‘Nous ne savons plus prendre la vie en grand, sortir de nous mêmes;
nous nous contennons dans un petit bien-être personnel, dans une
petite œuvre viagère.’ [He is writing in the mountains beyond Naples.]
‘Ici on reduit le vieux et le couvert au simple necessaire. Ainsi
dégagée l’âme, comme les yeux, pouvait contempler les vastes horizons
tout ce qui s’etend et dure au déla de l’homme.’
Modern life gives you six electric bells beside your bed, but not one
court or chamber that a great artist would care to copy. The poet
yawning among the electric bells becomes a common-place person, with a
mind obscured by a gourmet’s love of the table and the cellar; he is the
chameleon who has lost his luminous and magical powers of
transfiguration, and become a mere gorged lizard stuffed with sugar.
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, were in their different lives so great
because they had all the power to reject the drowsy and dulling
influences of the common world of men, and withdraw from it to Ravenna,
to Lirici, to Rydal. The commonplace of life, whether in occupations,
relationships, or so-called duties, eats away the poetry of temperament
with the slow, sure gnawing of the hidden insect which eats away the
tiger-skin until where the golden bronze and deep sable of the shining
fur once glistened, there is only a bald, bare spot, with neither colour
nor beauty left in it. There are millions on millions of ordinary human
lives to follow the common tracks and fulfil the common functions of
human life. When the poet is dragged down to any of these he is lost.
The moth who descried the star lies dead in the kitchen fire, degraded
and injured beyond recall.
‘There is a path on the sea’s azure floor;
No keel has ever ploughed that path before.’
Such should be the poet’s passage through life. Not his is it to sail by
chart and compass with common mariners along the sea roads marked out
for safety and for commerce.
Above all else, the poet should be true to himself—to his own vision,
his own powers, his own soul,
‘like Heaven’s pure breath
Which he who grasps can hold not; like death,
Who rides upon a thought, and makes his way
Through temple, tower and palace, and the array
Of arms.’
The supreme glory of Shelley is that he, beyond all others, did go where
‘no keel ever ploughed before,’ did dwell more completely than any other
has ever dwelt
‘on an imagined shore
Where the gods spoke with him.’
The poet is wisest, and his creations are most beautiful when his
thoughts roam alone in
‘fields of Heaven-reflecting sea,
. . . . . . . . . .
Beneath the uplifting winds, like plains of corn
Swayed by the summer air;’
and when he, like Proteus, marks
‘The shadow of fair ships, as mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, it’s sightless pilot’s crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset’s ebbing sea;
Tracking their path no more by blood and groans,
And desolation, and the mingled voice
Of slavery and command; but by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft and mild, free, gentle voices,
That sweetest music, such as spirits love.’
And he is wisest when he says, with Apollo,
‘I shall gaze not on the deeds which make
My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse
Darkens the sphere I guide; but list, I hear
The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit
That sits i’ the morning star.’
If ever poet held that lute on earth, Shelley held it all through his
brief life; and if ever there be immortality for any soul, his surely is
living now beside that Spirit in the light of a ceaseless day.
‘Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.’
SOME FALLACIES OF
SCIENCE[K]
‘Le génie fait les philosophes et les poetes: le temps ne fait
que les savants.’—FONTENELLE.
Sir Lyon, _now_ Lord, Playfair, read to the assembled members of the
British Association, when they met at Aberdeen, a discourse both
eloquent and well suited to excite the enthusiasm of his audience,
already disposed by taste and bias to salute its propositions as gospel.
That there were truths in it, no one would dispute; that it was
exclusively composed of truth is not so evident to minds unswayed by
scientific prejudice. It, at all events, was a curious and complete
example of the scientific mind, of its views, conclusions and
expectations, and is therefore interesting in itself, if not as
overwhelming in its persuasions to the dispassionate reader as it was to
the sympathetic and selected audience to which it was addressed.
