most vexed question in the whole science of life. But it belongs to our
argument to consider it from one or two general points of view. Its
analogies with, and its differences from, the great generalizations of
mathematical physics, are both highly instructive. The first crude
hypothesis of the gradual evolution of various vegetable and animal
forms from one another may be found in the earliest Greek thinkers, just
as Pythagoras and Aristarchus anticipated the Copernican theory.
Aristotle gave the idea a philosophic statement which only the fuller
knowledge of our own time enables us to appreciate. He traced the
gradual progression in nature from the inorganic to the organic, and
among living things from the simpler to the higher forms. But his
knowledge of the facts was insufficient: the Greeks had no microscope,
and the dissecting knife was forbidden on the human subject. Then, as
these things were gradually added to science from the seventeenth
century onwards, and the record of the rocks gave the confirmation of
palaeontology, the whole realm of living nature was gradually unfolded
before us, every form connected both in function and in history with
every other, every organ fulfilling a necessary part, either now or in
the past, and growing and changing to gain a more perfect accord with
its environment. Such is the supreme conception which now dominates
biological science much as the Newtonian theory has dominated physics
for two hundred years; and it is idle to debate whether this new idea is
different in kind or only in degree from the great law of physics. It is
a general notion or law which brings together and explains myriads of
hitherto unrelated particulars; it has been established by observation
and experiment working on a previous hypothesis; it involves
measurement, as all accurate observation must, and it gives us an
increasing power of prediction. So far, therefore, we must class it with
the great mathematical laws and dissent from M. Bergson. But seeing that
the multitudinous facts far surpass our powers of complete colligation,
that much in the vital process is still obscure, that we are conscious
in ourselves of a power of shaping circumstances which we are inclined
in various degrees to attribute to other living things, so far we
recognize a profound difference between the laws of life and the laws of
physics, and pay our respects to M. Bergson and his allies of the
neo-vitalist school. Not for the first time in history we have to seek
the truth in the reconciliation, or at least the cohabitation, of
apparent contradictories.
To us who are concerned in tracing the progress of mankind as a whole,
and constantly find the roots of progress in the growth of the social
spirit, the development, that is, of unity of spirit and of action on a
wider and deeper scale, there is one aspect of biological truth, as the
evolutionists have lately revealed it, which is of special interest. The
living thing is an organism of which the characteristic is the constant
effort to preserve its unity. This is in fact the definition of an
organism. It only dies or suffers diminution in order to reproduce
itself, and the new creature repeats by some sort of organic memory the
same preservative acts that its parents did. We recognize life by these
manifestations. A merely material, non-living thing, such as a crystal,
cannot thus make good its loss, nor can it assimilate unlike substance
and make it a part of itself. But these things are of the nature of
life. Now mankind, as a whole, has, if our argument is correct, this
characteristic of an organism: it is bound together by more than
mechanical or accidental links. It is _one_ by the nature of its being,
and the study of mankind, the highest branch of the science of life,
rests, or should rest, upon the basis of those common functions by which
humanity is held together and distinguished from the rest of the animate
world.
Just as in passing from the mechanical sciences to that of life, we
noticed that the general laws of the lower sphere still held good, but
that new factors not analysable into those of the former had to be
reckoned with, so in passing from the animate realm, as a whole, to man
its highest member, we find that, while animal, and subject to the
general laws of animality, he adds features which distinguish him as
another order and cannot be found elsewhere. His unity as an organism
has a progressive quality possessed by no other species. Step by step
his mind advances into the recesses of time and space, and makes the
farthest objects that his mind can reach a part of his being. His unity
of organization, of which the humblest animalcule is a simple type, goes
far beyond the preservation or even the improvement of his species: it
touches the infinite though it cannot contain it. To trace this widening
process is the true key to progress, the _idee-mere_ of history. For
while man's evolution has its practical side, like that of other
species,--the needs of nutrition, of reproduction, of adapting himself
to his environment,--with man this is the basis and not the end. The end
is, first the organization of himself as a world-being, conscious of his
unity, and then the illimitable conquest of truth and goodness as far as
his ever-growing powers extend.
Man's reason is thus, as philosophers have always taught, his special
characteristic, and takes the place for him, on a higher plane, of the
law of organic growth common to all living things. In this we join
hands, across two thousand years, with Aristotle: he would have
understood us and used almost identical language. But the content of the
words as we use them and their applications are immeasurably greater.
