[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which
makes it anything more than a philosophic vagary, is borrowed from
an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who
holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I
have printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is
because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible
for the general drift of the thought.]
The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through
Italy he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of
the place or by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the
monks concerning what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply,
but stood silently contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister.
Again they asked him what he desired; and then slowly turning his head
and looking at the friars, he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is
altogether too significant to escape suspicion; yet as _The Divine
Comedy_ is supposed to contain symbolically the history of the human
spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this fable of the divine
poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and desire of the
spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner search
this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the
spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem
as if some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when
the hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his
quaint way:
Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.
It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual
fluctuations of mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of
the contest between these two hostile members of our being,--between the
deep-lying principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that
drags us back into the region of change and motion and forever forbids
us to acquiesce in what is found. And I believe further that the moral
disposition of a nation or of an individual may be best characterised by
the predominance of the one or the other of these two elements. We may
find a people, such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longing after
peace was so intense as to make insignificant every other concern of
life, and among whom the aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close
the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting scenes and to look
only upon that changeless vision of
central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.
The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere
phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the
upspringing day-star.
Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable
stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet
together in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action,
that unity in variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the
special field of art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the
artistic sense among the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians
everywhere, were not content until the divergent tendencies were drawn
out to the extreme; and nowhere is the conflict between the two
principles more vividly displayed than in that battle between the
followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world of change to
their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether, and the
disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all things
and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the
Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one
who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of
Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the
possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while
avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the
sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last
irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike. "The war over
this point is indeed no trivial matter and many are concerned therein,"
said he, not without bitterness.
It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic
unity and human value to the long debate of the mediaeval schoolmen.
Their dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,--as a
struggle of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt
to lay bare the foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science
and mysticism; but above all it seems to me a long conflict in words
between these two warring members within us. The desire of infinite
peace was the impulse, I think, which drove on the realists to that
"abyss of pantheism," from the brink of which the vision of most men
recoils as from the horror of shoreless vacuity. In this way Erigena,
the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that which neither acts nor is
acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as if frightened by
these blank words, avowed that God though he does not love is in a way
Love itself, defining love as the _finis quietaque statio_ of the
natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the
impulse toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny
reality to the stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the
mind upon the shifting combinations of individual objects. In this
direction lay the labour of accurate observation and experimental
classification, and it is with prefect justice that Haureau, the
historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his chapter on William of
Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words: "It is then in truth
on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the nominalists that
Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"--and that monument is the
scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth century.
The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the
hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable
resting-place for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of
pantheism and absolute quietism was the work of the nominalists who in
William of Occam finally won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy
brought an end to its own activity. But a greater champion than William
was needed to wipe away what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediaeval
logomachy. Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ accomplished what the
nominalistic schoolmen failed to achieve: it showed the impossibility of
establishing by means of logic the dogma of God or any absolute
conception of the universe. Henceforth the real support of metaphysics
was taken away, and the study fell more and more into disrepute as the
nineteenth century waxed old. Not many men to-day look to the pure
reason for aid in attaining the consummation of faith. That
consummation, if it be derived at all from external aid, must come
henceforth by way of the imagination and of the moral sense. We say
with Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-new and increasing
admiration and reverence, the oftener and the more persistently they are
reflected on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral law within me."
But neither the imagination nor the conscience alone, any more than
reason, can create faith. They may prepare the soil for the growth of
that perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the seed or give the
increase; for they, both the imagination and the conscience, are
concerned in the end with the light of this life, and faith looks for
guidance to a different and rarer illumination. Faith is a power of
itself; _fidem rem esse, non scientiam, non opinionem vel
imaginationem_, said Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will, mysterious
in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the desire
of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world toward
an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, or a mere name, of
peace in absolute changelessness. Reason and logic may have no words to
express the object of this desire, but experience is rich with the
influence of such an aspiration on human character. To the saints it was
that peace of God which passeth all understanding; to the mystics it was
figured as the raptures of a celestial love, as the yearning for that
Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity.