Scientific persons usually never address themselves to any other
audience than one thus pannelled and prepared. They like to see a crowd
of their own disciples in their halls ere they let fall their pearls of
wisdom. The novelist does not demand that he shall be only read by
novelists. The painter does not think that none but painters can be
permitted to judge a painting. The sculptor does not ask that every
critic of his work shall be a Phidias. The historian does not insist
that none but a Tacitus shall pass judgment on him. But the scientist
does exact that no opinion shall be formed of him and of his works
except by his own brethren, and sweeps aside all independent criticism
on a principle which, if carried out into other matters, would forbid
John Ruskin ever to give an opinion on painting, and would prohibit
Francisque Sareey from making any critical observations on actors. This
address satisfied its audience, because that audience was composed of
persons already willing to be satisfied; but if we can imagine some
listener altogether without such bias, if we can suppose some one
amongst the auditors with mind altogether unprejudiced, such an one
might without effort have found many weak places in this fine discourse,
and would have been sorely tempted to cry ‘Question! Question!’ at more
than one point in it.
-----
Footnote K:
Suggested by an Address to the British Association at Aberdeen, 1885.
-----
Taken as a whole, the address was an admirable piece of special pleading
in favour of science, and of her superior claims upon the resources of
all states and the minds of all men. But special pleading has always
this disadvantage: that it seeks to prove too much; and the special
pleading of the President of the Aberdeen meeting is not free from this
defect. We know, of course, that, in his position, he could hardly say
less; that with his antecedents and reputation, he would not have wished
to say less; but those who are removed from the spell of his eloquence,
and peruse his arguments in the serene air of their studies, may be
pardoned if they be more critical than an audience of fellow-workers,
and mutual admirers, if they lay down the pages of his admirably-worded
praises of science, and ask themselves dispassionately: How much of this
is true?
The main object of the discourse was to prove that science is the great
benefactress of the world. But is it proved? To the mind of the
scientist the doubt will seem as impious as the doubt of the sceptic
always does seem to the true believer. Yet it is a doubt which must be
entertained by those who are not led away by that bigotry of science,
which has so much and so grievously in common with the bigotry of
religions.
Let us see what are the statements which the President of the British
Association brings forward in support of the position which he gives to
Science as the goddess and the benefactress of mankind. First, to do
this he casts down the Humanities beneath his feet, as the professors of
science always do; and, as an illustration of the uselessness which he
assigns to them, he asserts that were a Chrysoloras to teach Greek in
the Italian universities he would not hasten perceptibly the onward
march of Italy!
What does this mean? It is a statement, but the statement of an opinion,
not of a fact.
What is comprised under the vague term ‘the onward march of Italy?’ Does
it mean the return of Italy to her pristine excellence in all arts, her
love of learning, her grace of living? or does it mean the effort of
Italy to aggrandise herself at all cost, and to engage in foreign and
colonial wars whilst her cities groan under taxation and her peasantry
perish of pellagra? In the one case the teaching of Chrysoloras would be
of infinite value; in the other it would, no doubt, not harmonise with
the vulgar greeds and dangerous ambitions of the hour. If the ‘onward
march of Italy’ means that she is to kneel to a Crispi, submit to a
standing army, wait slavishly on Germany, and scramble for the sands of
Africa, the teachings of Chrysoloras would be wasted; but if it mean
that she is to husband her strength, cultivate her fertile fields, merit
her gift of beauty, and hold a high place in the true civilisation of
the world, then I beg leave to submit that Chrysoloras, or what his name
is here taken to symbolise, would do more for her than any other teacher
she could have, certainly more than any teacher she now possesses. Could
the classic knowledge and all which is begotten by it of serenity,
grace, trained eloquence and dispassionate meditation, be diffused once
more through the mind of Italian youth, it would, I think, produce a
generation which would not applaud Eritrea and Kassala, nor accept the
political tyrannies of state-appointed prefects.