The content is the mass of knowledge which man's reason has accumulated
and partly put in order since Aristotle taught. It is now so great that
thoroughly to master a single branch is arduous labour for a lifetime
of concentrated toil, and at the end of it new discoveries will crowd
upon the worker and he will die with all his earlier notions crying for
revision. No case so patent, so conclusive, of the reality of human
unity and the paramount need of organization. The individual here can
only thrive and only be of service as a small member of a great whole,
one atom in a planet, one cell in a body. The demand which Comte raised
more than fifty years ago for another class of specialists, the
specialists in generalities, is now being taken up by men of science
themselves. But the field has now so much extended and is so much fuller
in every part, that it would seem that nothing less than a committee of
Aristotles could survey the whole. And even this is but one aspect of
the matter. Just as the genesis of science was in the daily needs of
men--the cultivators whose fields must be re-measured after the
flooding, the priests who had to fix the right hour for sacrifice--so
all through its history science has grown and in the future will grow
still more by following the suggestions of practice. It gathers strength
by contact with the world and life, and it should use its strength in
making the world more fit to live in. Thus our committee of scientific
philosophers needs to have constantly in touch with it not one but many
boards of scientific practitioners.
The past which has given us this most wonderful of all the fruits of
time, does not satisfy us equally as to the use that has been made of
it. Our crowded slums do not proclaim the glory of Watt and Stephenson
as the heavens remind us of Kepler and Newton. Selfishness has grown fat
on ill-paid labour, and jealous nations have sharpened their weapons
with every device that science can suggest. But a sober judgement, as
well as the clearest evidence of history, dictates a more hopeful
conclusion. Industry, the twin brother of science, has vastly increased
our wealth, our comfort, and our capacity for enjoyment. Medicine, the
most human of her children, has lengthened our lives, fortified our
bodies, and alleviated our suffering. Every chapter in this volume gives
some evidence of the beneficent power of science. For religion,
government, morality, even art, are all profoundly influenced by the
knowledge that man has acquired of the world around him and his
practical conclusions from it. These do not, with the possible exception
of art, contradict the thesis of a general improvement of mankind, and
science must therefore claim a share--it would seem the decisive
share--in the result. We speak, of course, of science in the sense which
has been developed in this essay, of the bright well-ordered centre to
our knowledge which is always spreading and bringing more of the
surrounding fringe, which is also spreading, into the well-defined area.
In this sense religion, morality and government have all within historic
times come within the range of clear and well-ordered thought: and
mankind standing thus within the light, stands more firmly and with
better hope. He sees the dark spots and the weaknesses. He knows the
remedies, though his will is often unequal to applying them. And even
with this revelation of weakness and ignorance, he is on the whole
happier and readier to grapple with his fate.
If this appears a fair diagnosis of the Western mind in the midst of its
greatest external crisis, the reason for this amazing firmness of mind
and stability of society must be sought in the structure which science
and industry combined have built around us. The savage, untutored in
astronomy, may think that an eclipse betokens the end of the world.
Science convinces him that it will pass. Just so the modern world
trained to an order of thought and of society which rests on world-wide
activities elaborated through centuries of common effort, awaits the
issue of our darkened present calmly and unmoved. The things of the mind
on which all nations have co-operated in the past will re-assert their
sway. Fundamentally this is a triumph for the scientific spirit, the
order which man has now succeeded in establishing between himself and
his surroundings.
The country is demanding--and rightly--a stronger bias in our
educational system for teaching of a scientific kind; but teachers and
professors are not unnaturally perplexed. They see the immeasurable
scope of the new knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective,
that has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old
'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them before which the old
one with all its faults seems definite, manageable and formative of
character. The classical world which has been the staple of our
education for 400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in
thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives, as we go
about our business. This new world into which our youth has now to
enter, rests also on the past, but it is still more present; it grows
all round us faster than we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How
then can such a thing be used as an instrument of education where above
all something is needed of clear and definite purpose, stimulating in
itself and tending to mental growth and activity in after life? We could
not, even if we would, offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the
most troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments will be
needed before even a tolerable solution can be reached. But the argument
pursued in this and other essays may suggest a line of approach. This
must lie in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather in
the recognition that science rightly understood is the key to history,
and that the history best worth study is the record of man's collective
thought in face of the infinite complexities, the barriers and byways,
the lights and shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's
approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming student may
shape his own. He sees a unity of thought not wholly unattainable, a
foundation laid beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained
should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the past and to
apply the lessons gained to the amelioration of the present.
