without

calling it “scientific.”

But what is Science? Is it a synonym for Truth? By no means. It is not

even a search for truth. Truth is something general; the highest truth

is universal. The search for it is called Philosophy. Science, as we

now understand it, did not begin to have an independent existence until

it definitely abandoned Truth as its province and devoted itself to the

study of those--not general but particular phenomena known as facts.

When we say that Science is classified knowledge we mean that it is

our classified knowledge of facts. And in that word “classified” lies

the root of its only difference from common sense.

Science is also a method for ascertaining new facts as well as the

classification of those we already know. What do we mean when we say

that science is a method? What is its method? Every schoolboy can

answer, “The method of science is the experimental method.”

The experimental method itself is less generally understood. To

experiment without an object in view is like starting on a journey

with no destination in mind. In the vernacular phrase, it does not

get you anywhere. The object of an experimenter is always to prove or

to disprove something. And what is there for him to prove? A fact,

once established, is already proven. But behind one fact there always

lies another, and behind that yet others. We soon leave the world of

certainty and find ourselves in the world of theories. It is a theory,

then, which the experimentalist seeks to prove--his own theory, while

disproving that of somebody else. Theories, dignified by the name

hypotheses, are as necessary to science as are microscopes and scales.

They are invented generalities used as conveniences in a region where

Truths are too much to expect. A hypothesis does not even pretend to

be true. It is merely the best approximation, the best guess, possible

under the circumstances.

Every scientist worthy of the name has at one time or another said

something like the following: “The only thing we positively know about

a hypothesis is that it is to a certain extent wrong. Progress is made

by gradually substituting the less erroneous for the more erroneous,

until the hypothesis is finally established in a modified form as a

fact, or becomes so untenable that it must be abandoned altogether. In

either case, it has served its turn.” Thus Darwin, true scientist that

he was, characterized his theories as to the descent of man as “highly

speculative,” adding, “Some will no doubt prove erroneous.”[98]

The ideal scientist, therefore, never becomes dogmatic, never cocksure.

He knows that though Truth be not relative, Knowledge is. He forever

deals with conclusions which are highly tentative, and constantly

waits for that appeal to experience which will reveal his mistakes.

Unfortunately, scientists are but men, and the ideal scientist no more

exists than does the ideal Christian. Only those whose specialties keep

them constantly close to experience remain truly scientific for any

length of time--which is one of the reasons why most of our progress

has been made in physics and chemistry.

Francis Bacon, who is generally credited with having first put science

upon the firm ground of inductive reasoning, or generalizing from

observed particulars, says in his _Novum Organum_:[99] “Having first

determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to

experience; and bending her into conformity ... leads her about like a

captive in a procession.”

How well Bacon understood our human nature’s proneness to determine

questions according to its will, and then to bend experience to fit

the occasion! But he did not call this method the scientific method.

On the contrary, he described it as one of those “Idols of the Tribe,”

or habits leading to error, to which everybody is subject. And he only

_hoped_ that science would avoid it as much as possible.

True science has avoided it--as much as possible. But how little

true science we have! The experimental method is so limited in its

application that there are few matters important to human life which

can be put to the test of immediate experience. We must wait long

years for experience in general to tell its tale, and even then its

conclusions are not always convincing. To be convincing, experience

must take place under conditions of our own contriving, every unknown

influence eliminated. And the experience must be repeated time and

again. The field of true science is, therefore, one of the narrowest in

the world. Much that goes by the name of science is but semi-science,

pseudo-science, false science, or no science at all.

The ideal scientist, having suffered an initial experience, then forms

a tentative hypothesis merely to direct his subsequent experiments,

and never for an instant permits his enthusiasm for theory to warp his

judgment regarding fact. But as there are no ideal scientists, what is

to be done? Bacon thus notes what is to be expected:

“The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down

... forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and

although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary,

yet [the understanding] either does not observe, or despises them, or

it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and

injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first

conclusions.”[100]

How highly fateful, then, must have been those first propositions

which modern science laid down in its infancy. But man is not to be

balked by his own infirmities. Since he cannot hope to abolish the

worship of this particular Idol of the Tribe, cannot hope to be led by

non-existent ideal scientists, he will make a virtue of his necessity

and reap what good he may from his very shortcomings. Men will not

abandon their fetishes and become reasonable. Very well, then, we

will incorporate the Idol of the Tribe in our general method, and let

abuses correct themselves. We will give them rope until they are hanged

thereby.

This is precisely what has been done. Bacon’s Idol of the Tribe, the

human tendency to bend experience to suit theory, has been put upon a

pedestal and crowned with the high-sounding name of a principle called

“The Economy of Hypotheses.”

Of two possible explanations of a phenomenon, that one is chosen which

requires the fewer suppositions, the least departure from hypotheses

already existing.

This is nothing more nor less than the principle of conservatism,

and probably, in the long run, it does more good than harm. It is a

protection against wild and radical theories. It gives men a chance

for that long and intense application which they will give to nothing

but to the defense of old and cherished beliefs. But it makes the

correction of a fundamental error a very slow business, and though a

part of the now recognized methods of science, it is not scientific.

It is, however, immensely popular, this principle of the economy of

hypotheses. The other ideal--that of submitting continually to the

stern discipline of trial--never appealed to the man in the street.

For ages he was prejudiced against science altogether. He left it to

monks and such people. Then, finally--and not so very long ago--the

idea, having proved a money-maker, was “sold” to him. He swallowed it

hook, line and sinker, until today he will not admit that he has a

pain in the stomach unless he finds in his basic theories something

which will let him account for it. What we need now is to be reminded

to be economical not with our hypotheses but with our credulity, our

acceptance of hypotheses as final. For there are still many things in

heaven and earth not dreamed of in our major syntheses.

A major synthesis, of course, is that broadest, most shadowy, least

dependable, but widely inclusive hypothesis by which it is sought to

bind all minor theories into one more or less coherent system. It is

the point where science most nearly approaches to philosophy, the

point where, according to its own premises regarding the authority of

experience, it should be most cautious and humble. The making of a

major synthesis is an awesome business. The fall of a major synthesis

marks the end of an epoch. We are now living at the end of such an

epoch, though the pseudo-scientists do not appear to be yet aware

of the fact. And the major synthesis which has fallen is that which

sought to bind all phenomena together as manifestations of matter--the

Mechanist Hypothesis.

That the Mechanist Hypothesis should be the first generalization of

modern science was inevitable. It began with astronomy, the first

science to dare to call itself “exact.” In astronomy we cannot

experiment. We cannot take planets and comets and suns, and subject

them to laboratory conditions. But we can at least make observations;

and what we observe appears to be matter, pure and simple.

Then came physics and chemistry, throwing off the attempt to be magic

and buckling down to practical jobs. Both experiment and observation

were possible here--and still matter held the field. Matter, it was

soon noted, had exceedingly regular habits. And when it failed to

follow one habit, continued observation would discover that it was only

following some other. These habits came to be called laws, and it was

practically impossible not to confound laws with force.

In the back of the scientific mind were those human laws--customs,

behind which was Government, always ready to manifest itself as the

force in a policeman’s club. And back of that was the idea of the laws

of God--of a real God with all the force of the universe in His hand.

“Our laws are the laws of God,” said the early scientist, quite

rightly. And then, after he had abandoned that ancient idea, the

“hypothesis of a God,” he continued to say it, not realizing how

ridiculous and empty his notion of “law” had become. Eventually he

did begin to see this, and was minded to drop force altogether. A law

became merely the way things acted under given circumstances, and force

merely a persistence in such action--in other words, the way in which

other things would act which stood in the way.

A given amount of some substance put into a scale pan will lift the

same amount of the same substance to a level with it, and this behavior

of the substance in the second pan is the measure of the “force” of

gravity moving the substance in the first pan. As to the nature of

force itself, the scientist came to say that it lay outside of his

province--which was well and good. Pseudo-sciences went further, and

said that there was no such thing as force--quite another pair of

shoes. But long before this, which marks the end and not the beginning

of the last scientific epoch, the Mechanist Hypothesis had been

formulated in terms recognizing both force and matter, and brought to

the attention of the average man through the writings of Newton.