The scientists take for granted that the education of the schools
creates intelligence; very often it does no such thing. It creates a
superficial appearance of knowledge, indeed; but knowledge is like food,
unless it be thoroughly assimilated when absorbed, and thoroughly
digested, it can give no nourishment; it lies useless, a heavy and
unleavened mass. It is the fashion in these times to despise husbandmen
and husbandry, but it is much to be questioned if the city cad, with his
smattering of education, his dabbling in politics, his crude, conceited
opinions upon matters on which he is absolutely ignorant, be not a far
more ignorant, as he is undoubtedly a far more useless, person than the
peasant, who may never have opened a book or heard of arithmetic, but
thoroughly understands the soil he works on, the signs of the weather,
the rearing of plants and of animals, and the fruits of the earth which
he cultivates. The man of genius may be many-sided; nature has given him
the power to be so; but the mass of men do not and cannot obtain this
Protean power; to do one thing well is the utmost that the vast majority
can well hope to do; many never do so much, nor a quarter so much. To
this vast majority science would say: you may be as indifferent weavers,
ploughmen, carpenters, shopmen, what you will, but you must know where
the spermatic nerves are situated in the ichneumon, and you must
describe the difference between microzoaires and miraphytes, and you
must understand the solidification of nitric acid. Nor is the temper
which science and its teachers seem likely thus to give the human race,
one of fair promise. How much have not the men of science added to the
popular dread of cholera, which in its manifestation of cowardice and
selfishness has so grossly disgraced the Continent of Europe of late
years? Their real or imaginary creation, the microbe, has invested
cholera with a fanciful horror so new and hideous in the popular mind,
that popular terror of it grows ungovernable, and will, in great
likelihood, revolt beyond all restraint, municipal or imperial, whenever
the disease shall again revisit Europe with violence. Again, how many
nervous illnesses, how many imaginary diseases, have sprung into
existence since science, popularised, attracted the attention of mankind
to the mechanism of its own construction? It is a familiar truth that a
little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and of no knowledge is it truer
than of physiological knowledge. It has been said, that every one at
forty should be a fool or a physician, and so far as knowing what to
eat, drink and avoid, every one should be so; but, unhappily, those who
become the latter, _i.e._, those who become capable of controlling their
own constitutional ailments and weaknesses, are apt to contract in their
study of themselves an overweening tendency to think about themselves.
The generalisation of physiology amongst the masses means the
generalisation of this form of egotism. A child who was told and shown
something of anatomy, said, naively: ‘Oh, dear me! now that I know how I
am made, I shall be always thinking that I am coming to pieces.’ In a
less innocent way the effect of the popularisation of physiology is the
same on the multitude as on this child: it increases valetudinarianism,
nervousness and the diseases which spring from morbid fears and morbid
desires. Those nervous illnesses which are the peculiar privilege of
modern times, are largely due to the exaggerated attention to themselves
which science has taught to humankind. The Greek and the Latin said:
‘Let us eat and drink and enjoy, for to-morrow we die.’ Modern science
says: ‘Let us concentrate our whole mind on ourselves and our body,
although our mind like our body is only a conglomeration of gases which
will go out in the dark.’ The classic injunction and conclusion are the
more healthy and the more logical, and produced a race of men more
manly, more vigorous and more consistent with themselves.