To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in those who seemed to
them endowed with a grace beyond their untutored comprehension.
Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful
height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the
imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth,
and the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than
ever a sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more
than ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking
generally, the past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately
to observe and study the phenomena of change. We call that time, which
is still our own time, the age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The
Middle Ages, despite the obscurantism of the Church, had far better
claim to that title. One needs but to turn the pages of the doctors,
even before the day of Abelard who is supposed first to have been the
champion of reason against authority, to see how profound was their
conviction that in reason might be discovered a justification of the
faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the champion of reason
because only with him do men begin to perceive the inability of reason
to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of observation,
for never before have men given themselves with such complete abandon to
observing and recording systematically. By long and intent observation
of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a seeming order in
disorder, the shifting visions of time have assumed a specious
regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a home on
this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage.
For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.
From this wealth of observation and record the modern age, and
especially the century just past, has developed two fields of
intellectual activity to such an extent as almost to claim the creation
of them. Gradually through accumulated observation the nineteenth
century came to look on human affairs in a new light; like everything
else they were seen to be subject to the Heraclitean ebb and flow; and
history was written from a new point of view. We learned to regard eras
of the past as subject each to its peculiar passions and ambitions, and
this taught us to throw ourselves back into their life with a kind of
sympathy never before known. We did not judge them by an immutable code,
but by reference to time and place. Nor is this all. Within the small
arc of our observation we observed a certain regularity of change
similar to the changes due to growth in an individual, and this we
called the law of progress. History was then no longer a mere chronicle
of events or, if philosophical, the portrayal and judgment of characters
from a fixed point of view; it became at its best the systematic
examination of the causes of progress and development. And naturally
this attention to change and motion, this historic sense, was extended
to every other branch of human interest: in religion it taught
Christians to accept the Bible as the history of revelation instead of
something complete from the beginning; in literature it taught us to
portray the development of character or the influence of environment on
character rather than the interplay of fixed passions; in art it created
impressionism or the endeavour to reproduce what the individual sees at
the moment instead of a rationalised picture; in criticism it introduced
what Sainte-Beuve, the master of the movement, sought to write, a
history of the human spirit.
But history, like Cronos of old, possessed a strange power of devouring
its own offspring. Gradually, from the habit of regarding human affairs
in a state of flux and more particularly from the growth of the idea of
progress, the past lost its hold over men. It became a matter of
curiosity but not of authority, and history as it was understood in
Renan's day has in ours almost ceased to be written. Science on the
other hand is the observation of phenomena regarded chiefly in the
relation of space--for it is correct, I believe, to assert that the
laws of energy may be reduced to this point--and as such is not subject
to this devouring act of time. It frankly discards the past and as
frankly dwells in the present. It is not my purpose, indeed it would be
quite superfluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of the
scientific method in the past century: they are the theme of schoolboys
and savants alike, the pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I
dwell on the new philosophy which sprang up from the union of the
historic and the scientific sense and still subsists. Not the system of
Hegel or Schopenhauer or of any other professor of metaphysics is the
true philosophy of the age; these are but echoes of a past civilisation,
voices and _praeterea nil_. Evolution is the living guide of our thought,
assigning to the region of the unknowable the conceptions of unity and
perfect rest, and building up its theories on the visible experience of
motion and change and development. It has reduced the universal flux of
Heraclitus to a scientific system and assimilated it to our inner
growth; it has become as essentially a factor of our attitude toward the
natural world as Newton's laws of gravitation.
But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly to the sphere of motion,
yet this does not mean that the longing after quietude and peace has
passed entirely from the mind of man; the thirst of the human heart is
too deep for that. Only the world has learned to look for peace in
another direction. In place of that faith which would deny valid
reality to changing forms, we have taught ourselves to find a certain
order in disorder, which we call law,--whether it be the law of progress
or the law of energy,--and on the stability of this law we are willing
to stake our desired tranquillity.