Sir Isaac Newton had one of the greatest minds granted to a human being

since the Reformation; yet inadvertently he did his fellows about the

most evil turn which modern history records. He robbed them of their

belief in free will--or if not quite that, he at least induced them to

abandon those fundamental propositions upon which alone the belief in

free will can reasonably be based.

Free will presupposes force--real force--at the disposition of the

will. A will without force is a powerless will--no will at all. And

a man without will is not a man; he is not even an animal. He is on

a level with his own lawn-mower. Upon free will depends not only all

religion, all ethics, all sense of human responsibility, but our

physical and mental well-being, our happiness, our very self-respect.

If we are but weathercocks, blown this way and that by every breeze,

it is folly to talk of striving; of reasoning; of good or of evil; of

loyalty or of treason; of anything which makes us act indeed like human

beings. It is folly to speak even of consciousness. What good could

it do us? We might as well surrender to Dr. Watson at once--and it is

folly for him to write books to tell us so, though a folly which he

cannot help. To rob man of his will would be to rob him of his life,

and to rob him of his belief in the freedom of his will is to rob

him of all faith in any means proposed to make life better. Yet our

mechanists one and all pretend to be philanthropists, and nearly all

are reformers. Every day of their lives is a self-contradiction.

Sir Isaac Newton, when he saw the apple fall and deduced the law of

gravitation, did not intend to precipitate another Fall of Man. He

seems to have been quite unmindful of the evil reputation of the fruit

in question. Nor would much harm have been done had not his discovery

been one of those rare scientific ventures which are “good theatre.”

Everybody has seen apples fall. Nobody can ignore gravity. The law

was the best newspaper story of a scientific sort since Copernicus and

Galileo dislodged the earth from the center of the universal stage. It

gave Newton such prestige that his slightest word became Gospel.

Much of this prestige was deserved. His laws were, and still

are, mighty monuments of human genius. The trouble came from the

implications that were drawn from them. The mechanistic hypothesis

had long been in existence--no fruit of science, but both root and

branch of an old mechanistic philosophy. Descartes had brought it up

to date. So Newton adopted it in preference to any other philosophy.

And his worship of that Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses,

led him to arrange his laws so as to cause as little disturbance to

Cartesianism as possible.

The result was a world in which the Conservation of Energy was the only

real God. Neither energy nor matter could be created or destroyed.

Whatever went into anything, that or its equivalent came out. A “free”

creature gives out more energy than it receives. Therefore to believe

in freedom was to be crazy.

Moreover, the “laws” did account very well for most of the known

physical phenomena of the day. There were then no Becquerel rays,

X-rays, actinium, radium, protons, electrons, quanta or ultramicroscopy

to be dealt with. Accurate observation was in its infancy. Materialism

was in the very air. Had not science won its first triumphs by looking

at matter and ignoring everything else? Newton lived some two hundred

years ago. His “closed system” of a universe in which all creative

activity had ceased, though it gave us a life without a future, a

life wherein everything had already as good as happened, a life that

was really a moving death with its future behind it--this all fitted

amazingly well with the static ideas of the age. It was a Calvin’s

universe, unlit by the fires even of fanaticism. Prayer was futile.

Initiative an illusion. Heaven and hell either non-existent or

foredoomed. We were here but to turn the pages of a book printed long

before we were born.

Actual mechanics, busy at their work-benches, satisfied with a

hypothesis which was accurate enough for their immediate needs, thought

very little of these far-reaching implications. But here were weapons

forged to a nicety for the hands of the leaders of that vast movement

which today we loosely and inaccurately call modern paganism--it

being neither pagan nor modern, but an old, old disease marked by

the hardening of the arteries of the soul self-deprived of conscious

communion with God. Pains were taken to bring Newton’s findings home

to every intellect. Popular science became intensely interesting,

and hot with fervor; for in reality it was not science at all but

anti-religious propaganda--and this even when it sugar-coated itself,

as it sometimes did, with phrases having what might pass for a pious

taste.

But it was more than even the “tough-minded”--that is to say,

sclerotic-brained--long could endure. Oliver L. Reiser, of the

University of Pittsburg (a writer for _The Monist_) goes so far as

to say that “had Newton been able to foresee the inevitable logical

consequences of his doctrine in the godless universe of Laplace, he

might have been constrained towards a more hospitable regard for the

views of Leibniz”--the reference, of course, being to the attempt of

Leibniz to reconcile the mechanical Cartesian universe with the idea

that creation, after all, has a meaning and a purpose. Newton, indeed,

might have done even more than this.

But he died leaving us nothing but a big machine which continued

to dominate men’s minds until about the year 1890, when the whole

thing suddenly broke down. Says R. A. Millikan, of the Norman Bridge

Laboratory of Physics, writing recently for _Scribner’s_: “In [the

discovery of radio-activity and the electrical constitution of

matter] the physical world changed in our thinking over night in its

fundamental elements from a fixed, changeless, static, dead thing,

to a changing, evolving, dynamic, living organism. Two principles,

conservation of mass and conservation of energy, are now gone, clean

gone, as distinct and separate verities.” In other words, matter and

energy are now thought to be capable of changing, the one into the

other. In the opinion of G. Urbain,[101] the experiments of Rutherford

entitle us to say that there are “two chemical elements, the electron

and proton, out of which the universe is made.” But--“we physical

chemists of today do not tell what matter is.... The least metaphysical

among us all see in electrons and protons merely centers of convergence

of lines of force. That evidently explains nothing fundamental....

It makes for us a world formed of minute hairy points, the hairs

strikingly abstract.”

So matter itself is force and nothing else--or rather it is two forces,

electrons (negative electricity) and protons (positive electricity)

locked together in a strange conflict whose resistance to interference

gives tangibility and “hardness” to the things of the world--all of

which sounds rather as if it had been translated from the Rig-Veda.

Gone by the board is the idea that matter is the fundamental reality,

that nothing can happen in the mind but what has first happened in the

brain.

But has mind itself to obey the old law? Is it but a more subtile

manifestation of the preponderance of exterior forces? We shall have to

penetrate yet farther into these fairy halls of science before finding

an answer to that question.

2. SOME NEBULOUS MATTERS

Of all the facts of the old science, none was more firmly established

than what was known as the “Nebular Hypothesis.” The name “hypothesis”

clung to it always, because “nebular hypothesis” makes an imposing

mouthful of syllables. Yet it was everywhere treated as a fact. Indeed,

after the “fact” of the conservation of energy, it was just about the

fact of facts. What has become of it now?

A. Vibert Douglas, M.B.E., M.Sc., writing in _Discovery_ for August,

1925, says, “The nebular hypothesis of Laplace and the planetesimal

hypothesis of Chamberlain have gone into the history of science as

great and lasting _monuments_ to their originators.”

Monuments! Memorials marking the last resting place of things now dead.

How carefully Herbert Spencer used to explain the manner in which a lot

of star-dust, scattered somehow through the space marked roughly by the

orbit of the planet Neptune, started to contract, revolve, grow warm,

and to throw off rings (since known as Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Earth,

Mars, _et cetera_) and ended by central concentration in our glowing

sun. There was nothing difficult to understand about the theory except

the language in which Spencer couched it--that is, unless one tried to

look beyond and into some of the things which it took for granted. In

that case certain questions arose. What scattered the dust in the first

place? Would it scatter it again, again, and yet again, thus creating

the universe of recurrent phenomena imagined by the horror-loving

Nietzsche? What force separated the rings from the mass and rolled them

neatly up into planets? Why haven’t Saturn’s rings rolled up? Will

they, in time? What is keeping them back? These matters, and various

details which had been observed but by few, troubled the mathematicians.

They hardly caused the average citizen to lose a wink of sleep. Saturn

looked like a working model preserved for school-room purposes. And

the nebular hypothesis was a pleasant story to tell to children. But

the contrary observations increased and multiplied--for the most part

without getting into the newspapers--until now we have Vibert, with

a host of competent astronomers ready to echo his words, saying, “A

nebula giving rise to a solar system [is] an impossible hypothesis in

the light of modern knowledge.”