This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for all, the contemplation
of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its
secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as
well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn
and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the
rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the
lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths
remain, deeper and more glorious, with all the added marvels of man's
exploring thought. The seeing eye which a true education will one day
give us, may read man's history in the world we live in, and read the
world with the full illumination of a united human vision--the eyes of
us all.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
Alcan, _De la methode dans les Sciences_.
Mach, _History of Mechanics_, Kegan Paul.
Thomson, _Science of Life_, Blackie.
Thomson, _Science in the Nineteenth Century_, Chambers.
_New Calendar of Great Men_, Macmillan.
_The Darwin Centenary Volume._
Bergson, _Creative Evolution_.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.
[81] H. Bouasse, _La Methode dans les Sciences_, Alcan.
XI
PROGRESS IN PHILOSOPHY
J.A. SMITH
To contend that there has been progress in Philosophy may seem but a
desperate endeavour. For the reproach against it of unprogressiveness is
of long standing: where other forms of human knowledge have undoubtedly
advanced, Philosophy, in modern times at any rate, has (so it is said)
remained stationary, propounding its outworn problems, its vain and
empty solutions. Because of this failure it has by common consent been
deposed from its once proud position at the head of the sciences and
obliged to confess, in the words of the Trojan queen:
modo maxima rerum
Nunc trahor exul inops.
The charge of unprogressiveness is not made against it by its foes
alone; the truth of it is admitted by some of its best friends. If
Voltaire exclaims 'O metaphysique, metaphysique, nous sommes aussi
avances qu'aux temps des Druides', Kant sadly admits the fact, sets
himself to diagnose its cause, and if possible to discover or devise a
remedy. Yet we must remember that it was philosophers who first descried
those currents in the world of events which the non-philosophic,
borrowing the name from them, call Progress, who first attempted to
determine their direction and the possible goal of their convergence,
and laboured to clear their own and others' minds in regard to the
meaning, to capture which the name was thrown out as a net into the
ocean of experience. Nor must we forget that it was in their own chosen
field--the world of human thoughts and actions--that they from the
beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest evidence of the
reality of Progress. While the world that surrounded and hemmed them and
their fellows in might or must be regarded as unchanging and
unchangeable, doomed for ever to reproduce and monotonously reiterate
whatsoever it had once done and been, the mind or spirit of Man in its
own realm seemed capable of going beyond all its past achievements and
rising to new heights, not merely here and there or in isolated
instances but in such numbers or masses as to raise for long periods of
history the general level of human efficiency and welfare. It is true
that many of those who noted these advances or profited by them did not
always admit that they took place in, or were due to the agency of,
Philosophy. The advances were most often credited to other powers and
the new territory claimed by their representatives. The contributions
made by Philosophy to the general improvement of human life were and are
obscure, difficult to trace, easily missed or forgotten. It came about
that the philosopher was misconceived as one indifferent to ordinary
human interests and disdainful of the more obvious advantages secured by
others, pressing and urging forward and upward into a cloudland where
the light was too dim for the eyes of man and the paths too uncertain
for his feet. Unsatisfied with the region where Man had learned by the
slow and painful lessons of experience to build himself a habitable city
he dreamed of something higher, aspiring to explore beyond and above
where the light of that experience shone and illuminated. Perhaps the
main idea that the name of Philosophy now to most suggests is that of a
Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide and so high that it must be by sane
and sober minds pronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human
faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming and which
constantly tempts us forward like a mirage, but which like a mirage
leads us into waste and barren places, so much so that it is no small
part of human wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our
efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably regard as well
within the compass of our powers of thought and action. It is folly, we
are told, to adventure ourselves upon the uncharted seas into which
philosophers invite us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts
in the vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us. After
all, there is much that we can know, and in the knowledge of which we
can better the estate of Man, relieving him from many of his most
pressing terrors and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive
ourselves to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse them our help
and fail to play our part in the common business of mankind. There is
surely in the world enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all
our energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to do so so
plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance in them. Where in
this task our hearts do faint and fail, are there not other means than
the discredited nostrum of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit
our forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in the darkest days
of human history that men turned desperately to Philosophy for comfort
and consolation--how surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain! When
other duties are so urgent and immediate, have we even the right to
consume our energies otherwise than in their direct discharge? And is it
not presumption to ask for any further light than that which is
vouchsafed to us in the ordinary course of experience or, if that is
insufficient, in and by Religion?
