With science we usually associate accuracy and consistency, and at first
thought we are not likely to expect that the work and standpoint of
science can contain anything substantial enough for the doubter to base
his claim upon; but second thought is our first duty at this time, and
second thought always changes the view, and in this particular instance
it will show science in important respects to be quite as vulnerable as
the unreflective consciousness of practical life, for science also is
honeycombed with contradiction and paradox.
More than once scientists themselves have turned sceptical about their
work and its results. The cry of bankruptcy in science, not merely as a
charge, but also as a confession, has been heard in the land not
infrequently; now perhaps low and uncertain, but again clear and strong.
And why not? Why should the scientist escape the questioning of other
men? Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend humanity?
Surely, when all is said, the scientific consciousness is not formally
different from the ordinary consciousness. The same eye is looking at
[p.057] the same world, only through microscopes and telescopes. The
same mind is measuring the same environment, only with carefully devised
instruments of precision instead of arm's lengths or stone's throws and
rules of thumb. In a word, science is merely the ordinary consciousness
highly developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically
conscious method and clearest possible perception. Indeed, perhaps
without myself clearly knowing all my reasons, I am constrained to say
that science is related to ordinary perception very much as the
inventor's consciousness of his wonderful flying-machine to the simple
sensations of a bird. The mechanics of flying, so elaborately present to
the former, are nevertheless also present in the latter, while with both
we have the same eye or the same mind looking and the same world seen.
The boasted methods and ideals of the one are but the only half-waking
instincts of the other, and whatsoever is essential to either belongs
also to the other. But, to mark the great difference between them, the
inventor has the disposition to treat flying abstractly--that is, as if
a thing by itself, as if for its own sake; and he goes even farther,
making abstraction of the mere explanation and mechanical expression of
flying; while the bird simply flies, and, if I may hope to be
understood, all things else, the sun and the wind, the trees, and all
living things, and you and I who follow his course are flying with him.
But no poetic soaring such as this can satisfy our present needs. To
understand and appraise the view of science we must trace its rise as
clearly as we can, [p.058] and then critically examine its peculiar
conceits, its own ideal methods and attitudes.
As for the rise of the scientific view, we may well return to the
definition of science given above: the ordinary consciousness highly
developed, not without considerable abstraction, into critically
conscious method and clearest possible perception. Perhaps development
of anything is always at the cost of abstraction; but be this as it may,
science certainly arises through an abstraction, namely, through the
abstraction of consciousness of one's world, through the treatment of
this mere consciousness as something to be cultivated quite for its own
sake; and the motive and the meaning of such a treatment are not far to
seek. Consciousness, to the exclusion or inhibition of direct, overt
action, becomes a matter for abstract, which is to say, exclusive
cultivation, with any serious change, with any upheaval in the familiar
conditions of life. A man--or boy, if you prefer--is taking a
cross-country run, and for a time all goes well; the manner of his going
suffers no interruption, or no serious interruption; but gradually the
undergrowth thickens from low bushes to higher brushwood, and at last,
perhaps quite suddenly, breaking through some wild hedge, the runner
finds himself at the very edge of a stream too wide and too deep for any
ordinary crossing. Thereupon his running, or at least his forward
running, say the running of his "real life," ceases, and looking takes
its place. He is now, in a familiar phrase, "looking before leaping";
yet with his looking there is a good deal of running too, more or less
overt, but also more or less [p.059] instrumental or merely mechanical,
as, going from one point to another, he measures the relations of bank
to bank, or of possible stepping-stones to each other, or hunts for
fallen logs or for shallow places. But, finally, the measurements all
made, the peculiar conditions as fully as possible appreciated, in the
way found to be most feasible he crosses the stream and runs again. And
just in that "looking before leaping," with the accompanying check put
upon the forward running and with the change of the "real life" of
running into merely instrumental action, we get at least a glimpse of
what science is, of the sort of abstraction that its rise implies.