The hypothesis itself has not been altogether carried away to the

bone-yard. Like an old and faithful horse, it has been taken from the

shafts and turned out to grass so that it may enjoy its declining years

in comparative peace. The latter pastures of the nebular hypothesis

are sufficiently large, for it is being used now to help make stellar

systems. As there is little in this far region save assumptions to

drag around, the work is light. Fit ending for an honorable career.

But astronomers have grown cautious. It is not likely that any of them

will be rash enough ever again to impose the weight of a real star,

let alone a system, upon the already broken back. They at least know

the hypothesis for what it is--a hypothesis, and a dying one. Only

laymen, half asleep over their Sunday supplements, now think it was

ever anything else.

And what has come to take its place? The “Big Star Theory.” An

astronomer named Jeans brought forward this entry in 1919. He said

that if a big star had ever come near enough to the sun, it might have

caused a fearful tide of solar substance--a long arm of stuff more or

less gaseous and very hot--to reach out millions of miles into space.

And from this hypothetical arm (there were really two, but let us not

complicate matters with details), broken into several pieces, the

planets might have originated.

This time there was plenty of force at hand, enough to satisfy all the

equations which the mathematicians were likely to contrive. No need

to try to think how the dust had been scattered. The force came from

the big star, which Jeans made a very big star indeed, with a diameter

of eight thousand million kilometers--say about twice the distance of

the farthest planet from the sun. Anyway, there was a very big star

concerned. Too big. The mathematicians could not use all the force thus

put at their disposal. Dr. Harold Jeffers therefore reduced the mammoth

to a diameter of a mere forty million kilometers.

The mathematicians still objected. It was no longer a question of

force. But the theory of probability, they said, made it almost

unreasonable to suppose that a collision or near collision could

actually have happened within the lifetime of the sun. So astronomers

set to work again, some of them to lengthen the past life of the sun,

others to bring the stars in general closer together so as to increase

the risks of collision. Both parties succeeded admirably. Jeans himself

published a calculation which made the sun a million million years

of age--seven thousand times older than any other calculation had

ever made it. There were now seven thousand times more chances of a

collision having taken place than there had been when he started.

Others (you may read an account of their observations in an article

on the Spiral Nebulæ, by C. Wirtz, in _Scientia_, November, 1925),

discovered that when you look long enough and deep enough into the gulf

of space (about three hundred thousand light-years is as far as you

need to go), it looks as if all matter were outward bound, and moving

faster and faster all the time. Therefore the stars used to be much

more thickly placed here around home than they are now. A collision

becomes easy to imagine.

But why is matter going away from here? Apparently for the same reason

that rats leave a sinking ship. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, ought

to be five times more thickly settled with stars. As things stand, it

is much too light for its size. It cannot hold itself together and is

being deserted by its outer fringe of suns all the time. Nor is this

the worst of it. The very matter of our solar system is fifty-two times

less dense than it should be. Its critical point--that is, the point

where it will fly to pieces at the slightest provocation--has long

since been passed. Some day, a few million years hence, when you get up

in the morning the morning is likely not to be there. This is not such

a good story to tell to the children.

Nor is the situation any better if you turn your back to the stars, and

look at those little stars within things which we call atoms. Very much

to the contrary. Some meteorologists created considerable consternation

a few years ago by prophesying that one of the glacial epochs, probably

the last one, was coming back to play a return engagement--decidedly

not by request. But what is a glacial epoch or two compared with atoms

in the state ours are in?

“We owe to Sir Ernest Rutherford [the great English physicist] what

is basic in our actual ideas about atoms,” says Urbain.[102] This

savant was once a pupil of Pierre Curie, discoverer of radium, and

speaks with authority. And he asks: “As to the atom, have we attained

something real, or only a model, symbolic of observed phenomena?” He

then answers his own question by declaring that “it is difficult to

say.... Rutherford allowed the electrons [in the atom] to radiate,

since it was supposed that the model must obey the standard laws.” The

difficulty was that such an atom as Rutherford’s ought, all agreed,

to be luminous. And all atoms are not luminous. Another difficulty

was this. “Each outer electron must gradually approach the central

nucleus,”--I still quote from Urbain--“finally falling into it, which

means death.” Presumably it is not intended to be implied that the same

electrons which were allowed to radiate ended by falling into the thing

they radiated from. Anyway, Urbain continues: “We might have accepted

the death of the stars ... but we cannot that of the atoms. That would

mean a definite death of the universe.”

For once, even scientists were appalled. What was to be done?

Something, evidently. So an astronomer named Bohr rose to the occasion.

He constructed--not another atom, but another “model.” This one was

guaranteed to last forever, and if real atoms would only conform to it

all would be well.

“Bohr’s atom,” says Urbain, “is not a clear explanation, for the

privileged orbits [he gave the electrons ‘privileged orbits’ to keep

them contented without either flying off into space or into the

deadly nucleus] are not understandable in themselves; neither are

the quanta of energy set free by the electrons in leaping from one

privileged orbit to another.... Bohr’s models have their own laws with

no necessary relation to the law of ordinary experiments, and he thus

turned scientific thought into a new and unknown direction.... In the

future are theories to be built upon such contradictions?”

Apparently they are. We have now observed so many things that it is

flatly impossible to grapple with them, or to find out which ones

are so and which are not. The “new and unknown direction” into which

scientific thought has been turned is clearly that of imagining

artificial working-models known to be at variance with reality, getting

what satisfaction can be had from the models, and leaving reality to

shift for itself until some really serious collision with fact damages

the model beyond repair. It is not such a new direction, after all,

but merely a new frankness which acknowledges the shortcomings of a

hypothesis from the start without a period of pretending that it is

a genuine “explanation.” Every new discovery makes the universe--not

easier, but more difficult to explain. Progress uncovers our ignorance

much faster than it brings us knowledge--arm-chair progress, of course

excepted.

So Urbain is thankful for the new model atom, and says that “Bohr, in

reviving our hopes, is a great benefactor.” Adding, “It seems necessary

either to resign ourselves to not understanding, as Bohr has done, or

to resign ourselves to a model in flagrant violation with experience.”

Those sufficiently resigned to not understanding I now ask to return

with me for a short and final visit to those suburban stellar districts

situated some three hundred thousand light-years from our sun, where

matter is moving ever faster and faster away from us. By a strange

contradiction, time in those regions seems to be moving slower and

slower, as if tired with the long journey and no longer able to keep

up the killing pace set by the stars. Light, too, appears to be

losing the race. Professor Michelson, of the University of Chicago,

established the velocity of light not long ago at 299,796 kilometers

per second--roughly 186,000 miles. But now Monsignor E. J. Gheury

de Braye, in an article in _L’Astronomie_, official organ of the

Astronomical Society of France, declares that the velocity of light

decreases by four kilometers every second. We may perhaps grasp a

moment’s understanding by saying that this is relativity, that light

merely travels slower in comparison with the quickened pace of time and

matter in the outer stellar spaces.

This, however, will not serve us long, for W. de Sitter, the Dutch

astronomer, taking all these things into consideration, must needs

offer an “explanation.”

“The world of de Sitter,” says Wirtz in summing it up, “is a

four-dimensional continuum of space and time, forming the surface of a

sphere in five-dimensional co-ordinates.”

If you look wise and pretend in scientific circles that you understand

this, you go to the foot of the class. A four-dimensional sphere with

a surface in five-dimensional co-ordinates does not pretend to be

comprehensible. To declare it to be graspable by the human mind is to

insult it. But it can be used in equations, like any other “imaginary”

quantity, though--again like any other imaginary quantity--it is quite

unimaginable.

Imaginary quantities are not such awesome nonentities. Anybody can

make a few for himself and play with them as well as can anybody else.

Let us take nothing to begin with, thus--0. Write a 2 under it--0/2.

We have now one-half of nothing. Now multiply a cipher by 2, and we

have twice nothing, or 2(0)--not for a moment to be confounded with

twenty. Then one half of 2(0), or twice nothing, equals two times 0/2,

or one-half of nothing, because each is equal to nothing at all and

things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other--and

for various other reasons.