In this way, through what may be called the offspring begotten on the
historic sense by science, the mind has turned its regard into the
future and seemed to discern there a continuation of the same law of
progress which it saw working in the past. Hence have arisen the
manifold dreams and visions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism, and
all the other isms that would fix the hope of mankind upon some coming
perfectibility of human life, and that like Prometheus in the play have
implanted blind hopes in the hearts of men. It is indeed one of the most
curious instances of the recrudescence of ideas to see the mediaeval
visions of a city of golden streets and eternal bliss in another
existence brought down to the future of this world itself. What to the
mystic of that age was to come suddenly, with the twinkling of an eye,
when we are changed and have put away mortal things, when the angel of
the Apocalypse has sworn that time shall be no longer,--all this, the
heavenly city of joy and endless content, is now to be the natural
outcome here in this world of causes working in time. The theory is
beautiful in itself and might satisfy the hunger of the heart, even
though its main hope concerns only generations to come, were it not for
a lingering and fatal suspicion that progress does not involve increased
capability of happiness to the individual, and that somehow the race
does not move toward content. Physical comfort has perhaps become more
widely distributed, but of the placid joy of life the recent years have
known singularly little; we need but turn over the pages of the more
representative poets and prose writers of the past sixty years to
discover how deep is the unrest of our souls. The higher literature has
come to be chiefly the "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in
worlds not realised"; and missing the note of deeper peace we sigh at
times even for
A draught of dull complacency.
Alas, those who would find a resting-place for the spirit in the
relations of man to man seem not to reckon that the very essence--if
such a term may be used of so contingent a nature--that the very essence
of this world's life is motion and change and contention, and that Peace
spreads her wings in another and purer atmosphere. One might suppose
that a single glance into the heart would show how vain are such
aspirations, and how utterly dreary and illusory is every conceived
ideal of progress and socialism because each and all are based on an
inherent contradiction. He who waits for peace until the course of
events has become stable is like the silly peasant by the river side,
watching and waiting while the current flows forever and will ever flow.
Not less vain is the hope of those who would find in the laws of science
a permanent abiding place--perhaps one should say was rather than is,
for the avowed gospel of science which was to usurp the office of
olden-time religious faith is already like the precedent historic sense,
itself becoming a thing of the past. Yet the much discussed war between
science and religion is none the less real because to-day the din of
battle has ceased. It does not depend on criticism of the Mosaic story
of creation by the one, nor on hostility to progress offered by the
other. These things were only signs of a deeper and more radical
difference: religion is the voice of faith uttering in symbols of the
imagination its distrust of the world as a scene of deception and
unreality, whereas science is the attempt to discover fixed laws in the
midst of this very world of change. If to-day the strife between the two
seems reconciled, this only means that faith has grown dimmer and that
science has learned the futility of its more dogmatic assumptions.[10]
The very growth of science is in fact a gradual recognition of motion as
the basis of phenomena and an increasing comprehension of what may be
called the laws of motion. When motion was regarded as simple and
regular, it seemed possible to explain phenomena by correspondingly
simple and regular laws; but when each primary motion was seen to be
the resultant of an infinite series of motions the question became in
like manner infinitely complex, or in other words insoluble. But to be
clear we must consider the matter more in detail.
From the days of the old Greek Heraclitus, who built up his theory of
the world on the axiom of eternal flux and change, the Doctrine of
Motion as a distinct enunciation has lingered on in the world well-nigh
unnoticed and buried from sight in the bulk of suppositions and guesses
that have made up the passing systems of philosophy. Now and then some
lonely thinker took up the doctrine, but only to let it drop back into
obscurity; until during the great burst of scientific enquiry in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it assumed new significance and began
to grow. From that time to this its progress in acceptance as the basis
of phenomena may be regarded as a measure of scientific advance.