To return to the assertions contained in this address which we now
consider: in the address it is stated as a fact which all must rejoice
over, that in Boston one shoe factory, by its machines, does the work of
30,000 shoemakers in Paris, who have still to go through the weary
drudgery of hand-labour. Now, why is the ‘drudgery’ of sewing a shoe in
any way more ‘weary’ than the drudgery of oiling, feeding and attending
to a machine? Machine-work is, on the contrary, of all work the most
mechanical, the most absolute drudgery. There is no kind of proof that,
because the work of 30,000 shoemakers is done by a machine, mankind at
large is any the happier for this. We know that all machine-made work is
inferior to hand-work; inferior in durability, in excellence of quality,
and in its inevitable lack of that kind of individuality and originality
which handwork takes from the fingers which form it. In the _Seven Lamps
of Architecture_, there is an admirable exposition of this immeasurable
difference in quality which characterises hand-labour and machine-made
work; of the stone cut by steam and the stone cut by hand. Let us only
consider what ruin to the arts of India has been brought about by the
introduction of machinery. The exquisite beauty of Oriental work is due
to the individuality which is put into it; the worker, sitting beneath
his grove of date-trees, puts original feeling, individual character,
into each line graven on the metal, each thread woven in the woof, each
turn given to the ivory. Machines destroy all this. They make machines
of the men who tend them, and give a soulless and hateful monotony to
everything which they produce.
Despite the vaunt of Playfair, the cobbler who sits on the village
green, doing sound, if simple work, honestly, giving a personality to
the shoe he labours on, and knowing on what foot it will be worn and
whither it will go, is a man, and maybe in his own humble way a good
artist; but the attendant who feeds the shoe-machine with oil, or takes
from it its thousands of machine-cut leathers, is no better than a
machine himself; so far from being ‘set free,’ he is in servitude. The
cobbler on the village green knows far more of freedom than he.
This curious statement that hand-work, with its scope for originality
and individual interest is slavery, whilst the work of factories,
mechanical, monotonous and done in ugly chambers and unwholesome air, is
liberty, is surely the oddest delusion with which the fanatical and
biased mind of science ever delighted itself. Who can compare the
freedom of the native child in a village of Benares, shaping an ebony or
cocoanut toy under the palm-fronds of his home, with the green paroquets
swinging, and the monkeys chattering in the sun-lit bamboos above his
head, with the servitude of the poor little sickly and weary Hindoos,
thronging in patient flocks the noisome factory-chambers of Bombay?
The President of the British Association seems to expect that all men
whom machines ‘set free’ from the drudgery of their daily calling, will,
all at once, do something infinitely better than they did before they
were free. But this seems to me a very rash conclusion. If the 30,000
shoemakers are all ‘set free’ in Paris, by the introduction of the
Boston machine, is it so certain that their freedom will produce
anything better than a good pair of shoes? What greater freedom is there
in attending to the machine if they select to do that, or in entering
into another trade?—one thing or the other no doubt they must do, if
they want to earn their bread? What have they gained by being ‘set free,
and passed from one kind of occupation to another?’ I fail to see what
they have gained. Have the public gained? It is open to doubt. Where
will be the gain to their contemporaries, or to themselves, if these
30,000 shoemakers ‘set free’ become telegraph clerks or book-keepers?
Something they must become, unless they are to live as paupers or
mendicants. Where is their freedom? ‘Set free’ is a seductive and
resonant expression, but analysed it simply means nothing in this
instance. And, before quitting this subject, let me also remark that if
Playfair knew as much about shoes as he does about science, he would
know that a machine to make shoes is a most unwholesome invention,
because every shoe or boot which is not made _expressly_ for the foot
which is to wear it, is an ill-made shoe, and will cause suffering and
deformity to the unwise wearer. The vast mass of the population of every
‘civilised’ nation has deformed feet, because they buy and wear
ready-made shoes, thrusting their extremities into houses of leather
never designed for them. Machines which make shoes by the thousand can
only increase this evil. As it is, we never see by any chance any one
walk well, unless it be some one whose shoes are made with great care
and skill, adjusted to his feet alone, or peasants who have never shod
their feet at all and step out, with the bare sole set firmly and
lightly on their mother earth. Science can, no doubt, turn out millions
of cheap shoes, all exactly alike, but Nature will not consent to adopt
such monotony of contour in the feet which will wear them.