Abstractions are other imaginary no-things which cannot be imagined.

A mathematical point has, by hypothesis, neither length, breadth nor

thickness. We always think of it as a very small dot, having all three.

Yet in dealing with it, mathematically, we ignore these dimensions in

the result. A line has length, but no breadth or thickness. We think

of it as something long and very slender. It is the edge of a solid. A

plane has length and breadth but no thickness, theoretically speaking.

We think of it as a very thin slice of a solid. Try to think of the

surface of a solid without thinking of the solid! Abstractions are

conveniences when we wish to travel light without carrying all the

mystery of material reality about with us. They are like Bohr’s model

atoms. And like all other unreal things, they have a danger of their

own.

The practical man, especially if he be a physicist or a chemist, a

worker in those domains where our greatest scientific triumphs have

been won, has experience always at his elbow ready to correct his

errors whenever they pass beyond a certain point. Invent a machine, or

a shaving soap, and you are immediately compelled to prove that your

invention will work. And the only proof which those who invest in such

things will accept is the sort of proof which we require of a pudding

when we eat it.

Experience has shown that not even the best calculations ever quite

verify themselves when put to the test of novel circumstances. A small

model may run smoothly, yet a large machine made in the same way will

develop unexpected flaws. Even increased size is sufficient to upset

the forecast. A machine may run for a week, yet become cantankerous

if we try to make it run for a year. Time adds a new element. So does

speed. Chemical compounds which cannot be made to explode in minute

quantities--coal dust, for example--sometimes work havoc in large

quantities.

Now the physical sciences, like chemistry and astronomy, deal with the

simplest and most tangible things of which we have any knowledge. Yet

those who make them their study confess themselves baffled at every

turn. In these dreadful regions, Science, the real Simon Pure, humble,

beautiful and courageous, tries to maintain itself under the pitiless

bombardment of facts, smoky with the infinite mystery from which they

come, that rain every year more violently upon its defenseless head.

What has become of the Sunday-supplement, positive, dogmatic,

you-are-a-fool-if-you-do-not-agree-with-what-I-say attitude? These

men, who do not wish to be mystics, engage in more ghostly talk than

did the delegates to the Meta-Physic Congress which met last year

at the Sorbonne in Paris to discuss telepathy, haunted houses, and

kindred matters. Gone is the cocksure vanity of the closing nineteenth

century. Gone is the God-defying materialistic impiety, the arrogance,

the hard-heartedness of an older and more ignorant day. In this

ultimate dim Thule where the higher syntheses are born, kissing the

dust is today the only permitted posture. Hypotheses hardly dare to

call themselves even hypotheses any more. They are content to be known

as assumptions, postulations, fancies, guesses, and thankful if they

may be allowed to live their unreal existences from the time of the

publication of one pamphlet to that of the next. Early modern science

was drunk with victory. New science is dizzy with awe.

How comes it, then, that our Dr. Watsons can say that there is no

mystery in the building of a man? A man! Ah, that is different. We have

as yet hardly touched upon those positively certain “sciences” which

deal with human nature, with love, life and destiny.

3. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES

Hans Driesch, at Jena, working in the very laboratory of Ernst Haeckel

shortly after the death of that master argument-maker for the mechanist

conception of life, inadvertently broke a fertile egg in two--and

thereby broke not in two but into smithereens the whole mechanism of

the mechanist which he had been taught to defend. For the egg hatched,

each half producing a perfect creature as if nothing had happened.

Driesch then reduced a fertile egg fairly to hash--and still each

fragment functioned like a whole egg. As long as the egg was not

killed--and the eggs of primitive creatures are tough eggs except

where temperature and certain poisons are concerned--hashing merely

multiplied the hatch.

The biologist was much disturbed. For it seemed fairly obvious that

if the design which growth was to follow lay anywhere in the material

of the eggs, division of said eggs would--if it did not bring the

whole vital process to an end--result at least in the division of the

incubated organisms. One half of an egg should, if it hatched at all,

hatch a head; the other half a tail--and so on. But this not being

what happened, design could no longer be located in egg material. Any

part of the material was ready to develop into either head, or tail, or

wing, or antennæ, or what not, according to the direction of something

beyond the dividing process--something which remained whole in each

part.

Perhaps the experiment was not conclusive. In these days of model

atoms no doubt somebody can construct a model egg, each atom of which

is, potentially, a complete chicken. But what troubled Driesch was

the immediate necessity of violating a primary principle and being

compelled to be extravagant in the matter of hypotheses. Even a model

egg required a great many changes in Haeckelianism.

Now if Driesch had been of an older generation or of a different

persuasion, he would have found the ideas of Haeckel, not the idea of

exterior design, extravagant. For one of the most ancient hypotheses

in the world assumes that the design for everything lies outside of

its material self. And I sometimes wonder if the principle of economy

should not have been earlier applied, before so many of us abandoned

this grand old major synthesis which found its highest expression in a

belief in God. If it did not explain everything, it at least left room

for the explanation of everything. All we had to do was to struggle

for a truer and clearer conception of what it meant. Astronomers,

for instance, would not now be so hard put to it in the matter of

inventing Big Star theories, nor physicists in making model atoms

which neither work nor exist, if they were at liberty to suppose that

a forceful spirit lay behind phenomena, lending a guiding hand to all.

Intellectually that would be at least as satisfactory as points of

force surrounded by highly abstract hairs.

But the idea of God as it emerged from the nineteenth century presented

itself to many minds as the idea of a rather ridiculous monster--the

monster that Sinclair Lewis dared to strike dead,--the monster that

Stephen Crane once fancied as lying “dead in heaven,” and at another

time warned not to shake its bloody spears at him if its “sublime

ears” did not wish to “hear curses.” Neither Crane nor Lewis need have

shocked anybody. They had each seen a straw man set up, and were but

proceeding to knock it down. The only shocking thing was the idea, the

deformity, which had been presented to them. Where it came from it is

not my present purpose to enquire.

Astronomers and physicists have now gone far beyond Crane and Lewis

and are looping back--saving their faces (i.e., hypotheses) as much

as possible--and picking up ever more and more of the ancient belief

thrown away in the hour of materialistic extravagance. Chemists, too,

are beginning to realize that there is no use going on and pretending

that our thoughts, our feelings, our every manifestation, can be

reduced to a mechanical basis, since not even a sea-urchin or a pismire

can be so reduced.

This something which we call life shows itself, ordinarily at least,

only when certain physical elements are present. But it shows

sufficient independence of these elements to make it impossible for any

rational, unprejudiced being with the facts before him to continue to

confound life with matter.

Yet many learned professors do continue to confound them. Why? In

some cases it is, perhaps, not too much to say that the holder of a

university degree is not necessarily in possession of all the facts.

And very few of us, professors or not, are without prejudice. We must

remember the Idol of the Tribe, the capacity of the mind to become so

clouded by passion and biased zeal that it sheds unwelcome evidence as

readily as a duck’s back sheds water.

It was Herbert Spencer who first popularized the notion that

materialistic science could explain everything. It had not been

invented with an eye to explaining everything--only a few things, with

the hope of getting hold of them in a way that might be useful. But so

great was the success of the early applications of the method that the

temptation to turn it into a synthetic philosophy was too great for

mortal to resist. Spencer had the advantage of not knowing very much.

His early education had been neglected. And his powers of invention

were practically without limit.

It is always easier to explain when not burdened with too much

first-hand knowledge. Hearsay, and what we learn from books, is the

stuff for theories. But the facts which have entered intimately into

our own lives are stubborn. We are too familiar with their edges to

fancy that they fit into whatever space may be contrived for them.

Ignorance is satisfied with almost any account. Those who deal a good

deal with retorts and crucibles may speak of men and women as retorts

and crucibles. This is impossible to those whose knowledge of human

nature has made them distinguished in affairs. The books of a closet

economist satisfy everybody but business men.

