The influence of scientific discoveries on that vaguely defined
complex of beliefs and intellectual interests called culture seems, at
first sight, to have something paradoxical about it. There can be no
question that this influence is very widespread, and there can be as
little question that ignorance of scientific discoveries is equally
widespread. If our admittedly cultured classes were submitted to such a
_questionnaire_ as the workers in Sheffield were recently called
upon to answer, we should doubtless find that such questions as Who
was Dante? Who was Plato? would act like holes in a dam; but it is to
be feared that the questions under the heading _Science_ would
evoke the merest trickle of information. And yet many of the questions
in other parts of the _questionnaire_ would be answered very
differently were it not for those scientific discoveries of which the
examinee can give no satisfactory description. The apparent paradox is
resolved by remembering that it is only the broadest generalisations
of science, and only certain aspects of those, which exert a marked
influence on the rest of a man’s beliefs. The varied and highly
complicated studies which make up modern astronomy, for instance,
can be known, in any real sense, to but a few specialists; the one
significant thing, for purposes of general culture, that emerges from
these studies, is that the earth is materially insignificant in the
universe. We need not mind if so much knowledge and no more percolates
through the barriers of a literary education; the damage is done;
the rest of the man’s beliefs begin to be profoundly affected. In
the papers on geology and biology the majority of cultured people
would fail; they would all be amused, however, at the idea that the
earth was formed in 4004 B.C. and that man was a special and
separate creation. Psychological studies have not yet reached, perhaps,
a great and easily understood generalisation, but there is a growing
charity vis-à-vis the “criminal classes” and other moral outcasts. Our
Victorian parents’ hearty condemnation of everybody they disliked is
now just a little more difficult. Such generalisations as we have been
mentioning are important to general culture because of what we may
call their perspective effect. Their bearing on the rest of a man’s
mental furniture is not direct; they put the furniture in a different
setting. A change of residence, if the difference between the two
houses be sufficiently marked, may well lead to a change of habits,
and the furniture which looked quite well in four rooms may seem a
little inadequate in forty. Those writers who declare that there is
no “real” conflict between science and religion, for instance, may be
perfectly good logicians; the point is whether a particular religion
looks adequate in the modern universe of science. It is not a question
of destroying the furniture; it is whether the contents of a bijou
villa adequately furnish Salisbury Plain. The influence of science
on philosophy is similarly indirect. Perhaps there is no philosophy
which does not still find defenders; our objection to many of these
philosophies is not that they are illogical, but that they look so
funny.
When we come to study the influence of science on the arts we see that
there is yet another way in which science modifies culture. Many of the
pleasurable emotions associated with the arts are not unknown to the
student of science. The study of such sciences as astronomy, physics
or biology awakens emotions not readily distinguishable from those
evoked by even the greatest works of art. It is as if the universe with
which science deals was itself a work of art; it is, to an increasing
number of people, the greatest of all works of art. Such students often
acquire a new standard of æsthetic excellence. Darwin’s indifference to
poetry in his later years was probably the result, not of the atrophy
of a faculty, but of its fuller exercise elsewhere. The young William
Thomson, reading at night in the library, and drawing great breaths of
rapture over Lagrange’s _Mécanique Analytique_, was experiencing
emotions probably not very different from those of Swinburne when
reading Shakespeare. Before such satisfactions become accessible to the
ordinary cultured classes more is required than that vague acquaintance
with outstanding generalities to which we have referred. In such a
science as astronomy the mere results are often sufficiently attractive
to rouse pleasurable emotions in the reader, although the actual march
of the investigation by which the results were obtained is often of
equal interest. At the present day both results and the broad lines
of the investigations are in many cases accessible to the ordinary
cultured person, with the result that his intellectual interests are
added to, or at least find a new field for deployment. A greater number
of æsthetic objects people his world, and it may even happen that the
new arrivals affect the estimate in which he held the old. He may
discover an unsuspected futility in some of his earlier occupations; he
may, in fact, change his ideals of culture.
But it is, in truth, impossible to trace precisely the effect on an
individual of a new belief or of a new interest. Psychologists have
made us aware of the fact that the mind is not only immensely complex,
but that the connections between its elements are often of the most
unsuspected character. Destruction of an old belief or the grafting
of a new interest may issue in results as unlike their cause as the
butterfly is unlike the chrysalis. The effect of the impact of science
on the old culture cannot be foreseen; it has, however, already
produced such changes that the culture of the comparatively near future
will probably differ from ours by more than ours differs from that of
Babylon.