The President of the British Association speaks of science always as of
a Demeter, with blessings in her hands, creating the fulness of the
fields and the joys of mankind. He forgets that the curse of Demeter
brought barrenness: and if we resist the charm of his eloquence and look
more closely at the tissue of it, we shall not be so content to accept
his declarations. What does the expression mean, ‘to benefit mankind?’ I
conclude that it must mean to increase its happiness and its health; all
the wisdom of the ages will avail it nothing if it pule in discontent
and fret in nervous sickness. Now, does science increase the sum of
human happiness? It is very doubtful.
Let us take the electric telegraph as an instance of the benevolence of
science. Can it be said to make men happier? I think not. Politicians
and diplomatists agree that the hasty judgments and conflicting orders
which it favours and renders possible, double the chances of internecine
quarrels, and stimulate to irritation and haste, which banish
statesmanship. In business the same defects are due to it, and many a
rash speculation or unconsidered reply, an acceptance or refusal, forced
on men without there being time for any mature consideration, have led
to disastrous engagements and as disastrous failures. Even in private
life its conveniences may have a certain value, but the many troubles
and excitements brought by it are incalculable. Niobe hearing of the
death of her children by a printed line on a yellow sheet of paper, has
her grief robbed of all dignity and privacy, and intensified by a shock
which deals her its fatal blow without any preparation of the mind to
receive it. The telegraph, bridging space, may be, and is, no doubt, a
wonderful invention, but that it has contributed to the happiness or
wisdom of humanity is not so certain. Men cannot do without it now, no
doubt; neither can they do without alcohol. The telegraph, like nearly
all the inventions of the modern age, tends to shorten time but to
harass it, to make it possible to do much more in an hour, a day, a
year, than was done of old, but to make it impossible to do any of this
without agitation, brain-pressure and hurry. It has impaired language
and manners, it has vulgarised death, and it has increased the great
evils of immature choice and hasty action; these drawbacks weighed
against its uses must at the time prevent us from regarding its
invention as an unmixed blessing. Of the telephone may be said as much,
and more.[L]
-----
Footnote L:
Science having shouted many hallelujahs over the telephone, now
discovers that it is a terrible disseminator of disease!
-----
Playfair, proceeding in his enumeration of the benefits which science
confers on man, turns to that most familiar matter, air, and that
equally familiar element, water. He speaks with pride of all which
science has discovered concerning their component parts, and their uses
and effects upon the world. His pride, no doubt, may be justified in
much, but he passes over one great fact in connection with air and
water, _i.e._, that both have been polluted through the inventions of
science in a degree which may well be held to outweigh the value of the
discoveries of science.
Were we to awake an Athenian of the time of Phidias from his mausoleum,
and take him with eyes to see and ears to hear and nostrils to smell,
into Blackpool or Belfast, even into Zurich or Munich, he would ask us,
in stupefaction, under what curse of the gods had the earth fallen that
mankind should dwell in such hideous clamour, such sooty darkness, such
foul stenches, such defiled and imprisoned air. He would survey the
begrimed toilers of the mills and looms, the pallid women, the stunted
offspring, the long lines of hideous houses, the soil ankle-deep with
cinder-dust, the skies a pall of lurid smoke, the country scorched and
blackened and accursed; he would survey all this, I say, asking by what
malediction of heaven and what madness of mankind the sweetest and chief
joys of Nature had been ruined and forgotten thus? He would behold the
dwarfed trees dying under the fume of poisonous gases, the clear river
changed to a slimy, crawling, stinking, putrid flood of filth; the
buoyant air, once sweet as the scent of cowslips or clover-grass, made
by the greed of man into a sickly, noxious, loathsome thing, loaded with
the stench of chemicals and the vapours of engine-belched steam. He
would stand amidst this hell of discordant sounds, between these walls
of blackened brick, under this sky of heavy-hanging soot; and he would
remember the world as it was; and if at his ears any prated of science,
he would smile in their faces, and say,—‘If these be the fruits of
science let me rather dwell with the forest beast and the untaught
barbarian.’