If you have spent much of your time in observing, say, the behavior

of rats on inclined planes, you may come to think of animals as

machines. One such investigator has recently discovered that rats are

“negatively geotropic.” That is, they are afraid of falling; and when

the plane is tipped will scramble away from the lower edge. A pet rat

would have taught him not only this, but that, under kind treatment,

the rat is one of the cleverest and most affectionate four-footed

creatures in existence. A scientist bores holes in a dog’s cheek to

measure his autocoid secretion; or he removes part of a dog’s brain,

scratches the animal’s leg, notes that a kick results, and comes out

of the laboratory convinced that we all walk--not with a desire to get

anywhere, but because of the irritating effects of the ground on the

soles of the feet. Go tell that story to a man who knows dogs!

Those who love and understand animals cannot be made to believe that

animals are devoid of sense and feeling, or act blindly in response

to stimuli. Why then should we listen only to those who know nothing

of animals and care less? Lovers of flowers will even go so far as

to attribute a sort of sentience to vegetation. Are they necessarily

wrong because their opinions are contradicted by teachers in flowerless

school-rooms?

J. C. Bose, the great Hindu scientist, has lately intrigued the whole

world by writing a book in which he shows that trees have eyes, nerves,

veins, something which corresponds to a heart; are capable of pain;

of fatigue; can be poisoned; and to a certain extent seem to remember

what has happened to them. What is the result? Why, our mechanists have

hurried to invert the Bose philosophy and to describe it with its heels

in the air. It is “_la fin du mythe de la force vitale_,” cries Pierre

Guitet-Vauquelin.[103] Bose, according to this ingenious writer, has

discovered “_l’unité de la matière vivante et non vivante_,” and the

conclusion is drawn that said unity has been arrived at by making the

_non vivante_ universal.

The Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses, has become a

Procrustean bed, to which everything must be stretched or cut to

fit. But unfortunately this particular bed was made by chemists and

physicists in Newton’s time to fit certain facts and approximations

to truth in which they were dealing for the moment. It was then a

convenient bit of furniture. Now it is very awkward. We cling to it

only for old time’s sake.

The modern experimental method as at first developed has proven

woefully inadequate when universally applied. Even the study of outward

behavior is very difficult, especially if the subject be human, for

we cannot duplicate in the laboratory the exact circumstances of real

life--and every variation is fatal to accuracy, especially as its

influence is often unsuspected and totally unknown. We cannot control

our own species, because we are not placed above it--though many of us

would like to be.

This entails another difficulty. As we are not above it in power, so

we are not above it in intelligence. The mind in attempting to study

itself has the disadvantage of being both the eye and the picture.

No wonder the so-called social sciences have failed to duplicate the

triumphs of physical science. They have tried to steal a prestige which

they have not earned, to work with borrowed tools instead of developing

proper tools of their own.

But since it is the habit of the age to look below for its sanctions,

let us look a little more intently--at the findings of the new science.

4. THE NEW PHYSICS

Unfortunately, the new physics is difficult, or at least can be made

to seem difficult. Few lay readers have any first-hand knowledge of

it; few lay readers have ever read a book of science in their lives,

new or old. In fact science does not publish itself directly in books,

but in short monographs, editions limited to two or three hundred

copies. At best these papers make their appearance in small, specialist

magazines. And they are couched almost entirely in mathematical symbols

interspersed with long words barbarously derived from the Greek and

Latin. True scientists have not yet learned to advertise.

We are therefore at the mercy of the popularizer, and the popularizer

is under every temptation to bolster up popular prejudices and

misconceptions. There is also the “story interest” which he must

consider.

These are times when government is not by reason, by principle, by

expedience, or by experience. We are governed by story interest--the

thrill such as we get from a good detective yarn. Most of us must get

the bulk of our information from the newspapers, magazines, and the

most accessible and widely distributed of books. These depend upon

story interest for their sales. We buy those periodicals and those

volumes which promise to thrill us most; it is so much more pleasant to

be thrilled than not to be thrilled. Thus it becomes to the interest of

editors to see that we are thrilled as much as possible, without regard

to ultimate consequences. Fiction tends ever more and more to become

the moulder of public opinion.

It is of course a better story if Voronoff’s transplantations of goat

and monkey glands result in prolonged life than if they do not so

result. To say that chemicals will take the place of male sperm in the

fertilization of sea-urchins’ eggs (as Loeb, a few years ago, used to

claim) produces a greater thrill than to say that this consummation so

devoutly wished by some has yet to materialize. It is even thrilling

to be told that life is mechanical, for that gives man the flattering

idea that some day he will be able to create life in his own workshops

and set up an independent business as a god. We do not stop to think

of all the implications of such a theory--and we buy the paper. We go

further, and enact laws which take the truth of the articles in the

paper for granted.

So, when the modern popularizer deigns to give his attention to modern

physics, he has a single eye to the “story.” The difficult parts, the

parts expressing doubt, the parts which do not fit with the pet fads of

his readers, he can omit. Or he can take an entire theory and stand it

on its head. The effect will be exciting--and marvelous.

There are those who are becoming tired of this childish procedure,

those who would really like to know what is going on without having to

perfect their Greek and Latin or master the higher mathematics. They

would even like to know if it be true, as has been claimed, that the

attempt to reconcile the omnipotence of God with human free will and

responsibility has always been found scientifically impossible--to know

if belief in either will or God be in itself unscientific and contrary

to mathematics. Probably they will go on believing in God and free-will

anyway--for those who do not have not yet become tired of childish

procedures. But it will be with a certain sadness. The man who must

hide his faith from his reason in fear of attack, is not a complete or

a happy man. Few of us realize how much depends upon our conception of

the fundamental truths of physics, how we lean upon what we understand

to be the laws underlying the material world.

The Scholastics claimed that the existence of God--even the great

truths of Christianity--could be demonstrated by reason alone; but few

have sufficient philosophical training or inclination to follow such

arguments to their end. Science, while it has often claimed to be able

to disprove religion, has never claimed to be able to establish either

religion in general or any one religion in particular. The most that

can be asked of it, I think, is the removal of those barriers which,

some time since, it erected in the way of belief in the supernatural.

Science has always had its Mendels, its Voltas, its Galvanis, its

Ampères, its Pasteurs--men who believed as heartily in God as they

believed in his works. But I do not wish to discuss the religion of

scientists. It will be enough to show the bearings of recent science

upon an antiquated but still pretendedly scientific materialism. So let

us chose a single paper by a modern worker--a man comparatively obscure.

He will of necessity be comparatively obscure, for no one can be a

scientist pure and simple and be widely known unless he has invented

a popular mechanical appliance, advertised a cure for some common

disease, wandered into a foreign province as a prophet, or had the luck

to say something startling--such as, “Man descended from a monkey,” or

“Everybody can live to be a hundred years old,”--and even then fame

usually takes time to accumulate.

Ralph S. Lillie has as yet written no good story. But he has an

interesting article, entitled “Physical Indeterminism and Vital

Action,” in _Science_ for August 12, 1927.

Mr. Lillie, a worker in the Marine Biological Laboratory, is the author

of “Protoplasmic Action and Nervous Action,” and his very occupation

shows that he is engaged in the business of wrestling knowledge rather

than thrills from the phenomena of the world. What he says, however, is

much more thrilling than the most incestuous dreams ever dreamed by

a Freudian, or all the discoveries ever made by dropping babies upon

pillows in the laboratories of Dr. Watson.

For he says that we are free; that there has been observed under the

microscope certain actions which look much like the veritable finger of

God, glimpsed for an instant through the screen of matter behind which

His power forever works--a power that we so often fail to recognize

because, from our infinitesimal observation of it, it acts according

to laws--laws we have for the most part made ourselves and to which we

almost invariably give a personality and an omnipotence we would feign

deny to the Deity whose doings they so imperfectly record.

But how does Lillie say all this? In the most lamentable manner--in

Scientese. You will not wonder why I called him obscure after you read

the following sample paragraph:

“Science and philosophy, but especially science, have found great

difficulty in reconciling the apparent indeterminism of many vital

manifestations, particularly voluntary action, with the strict

determinism of physical science. The traditional problem of freedom,

with all its implications, is the classical expression of the

difficulty.”

