Is the scientific man really a distinct kind of man, or is it merely
that science is a distinct occupation? To answer the question we
must make the elementary distinction between the scientific man and
the man who practises science, and when we do that the answer is
obvious. There is as certainly the “born” scientific man as there
is the born artist. But in saying this we are referring to ideals.
Perhaps there has never been a perfect man of science, and perhaps
there has never been a perfect artist. But in order to understand
the distinction between one kind of man and another it is helpful to
construct ideals--extreme cases which may be used as measuring rods.
What, then, are the characteristics of the ideal man of science? We may
approach the solution by trying to make precise the characteristics
which have led us, vaguely, to construct the hierarchy we already
possess. We _feel_, for instance, that Henry Cavendish, that
passionless recluse, was a much more “purely scientific” man than,
say, Thomas Henry Huxley. If we examine this conviction of ours we
make the interesting discovery that it is chiefly for his negative
characteristics that we assign this greater purity to Cavendish. Huxley
was passionately interested in the questions which concern every good
citizen, in politics, in social reform, in religion; he took sides
on these questions and fought for his side. Of Cavendish we can only
say that it is inconceivable that he would have taken sides on these
questions, and very difficult to believe that he was even remotely
interested in them. Take another point. Huxley abounded in ordinary
human affections. He was a devoted husband, a good father, a faithful
friend, a resolute opponent. Cavendish never manifested a vestige of
any of these qualities. He had no wife, no children, no friends, and
never showed the faintest dislike of anybody. Huxley was a champion of
what he thought the truth, and strained every nerve to enable it to
prevail. Cavendish, who was one of the greatest investigators, one of
the clearest and most subtle minds, in the history of science, kept
his discoveries to himself. For years Huxley bore the brunt of the
attacks on Darwin’s theory. Cavendish blandly watched the growth in
popularity of theories he had privately demonstrated to be wrong, and
never stirred a finger to rebut them. And finally, Huxley was a man who
suffered his alternations of high spirits and despondency, hope and
despair, while Cavendish, from the evidence we have, was imperturbably
serene.
Now, the interesting point that emerges from this comparison is that
Cavendish, in virtue of his scientific purity, _could not_ have
exhibited those qualities which allied Huxley to the ordinary run of
men. A man’s characteristics are not disconnected. Cavendish’s cold
passion for knowledge required for its gratification qualities of the
spirit as well as of the mind. No man was ever more single in his
desire to _know_; no man ever was so little hindered by having
other interests to serve; no man, therefore, had a greater measure
of the purely scientific spirit. This is the important point for our
question; it is comparatively irrelevant that very few men have ever
had so great a mind to place at the service of their passion. That his
actual scientific standing should be so much greater than Huxley’s
is an accident; he would still have been more purely scientific than
Huxley had his ability been less than Huxley’s. Cavendish is all of
a piece. His very perfection as a recording and measuring instrument
tended to deprive him of “personality.” The less personal he was,
in fact, the more dispassionately open he could be. Other passions
were incompatible with his perfection; they would derange this
exquisite instrument. Judgments of good and evil would not have been
natural to him. His reaction to anything was exhausted in the act of
_understanding_ that thing.
So far as we have gone, it would seem that Nietzsche’s description of
what he calls the “objective man” is exactly what we mean by the ideal
man of science. “The objective man is in truth a mirror: accustomed
to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such
desires only as knowing or ‘reflecting’ implies ...” he will regard
such personality as he has, Nietzsche goes on to say, as accidental and
arbitrary. He cannot take himself seriously and devote time to himself.
His love is constrained, his hate artificial. He is only genuine so far
as he can be objective; he is unable to say either “Yea” or “Nay” to
life; he is concerned solely to understand, to “reflect.” He says, with
Leibniz: “Je ne méprise presque rien.” This description is undoubtedly
the result of genuine psychological insight. When we try to disentangle
the purely scientific element in a man of science we find that, so far
as he is scientific, he approximates to Nietzsche’s objective man. If
this, then, is the ideal scientific man, what place does he occupy?
Where does he stand in relation to the rest of mankind? According to
Nietzsche he is merely an instrument; “he is an instrument, something
of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing
in himself.” He is no goal, no termination, no complementary man in
whom the rest of creation justifies itself. As compared with the
_true_ philosopher, the philosopher in Nietzsche’s sense, the man
who gives a new direction to life, the ideal man of science is merely
the most costly, the most easily tarnished, the most exquisite of
instruments.
We need not quarrel with this valuation, but we would point out that
there is an omission in it. The scientific man is an instrument, but
he is an indispensable instrument. The human race has endured all the
different “new directions” given to it by the “true” philosophers of
the past without any marked increase in its spiritual stature. The
philosopher, however commanding, who would really lead us in any but a
circular direction must have _knowledge_. This knowledge, to be
valuable, must be clear and trustworthy; it must be scientific. And
if the inspirations and impulses of our leaders should prove to be
incompatible with deductions from scientific knowledge, then we may
be sure that the Promised Land does not lie their way. The scientific
man is merely an instrument. But it is this instrument alone that can
show to mankind which, of all the goals it desires, are possible goals,
and which, of all the leaders it trusts, are trustworthy leaders. The
scientific man is an instrument, but it is by this instrument that
those who would use it are first tested. Scientific knowledge is, if
you like, as dispassionate and inhuman as is the universe with which it
concerns itself--and it can as little be ignored.