Yes; no doubt science can study air in her spectrum, and analyse water
in her retorts; she can tell why the green tree dies in the evil gas,
and the rose will not bloom where the blast-furnace roars: she can tell
you the why and the wherefore, and can give you a learned treatise on
the calcined dust which chokes up your lungs; but she cannot make the
green tree and the wild rose live in the hell she has created for men,
and she cannot make the skies she has blackened lighter, nor the rivers
she has poisoned run clean. Even we who dwell where the air is pure, and
the southern sun lights the smiling waves and the vine-clad hills, even
we cannot tell how beautiful was the earth in the days of the Greek
anthologists; when the silvery blue of wood-smoke alone rose from the
hearth fires; when the flame of the vegetable oils alone illumined the
fragrant night; when the white sails alone skimmed the violet seas; when
the hand alone threw the shuttle and wove the web; and when the vast
virgin forests filled the unpolluted air with their odorous breath. Even
we cannot tell what the radiance of the atmosphere, of the horizons, of
the sunrise and sunset, were when the world was young. Our loss is
terrible and hopeless, like the loss of all youth. It may be useless to
lament it, but in God’s name let us not be such purblind fools that we
call our loss our gain.
Repose, leisure, silence, peace and sleep are all menaced and scattered
by the inventions of the last and present century. They are the greatest
though the simplest blessings that mankind has ever had; their
banishment may be welcomed by men greedy only of gold; but, meantime,
the mad-houses are crowded, spinal and cerebral diseases are in alarming
increase, heart-disease in divers shapes is general, where it once was
rare, and all the various forms of bodily and mental paralysis multiply
and crown the triumphs of the age.
Let us turn for a moment to the consideration of politics and of war as
these are affected by the influence of science. Playfair speaks much of
the superior wisdom, the superior education, the superior devotion to
science, of Germany, as contrasted with those of any other nation; he
lauds to the skies her enormous grants to laboratories and professors of
physiology and chemistry and ‘original research’ (called by the vulgar,
vivisection); but the only result of all this expenditure and
instruction is a military despotism so colossal that, whilst it overawes
and paralyses both German liberty and European peace, it yet may fall
over from its own weight any day, like the giant of clay which it
resembles. Are we not then justified in objecting to accept, whilst the
chief issue of German culture is Militarism and anti-Semitism, such
praises of Germany, and refusing to render such homage to her? ‘By your
fruits ye shall be judged,’ is a just saying: and the fruits of Germany,
in the concert of Europe and the sum of political life, are dissension,
apprehension, absolutism, and the sacrifice of all other nations to the
pressure of the military Juggernaut which rolls before her; whilst in
her own national life the outcome of the sanguinary lessons given by the
government is little better than the barbarism of the middle ages
without its redeeming law of chivalry. The incessant and senseless duels
which maim and disfigure German youth remain a disgrace to civilisation,
and a duellist may fire three times at an adversary who _never returns
the fire_ and, killing him at the last, will only be punished by a
slight imprisonment, whilst he will be admired and deified by his
comrades.[M] Such barbarous brutality, such insensibility to generous
feeling, such universal resort to the arbitration of every trifling
dispute by the pistol or the sabre, is the chief characteristic of the
nation in which science rules supreme! Conscription, that curse of
nations, is forced on all weaklier powers by the enormous armed forces
of Germany; art suffers, trades suffer, families suffer; and we are
called on by a ‘scientific’ mind to admire as a model the nation which
is the cause of this suffering, as we are bidden to admire as models
also her mutilated and bandaged students, and her blue-spectacled and
blear-eyed school children!
-----
Footnote M:
See _Times_ of September 19, 1885: account of duel in Munich.