True, this is by no means as cloudy as Freud when Freud plays

schoolmaster and propounds incomprehensible metaphysics intended

to inspire our awe. It contains no confusion of thought. But it is

sufficiently cold and forbidding. Lillie totally lacks the literary

ability of Freud, the raconteur of spicy stories. It is evident,

however, that he means to point out the difficulty which science

has found in reconciling the doctrine of blind reaction with that

appearance of choice which is often to be noted in the conduct of the

higher forms of matter. Living matter, apparently, does not respond

to external stimuli as mechanists think it ought to. It is inclined to

behave as if it had some force, some will of its own. In other words,

it seems to a certain extent to be interiorly determined.

There would, of course, never have been any controversy as to this had

those who took the negative been honest enough to accept a rational

definition of will and of freedom. Nobody ever claimed that the will is

free in all respects. Nobody supposes that a man set upon by a mob can

go his way as if nothing had interfered with him. He may be dragged to

the stake or the scaffold. Physically, there are circumstances in which

his movements are most certainly exteriorly determined. The most that

he can do is to refuse his consent to those motions he is forced to

perform, so that the resulting conduct is none of his.

But psychologists have assured us that the giving or withholding of

this consent is automatic; that physical forces are still at work;

that a man has a mob inside of his head even when there is no mob

without; and that what he does seemingly of his own volition is but

the net result of the pullings and haulings of this interior horde of

instincts, desires and stimulators. Moreover, these forces themselves

came either from parents or environment, and the man himself is but

their sum--he is his own inner mob. Nor can it be denied that the

law of the Conservation of Energy gave psychologists the right of

the argument. Since Newton, only the very wisest of men have had any

intellectual excuse for believing themselves either real or free.

“Analysis, in tracing down the sources of [physical action],” says

Lillie, “seems always to restate determinism; it shows the will to be

motivated; motives have their natural origins; actions not consciously

motivated are either habitual and referable to past motivation, or are

instinctive and determined by heredity. In either case we seem to have

a mechanistic determination.”

Having thus fairly stated the enemy’s argument, he goes further and

admits that “although voluntary action affects mechanical change and

seems free, the ‘energy balance sheet’ of a man shows no conflict

with the law of conservation, indicating that there is no creation of

energy within the organism.... Classical physics thus seems definitely

incompatible with the idea of freedom. Accordingly, scientific

men--and somewhat curiously biologists in larger proportion than

physicists--have commonly regarded freedom as a delusion. In so doing

they have created more difficulties than they have resolved; certainly

the inner conviction of freedom has not been abolished in the minds of

most thinking men.”

There are one or two points to be noted here. “Somewhat curiously,

biologists in larger proportion than physicists” have been willing to

abandon the free-will hypothesis. He doubtless means comparatively

recent biologists, men who have taken their foundation physics from the

books regarded as authoritative in their school days. Or perhaps there

is another reason. Following the Idol of the Tribe, they look below

them for their models, and seem to feel obliged to make their subjects

as much like the machinist’s subjects as possible. And when they deal

with man they are shut off from the corrective influences of free

experiment. Mistakes in speculative biology are not at once apparent.

They are not immediately applied, and returns are slow in coming in.

But I am willing that the enemy should take what comfort he can from

the biologists. He may say, if he likes, that biologists are the ones

who call life mechanical because biologists are the ones who work

closest to life. Lillie happens to be a biologist himself--a biologist

of details, not of generalities.

As to the “energy balance sheet” of the individual, I think he leans

over backward in his endeavor to be fair. Considering the exceedingly

minute quantities of energy involved, it cannot rightly be claimed

that the energy balance sheet even of a wayside daisy has ever been

experimentally worked out with an accuracy fit to be called conclusive.

Only recently have we even begun to measure quantities of this order

of magnitude. Only recently did we know how very little energy we

needed at our disposal in order to rid our inner conduct of external

compulsion--and it is inner conduct alone with which we are here

concerned. We do not ask to be able to shake a physical leg at will,

but merely to be capable of shifting our attention to legs if and when

we chose, or to entertain the desire to shake.

But once more let us grant the point to the adversary. Let him prove

the balance sheet of the individual if he can--it will avail him

nothing. Lillie, in seeming to leave intact the Law of Conservation,

is but planning a flank attack. For a curious reason soon to appear,

the law may rule and yet leave us free. It will then cease to be of

moral importance. Our biologist goes on: “We must regard it not as

a coincidence but as highly significant that the only region where

physical science gives evidence of ... externally uncontrolled, or

individual, action, is in the field of ultra-microscopic phenomena.”

Nevertheless, there is a coincidence here. The field where Lillie has

noted externally uncontrolled individual action is his own field. As a

worker in a marine biological laboratory, the minutest forms of life

are objects of his daily study.

If I wanted to settle the question by authority and a show of

erudition, I could now quote from Jordan’s “The Philosophical

Foundations of the Quantum Theory.”[104] While if it depends merely

upon famous names I could cite Einstein and Smoluchowski, who have

found that the second law of thermo-dynamics (according to which heat

is said to pass from higher to lower temperatures in direct proportion

to the energy which is extracted from it--another way of expressing our

old friend, Conservation) does not hold true when the time and space

involved are sufficiently small. And to this Svedberg, in his “Colloid

Chemistry,” agrees by saying that in microscopic systems it is obvious

that “fluctuations of entropy” (variations in the amount of a given

energy which is found to be “available”) undoubtedly occur.

But there is no need to follow such a thorny path as this. Lillie

sufficiently sums up the situation by declaring that “the universality

of the rule of physical determination” as regards very minute, or

“quantum” phenomena, is now subject to question; and that “in the

highest manifestations of life, prediction [that is, the discovery

of a mechanical law governing conduct] is not possible at all.” And

he adds: “It follows that the regularity of macroscopic [or large]

phenomena, in which determinism is for all practical purposes complete

and trustworthy, is in reality a _statistical regularity_.”

What can he possibly mean?

Here is in reality a flash of light in darkness, the gist of the whole

matter, the way out, the explanation of a thousand riddles. And he must

put it in such language as this!

For a statistical regularity is of course nothing but the regularity

to be observed in averages. Individuals vary in a way which groups do

not. No one is compelled to commit suicide this year. If I do such a

thing it will be because I am individually a fool. And nobody knows

whether my good sense is going to last another twelvemonth or not. Yet

every actuary in every life-insurance company’s office in the world

knows how many people are going to commit suicide this year, and next

year, and the year after; and the quota which each civilized country

is going to furnish. Their knowledge may not be absolutely accurate

as to the last digit. There is a very slight margin for mistake. But

they are almost as certain of the figures as they are of the figures

for last year, or the year before. Mass action is sufficiently regular

to make calculations based upon a comparison of its future with its

past exceedingly profitable. Groups, and groups alone, obey the Law

of Conservation. It was group action observed among atoms which gave

rise to the formulation of that law. Individuals behave capriciously,

obeying the laws of their unique natures, laws known only to God.

But it will be objected: is not man a mass of atoms, or a mass of

whatever ultimate particles science finally arrives at? And the answer

is an emphatic _no_. His body is such a mass, but it is so formed as

to be controlled, in so far as its movements are voluntary, by an

individual self whose inner essence is single. The only way to make

group action out of one man’s conduct is to observe him over a long

period of time. His average may be guessed at. But nobody can say how

he will act in a new and unusual circumstance.

5. CHANCE

Pious people have always been prone to declare that there is no such

thing as chance. They have been afraid that belief in chance implied

a disbelief in the omnipotence of God. Never were pious people more

mistaken--or perhaps I should say misinformed. The doctrine of

probabilities is one of those things belonging to mathematics which

the pundits have decided it were better for us common people not

to understand. So they have carefully refrained from stating it in

interesting, or even human, language, pretending that we were barred

from comprehension by the inadequacy of our intelligence and education.

Nevertheless we all inhabit a world upon the phenomena of which the

doctrine of probabilities is founded. We are compelled to live every

day surrounded by events “obeying” the Law of the Greatest Probability.

And those of us who have made any success in life have become pretty

good mathematicians, though we may know no mathematical symbols beyond

the signs of addition, subtraction and division.