By a strange fatality Kant, who had been so efficient as an iconoclast
in metaphysics, was perhaps with his nebular hypothesis, followed later
by the work of Goethe on animal and plant variations, the one most
largely responsible for the new hope that in science at last was to be
found an answer to the riddle of existence which had baffled the search
of pure reason. The achievement of Kant both destructive and
constructive is well known, if vaguely understood, by the world at
large; but it is not so well known that a contemporary of Kant did
precisely for science what the sage of Koenigsberg accomplished in
metaphysics. In the very decade in which _The Critique of Pure Reason_
saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar of France, published a work which
carried the analytic method, or the method of motion, to its farthest
limit. In this work, the _Mecanique Analytique_, Lagrange develops an
equation from which it can be proved conclusively that to explain any
group of phenomena measured by energy an infinite number of hypotheses
may be employed. So, for instance, if we establish any one theory which
will sufficiently account for the known phenomena of light, such as
reflection, refraction, polarisation, etc., there will yet remain an
infinite number of other hypotheses equally capable of explaining the
same group of phenomena. Or to use the words of Poincare: "If then we
can give one complete mechanical explanation of a phenomenon, there will
also be possible an infinite number of others which will account equally
well for all the particulars revealed by experiment." That is to say, no
_experimentum crucis_ can be imagined which will reveal the truth or
error of any given theory. This restriction on the finality of our
knowledge is borne out in all physical reasoning,--and I venture also to
say in the other sciences; thus in optics we can perform no experiment
which will establish as finally true the theory that light is caused by
the motion of corpuscles of matter emitted from a luminous body, or
that it is due to vibrations propagated through a medium by a wave
motion, or that it is generated by certain disturbances in the
electrical state of bodies. Each of these hypotheses has its advantages
and disadvantages; and in our choice we merely adopt that theory which
explains the greater number of phenomena in the simplest way.
If any one should here ask: Granted that from phenomena expressed in
terms of energy no ultimate law can be educed, yet may not some other
view of phenomena lead to other results? We answer that no other view is
possible. Not that the system of the universe, if we may use such an
expression, is necessarily constructed on what we call energy, but that
our minds can conceive it only in terms of energy. An analysis of the
concepts which enter into the idea of energy must make it evident that
in our understanding of nature we cannot go beyond this point.
There is an agreement among philosophers and scientists that the concept
of space is not derived from external experience, but is inherently
intuitive. As stated by Kant:
The representation of space cannot be borrowed through experience
from relations of external phenomena, but, on the contrary, those
external phenomena become possible only by means of the
representation of space. Space is a necessary representation, _a
priori_, forming the very foundation of external intuitions. It is
impossible to imagine that there should be no space, though it is
possible to imagine space without objects to fill it.
The concept of space therefore makes possible the intuition of external
phenomena; but these phenomena to be realised must appeal to one of our
senses, and this connecting link between the outer world and our
consciousness is the concept which we call time. Quoting again from
Kant:
Time is the formal condition, _a priori_, of all phenomena
whatsoever. But, as all representations, whether they have for
their objects external things or not, belong by themselves, as
determinations of the mind, to our inner state;... therefore, if I
am able to say, _a priori_, that all external phenomena are in
space, I can, according to the principle of the internal sense,
make the general assertion that all phenomena, that is, all
objects of the senses, are _in time_, and stand necessarily in
relations of time.
It follows, then, that our simplest possible expression for phenomena
will be in terms of space and time, and that beyond this the human mind
cannot go.
Turning here from metaphysical to scientific language, we speak of space
and time as the fundamental units from which we deduce the laws of the
external world. The fact that space appeals to us only through time
furnishes us with our concept or unit of motion, which is the ratio of
space to time. The external phenomena so revealed to us we call the
manifestations of mass or energy, thus providing ourselves with a second
unit. It must be observed, however, that mass or energy is not a new
concept, but bears precisely the same relation to motion as Kant's
_Ding-an-sich_ bears to space and time: it is the unknowable cause of
motion--or more properly speaking it is the ability residing in an
object to change the motion of another object and is measured by the
degree of change it can produce. And I say mass or energy, advisedly,
for the two are merely different names or different views of the same
thing; we cannot conceive of matter without energy or of energy without
matter. Our choice between the two depends solely on the simplicity and
convenience with which deductions may be made from one or the other.
