to be welcomed; yet only under one important moral condition, and with a
paradoxical result. The moral condition is that the pride of science
should turn into humility, that it should no longer imagine that it is
laying bare the intrinsic nature of things. And the paradoxical result is
this: that the forms of science are optional, like various languages or
methods of notation. One may be more convenient or subtle than another,
according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a
reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit
of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or
itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of
experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no
ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I
was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is rather when the
expert prophesies, when he propounds a new philosophy founded on his
latest experiments, that we may justly smile at his system, and wait for
the next.
Self-knowledge--and the new science is full of self-knowledge--is a great
liberator: if perhaps it imposes some retrenchment, essentially it revives
courage. Then at last we see what we are and what we can do. The spirit
can abandon its vain commitments and false pretensions, like a young man
free at last to throw off his clothes and run naked along the sands.
Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
another in being directed in the first instance upon various
unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because
they are everywhere striving to discover in those miscellaneous objects
some intelligible order and method. And as the emotion of the pure artist,
whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
singing his songs.
Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
the prestige of the arts in the world. If science misled us before, when
it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
not romantic physics require? Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
per second--an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
spirit. All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
things.
The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating
the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
since a plurality of points of view, somehow comparable, must be assumed
in the beginning, as well as common principles of projection, and ulterior
points of contact or coincidence. Such assumptions, which must persist
throughout, seem to presuppose an absolute system of nature behind all the
relative systems of science.
The other circumstance which points to further revolutions is social. The
new science is unintelligible to almost all of us; it can be tested only
by very delicate observations and very difficult reasoning. We accept it
on the authority of a few professors who themselves have accepted it with
a contagious alacrity, as if caught in a whirlwind. It has sprung up
mysteriously and mightily, like mysticism in a cloister or theology in a
council: a Soviet of learned men has proclaimed it. Moreover, it is not
merely a system among systems, but a movement among movements. A system,
even when it has serious rivals, may be maintained for centuries as
religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end;
it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it,
or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether
the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to
refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have
enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of
capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward
invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the
unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy
support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no
utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or
discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its
metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the
public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of
declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until
recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may
cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the
practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.
IV
A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various
kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them
abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the
texture of a more comprehensive destiny. The end of one life might be the
beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a
dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters. Death
would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next
personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps, as some
suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural
Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living
for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a
universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in
the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either
case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end
each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.
The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality, but
something naturally quite smooth and proper. This has been set forth
recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected
such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his
conception of sexual craving or _libido_ into a general principle of
attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets
Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown
open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have
escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given
to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.
I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and
graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
and of love.
"Let us imagine [writes Freud][11] an undifferentiated vesicle of
sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the
outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as
an organ for receiving stimuli.... This morsel of living substance
floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most
potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not
furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, _an
instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
towards reinstatement of an earlier condition_, one which it had
abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces--a kind
of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
of inertia in organic life.
"If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically
acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of
organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and
distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its
very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances
had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course
of existence.... It would be counter to the conservative nature of
instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.
It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being
left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the
circuitous paths of development.... _The goal of all life is
death...._
"Through a long period of time the living substance may have ...
had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences
altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations
from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and
circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These
circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative
instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of
life as we know it."
Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty,
admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more
important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that,
for all that, they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies.
When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an _Élan vital_,
or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used
are no less uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is
false--false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the
simple naturalness of nature: whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud's
speculations is true. In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or
false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from
literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the
pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise
sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek
mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms
employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious
wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism",
"the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened
up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh
start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The
shortcomings of our description", Freud says, "would probably disappear if
for psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical
ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar
to us for a much longer time, and perhaps also simpler." All human
discourse is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are
adventitious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as the
sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image, can trace the
flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to shoot it and bring
it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about the origin of life or of
dreams, though expressed symbolically, may reveal the pertinent movement
of nature to us, and may kindle in us just sentiments and true
expectations in respect to our fate--for his own soul is the bird this
sportsman is shooting.
Now I think these new myths of Freud's about life, like his old ones
about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us enormously
about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes, finds itself in
trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign, with all sorts of
anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and pains. It is born, as
another wise myth has it, in original sin. And the passions and ambitions
of life, as they come on, only complicate this burden and make it heavier,
without rendering it less incessant or gratuitous. Whence this fatality,
and whither does it lead? It comes from heredity, and it leads to
propagation. When we ask how heredity could be started or transmitted, our
ignorance of nature and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild
conjectures. Something--let us call it matter--must always have existed,
and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up
into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy
manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they
can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing
to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But
the external agencies that originally wound up that mainspring never
cease to operate; every fresh stimulus gives it another turn, until it
snaps, or grows flaccid, or is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when
circumstances change, these external agencies may encrust that primary
organ with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every adventure,
leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a further
complication in the structure of the body, a fresh charge, which tends to
repeat the impressed motion in season and out of season. Hence that
perpetual docility or ductility in living substance which enables it to
learn tricks, to remember facts, and (when the seeds of past experiences
marry and cross in the brain) to imagine new experiences, pleasing or
horrible. Every act initiates a new habit and may implant a new instinct.
We see people even late in life carried away by political or religious
contagions or developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old
age, but rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares,
were it not that time, in exposing us to many adventitious influences,
weakens or discharges our primitive passions; we are less greedy, less
lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primitive impulses
are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply rooted in the organism:
so that although an old man may be converted or may take up some hobby,
there is usually something thin in his elderly zeal, compared with the
heartiness of youth; nor is it edifying to see a soul in which the plainer
human passions are extinct becoming a hotbed of chance delusions.
In any case each fresh habit taking root in the organism forms a little
mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that an elaborate
mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever and spring holds the
other down, and all hold the mainspring down together, allowing it to
unwind itself only very gradually, and meantime keeping the whole clock
ticking and revolving, and causing the smooth outer face which it turns to
the world, so clean and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the
passer-by. But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath,
propelled with difficulty, and balanced precariously, with much secret
friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly out of
order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to go at all.
Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, when at last dismounted,
starting afresh in the person of some seed it has dropped, a portion of
its substance with all its concentrated instincts wound up tightly within
it, and eager to repeat the ancestral experiment; all this growth is not
merely material and vain. Each clock in revolving strikes the hour, even
the quarters, and often with lovely chimes. These chimes we call
perceptions, feelings, purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are
taken up entirely with this mental music, and perhaps think that it sounds
of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty
in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe
them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our
aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these
minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various
musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and
catching the echoes of distant events or of maturing inward dispositions.
This information and emotion, added to incidental pleasures in satisfying
our various passions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They
reconcile it to the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and
is breaking it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can
anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is
to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time
pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because
the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously
wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and
prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical
being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a
sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and
that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
What is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its
career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an
organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for
its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our
unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying
and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied
harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then
doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.