It is of course misleading to say that events _obey_ the law of the

greatest probability. Events do not obey any of the laws which science

has formulated. On the contrary, the laws were, in so far as they are

laws and not mere errors, formulated in obedience to the events. But

to say that there is no such thing as chance is to say that there is

no such thing as ignorance, which to my mind is hardly a pious idea.

For chance, rightly understood, is but the measure of our ignorance.

Nothing more.

Given total ignorance, the chance of guessing right is too remote to

be calculable and can be expressed only by the meaningless formula,

“nothing to infinity.” Given total knowledge, certainty leaves no room

for probability. In all other circumstances, chance is the balance in

which we weigh what we know against what we do not know. Gambling is

called a vice because nobody ever uses the word except to describe some

form of chance-taking which he considers vicious--the vice usually

consisting in a foolish attempt to get something for nothing. It is

considered particularly immoral to lose. But in a broad sense, everyone

gambles who lives. I hope I will be pardoned, then, if I take my

illustrations from actual games.

If we know that a penny is a disk of equally weighted sides and is to

be tossed in the air by an unknown amount of force which will cause it

to turn over an unknown number of times, the chance of its falling head

up is the same as that of its falling head down. We say the odds are

even. If we do not know what a penny is, we cannot reckon the odds. If

we know exactly what a penny is, know its present position in relation

to the table-top, and know that it is going to turn over three times,

say, there are no odds to calculate. Ignorance has been supplanted by

knowledge.

But why do we say that an even-sided disk, thrown at hap-hazard, is as

likely to fall head up as it is to fall tail up? Because observation

in the past has taught us that such is the case. We may reason

subsequently about momentum, gravity, and the like, but observation

lies at the bottom of our knowledge. Very well. The sun rose this

morning. I know that. What is the chance of its rising tomorrow morning?

If I know nothing but what I have stated, the chance, from my point of

view, is as one to one. The odds are even, nothing more. It is just

as likely not to rise as it is to rise. From the standpoint of an

Omnipotent God, this is not the case. He knows whether it is going to

rise or not. To God there is indeed no chance.

But to mankind at large? Surely the chances of the sun rising tomorrow

are better than even? To be sure they are. For mankind at large knows

not only that the sun rose yesterday morning, but the morning before

that, and on ever so many other mornings. How many? Upon the answer

to this question rests the actual chance of its rising again, for the

answer shows the amount of our knowledge. The more knowledge, the more

certain the chance.

Let us say we know that the sun has risen for a billion mornings.

Tomorrow, if there be a tomorrow, will mark a billion and one. Then

there are a billion and one events, or sunrises, under consideration,

and only one of them is still in doubt. The chances of the sun’s rising

tomorrow are therefore a billion to one. If we know it has already

risen a trillion times, they are a trillion to one. As knowledge

increases, certainty approaches.

I have heard it objected that, according to this theory, the chance

of a one-year-old child to live another year must be only even, while

a man of 99 has 99 chances in a hundred of rounding out his century.

This would indeed be true if we knew nothing about either babes or

nonogenarians but their years. But we have a great deal of other

information--statistics--bills of health. We must put all of our

knowledge into the calculation.

Almost everybody is now willing to admit this method of reckoning

probability when it is applied to dawns or to life insurance. It seems

quite natural to say that we know the sun will rise again because,

so far as we know, it always has risen; or to say that a baby has

a longer prospect of life than has a very old man because we have

observed that babies generally live, while very old men generally

die. But when we apply the same method to the calculations of certain

other things--the behavior of our penny, for instance--we shall meet,

strangely enough, with a lot of heretics. If a penny has fallen heads

for twenty times in succession, there are those who will say that the

chances of heads coming on the next throw are much worse than one to

one. “It is time for a change,” they will contend. And nothing can

keep them, if sportingly inclined, from wagering their money on tails.

But a mathematician will coldly bet on heads. _He knows that there is

something the matter with that penny!_

So come what are known as “runs of luck,”--a subject apparently remote

from that of free will, but not so remote as it seems. Runs of luck are

the result of unknown influences; for if the influences are known we do

not say “luck,” we use a harsher term. The oftener a thing has happened

before, the more likely it is to happen again. Some large force must

be at work, or there would not have been the run. This is such an

important rule that anyone who doubts it would do well to convince

himself of its validity. He will in that way not only improve his mind,

he will save money be he never so little of a “gambler” in the vicious

sense of the term. Losers are always playing the stock-market and the

world for “reactions” that “must come.” Winners always “go with the

trend.” They are vicious only when their prizes are evil.

“But what,” some will say, “of the change of luck which wipes out the

winnings? What of those larger cycles which bring the smaller cycles

to an end?” Just this. We know nothing of the larger cycles until we,

or somebody whose word we can trust, has begun to experience them.

Therefore our ignorance is complete in most cases, and we have no

chance against the larger cycles or rhythms at all--which is why

sensible people usually keep out of the stock-market. Doubtless there

is some larger cycle in cosmic events which will some day put out the

sun. But unless we have somehow been able to put our finger already

upon its pulse, we must ignore it in our calculations. We cannot bring

it to book. When any one cycle has kept up a faithful performance as

long as the sun has kept on rising, it must be a rather large cycle and

is pretty safe to depend on for our remaining days.

But I did not enter into this digression merely to give a few tips

on gambling, or the advice not to gamble at all when gambling can be

avoided. The calculation of probabilities is of vast utility in matters

infinitely more important than markets or games. With it mathematicians

have put mere telescopists to shame. Give a mathematician the past

course of a planet, and he will calculate its future course without

taking the trouble to find out a thing about the nature of planets.

This is no chimera. It has been done. The vagaries of the motions of a

heavenly body fall into series; into cycles; into cycles within cycles.

Accuracy in prediction is determined by accuracy and amount of past

observations, and by nothing else.

But what has this to do with the human will? Everything. The so-called

“laws” of science, including the Law of Conservation, are the laws

of chance, nothing more. They are founded upon the behavior of great

masses of particles, or the behavior of one or a few particles (more

accurately, _particulars_) over long periods of time. As Lillie phrases

it, the regularity of nature is a “statistical regularity,” like the

regularity of the statistics of suicide. It does not interfere with the

freedom of the individual, of the particular. Here is the answer to

Freud’s absurd statement that the attempt to reconcile human free will

with divine omnipotence is always a failure. The actuary calculates the

number of suicides that are going to take place--does he thereby compel

you to kill yourself?

There is, of course, this difference between an actuary and

Omniscience. The actuary only knows the total result. Omniscience must

know the individuals who will help to make up that result. Omniscience

knows just what we are, individually. Omniscience knows every Psyche,

and knows what it will chose. I may know that a pair of dice are so

loaded that they will always come up sixes. Is it my knowledge which

compels them so to fall?

But some will say that if our human dice are loaded, it must have been

God who loaded them, and that beneath that load free will disappears.

It might have been that way, I will admit. Omniscience, being also

Omnipotence, might have loaded the dice, beyond question. Omnipotence

was under no compulsion to grant free will to anything. But by the

same reasoning, Omnipotence was free to withhold Its hand, and to let

us determine to a certain extent our actions for ourselves. Even the

finite mind has been able to see how this can be without interfering at

all with that regular march of events which characterizes a cosmos in

distinction from a chaos. A cosmos of free particulars will still have

a “statistical regularity.”

As a matter of fact, this system of delegated authority, of

limited grants of real power, seems to run through all nature. The

Commander-in-Chief leaves certain details to his generals; the generals

leave certain details to their captains, the captains to their

lieutenants. The private soldier has his particular duty to perform.