Much in this plea for a final relinquishment of aid from Philosophy in
the furtherance of human progress is plausible and more than plausible.
Yet the hope or, if you will, the dream of attaining some form or kind
or degree of knowledge which the sciences do not and cannot supply and
perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness and firmness of assurance
other and beyond the confidence of religious faith, is not yet extinct,
is perhaps inextinguishable, and though it often takes extravagant and
even morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes many, nor
these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that they count all the
labour they spend upon its search worth all the pains. Not for
themselves alone do they seek it; they view themselves as not alone in
the quest, but engaged in a matter of universally human moment. In the
measure in which they count themselves to have attained any result they
do not hoard it or grudge it to others. The notion of philosophic truth
as something to be shared and enjoyed only by a few--as what is called
'esoteric'--is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt to involve an
essential self-contradiction; rather it is conceived as something the
value of which is assured and enhanced by being imparted. Those who
believe themselves to be by nature or (it may be) accident appointed to
the office of its quest, by no means feel that they are thereby divided
from their fellows as a peculiar people or a privileged and exclusive
priesthood, but much rather as fellow servants enlisted and engaged in
the public service of mankind. Least of all do they believe that their
efforts are foredoomed to inevitable failure, that progress therein is
not to be looked for, or that they and their predecessors have hitherto
made no advance towards what they and, as they also believe, all men
sought and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say the
last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiriting narrative of
repeated error and defeat, but the record of a slow but secure and
steady advance in which, as nowhere else, the mind of Man celebrates and
enjoys triumphs over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an
ever-brightening flame. Reviewing its own past in history the spirit of
Philosophy sees its own inner light, which is its act and its essence,
constantly increasing, spreading ever wider into the circumambient dark,
and touching far-off and hitherto undiscovered peaks with the fire of a
coming dawn. In place of the starlight of Science or the moonlight of
Religion it sees a sun arise flooding the world with light and warmth
and life. High hopes, high claims; but can they be made good, or even
rationally entertained? Suffice it here that they be openly avowed and
proclaimed to be laid up in the heart of the philosophic spirit,
'dreaming', and yet with waking eyes, 'of things to come'. Or rather
shall we not say, seeing that its eyes are unsealed and the vision
therefore no dream, beholding a present--an ever-present--Reality?
It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that first discerned
the fact of Progress, named it, and divined its lineaments. To
Philosophy the name and notion of Progress belongs as of right--the
right of first occupation. Merely to have invented a name for the fact
is no small service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and
examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us the idea, the notion,
and therewith the fact began to be understood and to become amenable to
further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy
gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be
the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and
shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the
words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines,
distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of
meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called a
notion, a fit member of the world of mind, a seat and source of
intellectual light. In this work Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply
by reflecting on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already
acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite methods, only
continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously to use the familiar
means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and
developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and
spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse
to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary
words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy
and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an
effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to force our thoughts
to run counter to our customary heedless use of words and to learn to
employ them even for a short time with a steady precision of
significance. Yet unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain
the easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip us in the
dark. Our words degrade into tokens which experience will not
cash--tangles of symbols which we cannot retranslate.
But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and subtilize our
ordinary words so as to fit them for the higher service of
interpretative thought, more even than the endeavour to improve the
stock of ideas no matter how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves
whatever it imports us to understand. All this it is and does, or
strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business and real aim.
All this it might do and do successfully, and yet make or bring about no
substantial progress in itself or elsewhere. And when progress in
Philosophy is spoken of, it is not either such improvement in language
nor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is meant.
What is claimed for (or denied to it) under the name of Progress is an
advance in knowledge, knowledge clear-sighted, grounded, and assured,
knowledge of some authentic and indubitable reality. It is by the
attainment of such knowledge, by progress in and towards it, that the
claim of Philosophy to be progressive must stand or fall. To the
question whether it can make good its claim to the possession and
increase of this knowledge we must give special attention, for if
Philosophy fails in this it fails in all.