-----
Again Playfair traces the defeat of France in 1870 to the inferiority of
her university teaching, and gives the opinion of the Institut de France
as his authority. It seems a singularly illogical and unphilosophical
decision for such an august body to have given forth publicly. The
causes of the defeat of France stretch farther back and have deeper
roots than can be accounted for by the omission of the state to create
more professors and laboratories. The whole teachings of history show
that all states, after reaching their perihelion, gradually decline and
sink into an inferior place amongst the nations. The day of France, as
of England, is already past its noon. Neither will ever be what they
have been. Neither will ever again give law to Europe as they gave it
once. But so many causes, some near, some remote, have all contributed
to bring about a decline which is as inevitable to nations as to
individuals, that it is surely most unphilosophic to contend that such
decay could have been averted by the creation of some hundred or
thousand more professors of natural or other science. It may be
excusable for such a professor to consider such professorships the one
universal panacea for all ills; but it is not an opinion in which those
who know France best and most intimately would be inclined to coincide.
They would conclude that, on the contrary, she has too many professors
already; that the grace, and wit, and courtesy, and wisdom and chivalry
have gone out of her since she was ruled from the desks of the
school-master, the physiologist and the notary, and that the whole
system of French colleges is calculated to emasculate and injure the
character of the schoolboy before he goes up for his baccalaureate.
The German invasion of France was supported by all which science could
do, yet most military judges are agreed that unless the carelessness of
her foe had afforded her a fortnight’s preparation, Germany would have
been hopelessly beaten on her own territory; whilst, look at the
campaign how we may, it cannot stand a moment’s comparison with the
Eastern marches of Alexander, or the conquests of Roman generals. With
none of the resources of modern warfare, these great conquerors carried
fire and sword through the whole of the regions known to them, from the
sands of Africa to the ice-plains of the Baltic. What is there in modern
war, which can compare with the campaigns of Hannibal, the amazing
victories of Julius Cæsar, the deeds of the young Pompeiins, the story
of every Legion? In the English endeavour to rescue Gordon, with every
aid which modern science can invent, and assisted by every facility
which modern modes of transit lend to the transport of multitudes, an
army was despatched from Great Britain with orders to reach a city on
the Nile. The errand was too difficult to be accomplished; the generals
returned with their mission unfulfilled; the country received them with
honour. This is the height to which the assistance of modern science has
brought the would-be Cæsars of the age.
What child’s play would this expedition to Khartoum have seemed to
Scipio Africanus or to Lucius Sylla! Yet all the ‘resources of science’
did not save the modern expedition from failure, and, in the face of
Europe and Asia, it retreated in ignominy before the barbaric and
untrained followers of a half-mad prophet, after an enormous expenditure
of stores and treasure, and a perfectly useless waste of human life!
War has been almost incessant since the empire of science, but it has
been characterised neither by magnanimity nor true triumph. Europe,
armed to the teeth, is like a muzzled pack of blood-hounds; every nation
lives in terror of the others; to such a pass has scientific warfare
brought the world. The multiplication of engines of destruction is one
of the chief occupations and boasts of a scientific age, and it can
claim a melancholy pre-eminence in the discovery of the means to inflict
the most agonising of all wounds through the medium of conical bullets
and shells of nitro-glycerine. To have added unspeakable horror to
death, and to have placed the power of secret and wholesale
assassination in the hands of ignorant and envious men, is one of the
chief benefits which this Egeria has brought to her eager pupil. And
when her worshippers laud her to the skies, as does the president of the
Aberdeen meeting, their silence on this side of her teaching is at once
significant and ominous.
Playfair is obviously afraid that the Humanities will always obtain, in
England at least, a larger place in public teaching and in public
subsidies than pure science will be able to do. I wish his fear may be
justified. My own fears are on the other side. Science offers prizes to
the prurient curiosities and the nascent cruelties of youth with which
literature can never compete. To study all the mysteries of sex in
anatomy, and to indulge the power of a Nero in little when watching the
agonies of a scientifically-tortured or poisoned dog, are enjoyments
appealing to instincts in the frame of the school-boy, with which not
even the most indecent passage in his Greek or Latin authors can ever
pretend to measure attraction. The professors of science need have no
fear as to the potency of the charm which their curriculum will exercise
over the juvenile mind. Teaching which offers at once the penetration
into corporeal secrets and the power of torture over animals, possesses
a fascination for the minds of youth which it will never lose, because
its appeals are addressed to those coarsest and crudest impulses which
are strongest of all in the child and in the adolescent.