Only science, specifically so called, is more than such a casual, merely
personal study of a new situation. Science is the distinct work of a
distinct class abstractly studying a new situation that has confronted
the progress not of an individual, but of a whole people, and in this
character it gets at once all the advantages and all the conceits that
belong in general to the life of a class. It gets, too, all the
limitations. Science, once more, is not strictly a personal experience,
although in personal experience, like that of the cross-country runner,
we can get a glimpse of just that which may develop into science.
Science is characteristically a profession. The runner withholds his
running for a time and merely looks and studies, yet his looking is only
for a time; sooner or later he will run again; and even while he studies
there is his continued moving about, his instrumental action, as we
called it; but the professional scientist waives all thought of possible
future activity. Although in reality [p.060] his looking is before
leaping, it is not consciously so for him; he is one who under the
constraints of his class merely looks and studies, making of these
processes things quite worthy in themselves.
In other words, to enlarge somewhat on what has just been said, the rise
of the profession of science does indeed involve both the same check
upon the "real life" and the same reduction of activity to a purely
mechanical or instrumental character that we have pointed out in the
case of the runner at the bank of the stream, but a number of different
social classes divides the labour. In general, society as a means to the
expression and development of human activity, be the activity running or
living in a broader and fuller sense, always shows the different phases
or factors of the experience identified more or less exclusively with as
many different classes or groups, and, in respect to the particular case
here under consideration, upon the rise of science society appears to
delegate the work of careful observation and critical thinking to a
separate class, which, as already suggested, gives up any direct
responsibility to the real life. Another distinct class, arising
contemporaneously, is composed of those who do feel directly
responsible, or "practical," continuing the life of positive, overt
action. This second class maintains the vital processes, although in a
more or less consciously instrumental way, since its members have the
lives of others as well as their own lives to support. So society gets
its workers or labourers as well as its observers and thinkers.
The rise of science, then, involves a disrupted society. Moreover, the
division is by no means so [p.061] simple as the foregoing analysis may
seem to have implied. Observing and thinking, for example, have often
made, too, separate sub-classes, and also there have been many distinct
groups among the workers, such as clerks, soldiers, artisans,
road-menders, and tillers of the soil. The simple analysis, however, has
been quite enough to show, what has seemed to need emphasis, that all
the passions of social life, or rather of social caste, are brought to
bear upon the profession of science, giving it the peculiar conceits and
advantages of class or caste, and also imposing upon it the peculiar
limitations. The advantages, among others, are the strength that lies in
union, and the long continuity and the imitation that always ensure an
accumulation of experience and a refinement of method and an attainment
to impersonal, impartial standards; the conceits are exclusiveness,
sense of sanctity or intrinsic worth, and consequent claims to
aristocracy; and the limitations, although possibly already quite
obvious, are hereafter to be pointed out. But whatever the limitations
or the opportunities, it is now our chief concern that the social
conditions of its rise must greatly intensify the abstraction of
science, the treatment of the consciousness of the world, which is but
the sphere of action, the totality of the manifested conditions of
action, as something to be cultivated wholly for its own sake.