From a physical standpoint the concept energy is rather the simpler, but
mathematically our deductions flow more readily from the concept mass.
If then our explanations of phenomena must ultimately involve the two
units of motion and of energy or mass, and if it can be demonstrated
that on this basis we may account for any group of phenomena in an
infinite number of ways, what shall we say but that the attempt to
attain any resting-place for the mind in the laws of nature is, and must
always be, futile? Further than this, any given law is itself only an
approximate explanation of phenomena, and must be continually modified
as we add to our experimental knowledge. In all cases a law must be
considered valid only within the limits of the sensitiveness of the
instruments by which we get our measurements. With more delicate
instruments variations will be observed that must be expressed by
additional terms in the formula. Thus we maintain that the law of
gravitation is true only within the range of our observation; it does
not apply to masses of molecular dimensions. Another formula, the
well-known law of the pressure of gases, can be shown by experiment to
be merely an approximation, because the variations in it are not of a
dimension negligible in comparison with the sensibility of our
instruments. As the pressure increases the error in the formular
equation becomes constantly greater. To remedy this a second
approximation, which is still inadequate, has been added to the equation
by Van der Waals; yet greater accuracy will require the addition of
other terms; and a complete demonstration would demand an infinite
series of approximations.
The meaning of all this is quite plain: there is no reach of the human
intellect which can bridge the gap between motion and rest. Our senses
are adapted to a world of universal flux which is, so far as we can
determine, subject to no absolute law but the law of probabilities. He
who attempts to circumscribe the ebb and flow of circumstance within the
bounds of our spiritual needs, he who attempts to find peace in any
formula of science or in any promise of historic progress, is like one
who labours on the old and vain problem of squaring the circle:
Qual e'l geometra, che tutto s'affige
Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige.
The desire of peace, as the world has known it in past times, signified
always a turning away from the flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt
to fix the mind on absolute rest and unity,--the desire of peace has
been the aspiration of faith. And because the object of faith cannot be
seen by the eyes of the body or expressed in terms of the understanding,
a firm grasp of the will has been necessary to keep the desire of the
heart from falling back into the visible, tangible things of change and
motion. For this reason, when the will is relaxed, doubts spring up and
men give themselves wholly to the transient intoxication of the senses.
Yet blessed are they that believe and have not seen. It was the peculiar
quest of the nineteenth century to discover fixed laws and an unshaken
abiding place for the mind in the very kingdom of unrest; we have sought
to chain the waves of the sea with the winds.
And how does all this affect one who stands apart, striving in his own
small way to live in the serene contemplation of the universe? I cannot
doubt that there are some in the world to-day who look back over the
long past and watch the toiling of the human race toward peace as a
traveller in the Alps may with a telescope follow the mountain-climbers
in their slow ascent through the snows of Mont Blanc; or again they
watch our labours and painstaking in the valley of the senses and wonder
at our grotesque industry; or look upon the striving of men to build a
city for the soul amid the uncertainties of this life, as men look at
the play of children who build castles and domes in the sands of the
seashore and cry out when the advancing waves wash all their hopes away.
I think there are some such men in the world to-day who are absorbed in
the fellowship of the wise men of the East, and of the no less wise
Plato, with whom they would retort upon the accusing advocates of the
present: "Do you think that a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and
privileged to contemplate all time and all existence, can possibly
attach any great importance to this life?" They live in the world of
action, but are not of it. They pass each other at rare intervals on the
thoroughfares of life and know each other by a secret sign, and smile to
each other and go on their way comforted and in better hope.