What science is preparing for the future of man, in thus putting the
scalpel and the injecting-needle into the hands of children, is a darker
and wider question. One thing is certain, that in the future, as in the
streets and temples of Ancient Rome, there will be no altar to Pity.
The acknowledged doctrine of the professors of ‘research,’ that all
knowledge is valuable because it is, or appears to be, knowledge, and
that all ways and methods of obtaining it are justified and sanctified,
bears so curious a likeness to the self-worship of the Papal dominion
and of the Spanish Inquisition, that we see, with a sense of despair,
how bigotry and despotism in some form or another are fated to reappear
so long as human life shall last.
It is significant of the political immorality and readiness to tyrannise
over others in the pursuit of their aims, which characterise the
scientific classes, that they are willing to admire and support any
government, however despotic, which is willing in return to endow their
scholarships and erect their laboratories. They are inclined to
surrender all political liberty, if by so doing they can obtain a ruler
who will build them a number of new colleges, with every new instrument
ready to their hands for animal torture and physiological or chemical
experiment.
A Lorenzo di Medici, devoted exclusively to the sciences instead of to
the arts, would be their ideal sovereign. Public liberties might perish
under him as they should; he would give science her free scope, her
desired endowments, her million living victims; he would be even too
enlightened to refuse her human subjects for the physiological
laboratory.
This curious willingness of the pursuers of science to join hands with
tyranny, so long as tyranny helps themselves, is the darkest menace of
the world’s future. In time to come it may assume dimensions and aspects
which are undreamed of now. The demand of biologists and chemists to be
provided for out of the funds of the state, is a demand which has never
been made by literature or art, and would not be tolerated from them.
The exorbitant sums insisted on for the establishment of laboratories
and professorships, rob science of that character of disinterested
devotion which alone would make it worthy of esteem. ‘Give me a thousand
or fifteen hundred a year,’ says the physiologist to the state; ‘give me
money-grants also for experiments which I may spend at my good option
and for which I need return no account, and leave me to cut up dogs and
cats and horses at leisure. In return I will give you some new facts
about internal hydrocephalus or the length of time a new poison takes to
kill a guinea-pig.’ The agreement may, or may not, be worth the state’s
entering into with the physiologist, but in any case the physiologist
cannot deny that he makes a good income out of his science, and cannot
pretend to any disinterested or philanthropic selection of it. The
moment that any man accepts a salary for intellectual work, he must
submit to resign all claim to purely intellectual devotion to it. The
claims of scientists to be paid and provided for out of national funds
has many equivocal aspects, and will have many unwholesome results;
whilst the rapacity and insistence with which they are put forward are
as unbecoming as they are undisguised. The high priests of modern
science are not likely to shed tears like the Greek philosopher
Isocrates because they are compelled to take money. On the contrary,
they clamour loudly for their maintenance by their nation, with a
cupidity which has happily never disgraced either literature or art.
As modern socialism aspires to make the world into one vast
allotment-ground, with every man’s half-acre meted out to him on which
to build his hut and hive his store, so science would change the world
into one vast class-room and laboratory, wherein all humanity (paying
very large fees) should sit at the feet of its professors, whom it would
clothe with purple and fine linen, and whom it would never presume to
oppose or to contradict.
The world will gain nothing by delivering itself, as it is gradually
doing, from the bondage of the various churches and their priesthoods,
if in their stead it puts its neck under the yoke of a despotism, more
intellectual perhaps, but as bigoted, as arrogant, and as cruel. That
this danger lies before it from its submission to the demands of
science, no dispassionate student of humanity can doubt.