And each one is held responsible for the performance of his own duty

within his own limited sphere of action--a duty which he is free to

perform or to leave undone. Whenever an individual is rewarded or

punished for something which he was not free to do or not to do, our

natures recoil from what we term an “injustice.” With no free will at

all, any reward or punishment would be unjust. And it is to this sort

of a world our materialistic psychologists and philosophers have been

trying to introduce us. No wonder they shied away from the conception

of consciousness. Sentience without freedom seems unjust. Even with

limited freedom, it seems unjust. Man’s sense of justice, therefore,

has compelled him to regard this life as a fragment; to say that only

willfully endured or provoked pains and privations are deserved, to

believe in another life beyond the grave without waiting for further

proof of it. Thus Dante was constrained to write even over the gates of

Hell, “_Giustizia mosse ’l mio Alto Fattore_.”[105]

If we return now to the doctrine of probabilities and to Lillie we

shall find him nodding, for he says: “It already seems clear that

many of the physical laws with which we are familiar in the realm of

microscopic phenomena cease to apply on the scale where events are

determined by the ‘chance’ fluctuations of molecular movement.”

Chance here is clearly not the proper word. It contradicts his whole

argument. Obviously he is using it in a very loose sense--much

as behaviorists use it when they say that the first synapse

between dendrite and axone in the brain is chance-determined. As

a mathematician he must know that these isolated phenomena of

the exceedingly minute are precisely those to which the law of

probabilities cannot be applied. As much cannot be said of the

behaviorists. Their attaching of the word “chance” to the word

“synapse” is due to no slip of the pen, but rather to some regrettable

individual action behind the synapse itself.

“Ultra-microscopic phenomena,” Lillie goes on, in a way which quite

confirms the foregoing explanation of his lapse, “thus give evidence

... of control by individual action rather than by statistical or mass

action. The laws relating to such [microscopic] action ... assuming

such laws to exist ... are as yet imperfectly known. But they are

certainly entirely different from physical laws.”

This may seem remarkable, but after all it is only what we should have

expected. In the ultra-microscopic world we are approaching individual

action and leaving mass action, the average action of many individuals,

behind. The illusion of bondage begins to disappear.

What makes this so important is the fact that we are so built that

the minutest imaginable interior events may determine our largest

actions. I lift a pound weight, but it was the movement of the all but

impalpable particles of the brain which decided what the movement was

to be. A touch upon the trigger fires the gun. And the force at the

disposal of will needs to be only enough to move these tiny particles

in the vital field. The trigger-touch, the precipitating circumstance,

is traceable, says Lillie, “to ultra-microscopic events in the nerve

cells.” And it is precisely this fact, with the opportunity it offers

for central control, which makes a man’s behavior, even as to his body,

something other than the result of a struggle of blind forces. Man is

not a mass of particles like a dumb-bell.

There is, Lillie contends (and he is supported by Maxwell and

Boltzman), “a smoothing off, or obliteration of detail” in “effects

controlled by mass action.” So we say that we lose ourselves in a

crowd. “Mass action” represents the “sum of numerous fluctuating

minutiæ.” What we see is like a composite picture, with individual

traits more or less obliterated. Excess in one unit is off-set by

deficiency in another, so to our sight the individual is obscured. “The

relation between a smoothed curve and the distribution of the points

showing the individual data is a relation of a similar kind,” he adds

for the mathematically minded. And then he throws an almost literal

bombshell into the determinist camp, with these words:

“Every now and then an unexplained catastrophe occurs in stores of high

explosives. We know from observation ... as well as from theoretical

considerations of probability, that at infrequent intervals an internal

molecular movement of unusual amplitude occurs. Such a movement

may exceed the critical minimum below which no chemical reaction

results,”--and so blow up the whole mass.

But what we are here interested in is that unexplained molecular

movement of unusual amplitude. It is almost like coming upon the

creative spark itself, and--as is frequently the case with creative

sparks--the immediate result is destructive to existing conditions.

Not that I think that here is actually the naked finger of God. I am no

Monist. So far as human experience, at least, is concerned, I believe

that however far we pursue matter, either into its minute or its starry

depths, it remains matter; and that spirit is separate and apart from

it. The ultimate knot cannot be untied. The seamless veil has been

drawn too tightly across the face of Deity for it ever to be penetrated

by physical science.

Call matter but force, if you will. Admit that even material force is

of a spiritual nature, that its materiality consists in what we call

its material effects. Nevertheless there is a gulf between those locked

forces and spirit properly so-called. Saying that everything is God is

only an indirect way of saying that there is no God--no God but what is

locked up.

If all be matter, how can we, who too must then be matter, manage to

contemplate the universe? We must conclude with Dr. Watson that we do

not contemplate it. The same thing cannot at once be both subject and

object. If all be spirit, then what separates us from the Great Spirit?

Why is not our knowledge and comprehension, our power and our duration

of days infinite and commensurate with ourselves here and now? For in

the case supposed, we would ourselves be God. There would be nothing to

come between.

Spinoza, who claimed that all is God, contradicted himself by calling

his philosophy a philosophy, a search for truth. Were his theory true,

we should not have to search. We would be already one with the All.

Nor could any of the diverse phenomena of creation exist. There could

be no separation between part and part, even in our sense perceptions.

With nothing but spirit, out of what could those shadows, those lapses,

those ignorances between this and that be made? Of nothing? But nothing

is nothing. It is not even empty space, nor darkness, nor a shadow.

Even the Vedantic philosophers had the wit to see that there must

be a gulf between Brahma on the one hand and Vishnu and Siva on the

other. They had no explanation to offer. Modern would-be Brahmins

have assumed that there is no inexplicable. Instead of rising to the

Gospels, they have fallen below the Vedas.

Lillie seems not to have fallen into this error, for he says that

“microscopic events” are determined by “sub-microscopic events”; that

“behind or internal to the sub-microscopic events, we must assume a

series of ultra-microscopic events reaching back by convergence into

the field where the known types of physical determination are replaced

by another type of determination, the special conditions of which we do

not know.” But as the action of the brain-cell determines the motion

of the arm, so the action of something yet more minute determines the

action of the cell, and so on until we come to the ultimate physical

basis of the series. In this field of the physically ultimate, events

are self-determined. They occur through no compulsion from without.

“If by free we mean externally uncontrolled, it would appear that the

ultimate local centers or units of action should be independent of

one another, i. e., a radical discontinuity should exist at the base

of physical reality. Something of the kind seems to be indicated by

quantum phenomena,”--phenomena of an ultra-minute variety. Men have

often spoken of the eternal loneliness of the soul. Here we see that in

this very loneliness lies its freedom. If it chooses to surrender this,

for good or for evil, its surrender is still a choice.

And in conclusion, Lillie most rightly adds that one may “hesitate to

call [this ultimate physical field]” the “metaphysical field,” or the

field beyond matter. Our author makes no attempt to taper his matter

off into spirit merely by subdividing it. And he goes on:

“If would seem, however, that there must be some final support or

substratum of the physical to which only the term metaphysical can be

applied.” Which I take to mean that he believes in a substratum which

is not physical. And having thus shown that back of matter experimental

science feels that there is something else, and that we in our inner

selves are quite free from external control, whatever compulsion may be

put upon the actual motions of our bodies by things beyond our power,

he rounds out his argument by saying:

“There is also the general philosophical position that the universe,

considered in its totality, must be the expression of free action,

since an all-inclusive whole cannot be determined externally, i. e., by

conditions outside of itself,”--there being nothing outside of itself.

In other words, not only are we free, but God is omnipotent; and the

two facts, instead of being contradictory, are found to be but the

different ends of the same chain of reasoning. Freud’s dictum proves

to be not quite so final as it seemed. Lillie has torn it to bits in a

single article.

And had we not gone to Lillie we might have gone to Cassier, LeBon,

Claude Bernard, Lucien Poincaré, or to any of a multitude of

clear-headed scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. They may not

give us all we seek, but they at least give us this. Let behaviorists

and psychoanalysts say what they will, reason has not yet vanished from

the world. Neither has unreason, for that matter--as the next chapter

will show.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] “The Descent of Man,” p. 780.

[99] “The _Novum Organum_,” i. 63.

[100] _Op. cit._, i. 45.

[101] _Vide Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to

304, for the year 1925.

[102] _Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to 304,

1925.

[103] In the Paris _Matin_, September 4, 1927.

[104] _Nature_, vol. 119, 1927, p. 566.

[105] “Justice moved my High Maker,” Dante’s “_Inferno_,” canto III,

line 4.