Nor is this fact that science is an abstraction, intensified by the
conditions of class life, the only fact to which the rise of science
bears witness. There is something else equally significant--something,
indeed, so intimately involved in this as perhaps not [p.062] properly
to be referred to as another fact at all, being only a further
manifestation of what is already before us. _There never arises
abstraction without duplicity._
Plainly a disrupted society, such as has been seen to be incident to the
rise of science, means also a disrupted life. In general the corporate
life of any single class resulting from the division can be only
partial, I do not say in respect to "real life," since this phrase has
itself been associated with too narrow a meaning, but to human nature,
to human life in its entirety, in its real fulness, in its true breadth
and its true depth. All class life, I repeat, involving as it does
disruption and selection of some particular interest or relation, is
inadequate to any human being, and the life of science is no exception
to this rule. Membership in any class and conformity to its peculiar
life, which is partial and abstract as partial, have never satisfied
anybody, and the life of the professional scientist, again, is no
exception to this rule. Accordingly any abstraction in life, the
isolation of any specific interest, when seen in just the light of its
necessary inadequacy, of its definite, more or less exclusive
partiality, must imply in life a demand for reality and completeness,
and this the more as the abstraction is assertive, as the isolation is
insistent. Simply, the whole life will never brook an untempered neglect
from any of its always self-assertive parts. Plainly, however, as
plainly as a disrupted society must mean a disrupted life for each
resulting group, such a demand can be met only in one way, if the cause
for it continues; it can be met only by some form of duplicity, by some
way in which, however indirectly, the life of those [p.063] concerned
will always really be more than it seems or will always actually imply
what explicitly or formally it appears to exclude. No such narrow life,
in short, as must always characterize any social group, can ever be
without its compensating innuendoes or indirections for the life from
which it is outwardly aloof, and while the peculiar manner in which the
true reality and the wholeness of life are thus conserved will very
naturally always be determined by the particular class or the particular
class-character involved, being of one sort for road-menders and of
quite a different sort for scientific observers, the organization of
society seems bound at every turn to show that duplicity, compensation
as it always is for partiality, is an indispensable condition.
Duplicity, whatever may be its own special dangers, is always better,
being nearer to reality, than narrowness.
Is not the road-mender also a good Catholic, or in some other way,
conventional or unconventional, religiously devout, piously doing, not
his own, but another's work? Does not the scientist give point to the
idea of another and different life, that is to say, of his life of
knowledge not being the whole of life, by the agnosticism which he not
only carefully asserts but also actually embodies as a factor in his
method? The road-mender slaves at his humble task, ignorant and yet
trustful, believing in an infallible wisdom and an absolute power, and
the scientist lives with great enthusiasm to know the world as it is,
but tells us at the same time with no less enthusiasm and with a meaning
that certainly ought to temper his exclusiveness that the object which
he studies and describes [p.064] is nevertheless really unknowable. To
quote Mr. Spencer: "The man of science ... more than any other, truly
_knows_ that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known." Surely there
is meaning for Stevenson's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in other
fields besides that of morality. Class life must always involve its
members in a protective or compensating duplicity.
But now, whatever in the life of other classes this duplicity, which
conserves the wholeness of life even when formally life is narrow and
partial, ought to be called, in the profession of science it often goes
under the name of dualism. Seen at different angles, it is now dualism,
now objectivism, now agnosticism. In each of these different ways the
scientist, quite outdoing or transcending his profession, recognizes a
sphere of reality or a sphere of activity, that is beyond that of the
knowledge which he makes his special business, and, as is very important
to observe, the peculiar manner of his recognition of this sphere, or
the peculiar character of his duplicity, is relative to just the
abstraction which makes his science what it is. Thus his peculiar
duplicity is one of conscious subject and unconscious, external object,
of observing man and objective nature, of real knowledge and unknowable
reality.
Yet here, before discussing further the relation of dualism to science,
it is well to observe that the positive history of science justifies the
account of its rise which has now been given. The age of science among
the Greeks was coincident with the closing conflict between Greek
civilization and the general life [p.065] of the Mediterranean, and the
age of modern science began, not to attempt a long story, with the
discovery of America. All "looking before leaping" is transitional or
revolutionary, and while, of course, there had been transitions and
degrees of scientific inquiry before, the science of the Greeks belongs
to that very critical transition from Greece to Rome; and modern
science, to the transition, certainly not less critical, from
Christendom to--who can say to what? But not only does history show
science to arise when there is a stream to cross; also it shows the life
of the time, in the first place, to be sharply disintegrated, its
different factors being separately and abstractly expressed through as
many different social groups, and, in the second place, in each of the
groups to be given to double living, to the storm and stress of being
one thing and seeming another. Always an age, conspicuously and
characteristically scientific, has been an age of clearly developed
classes and of a general duplicity in living.
Thus, to give a striking, although possibly too philosophical an
illustration of the duplicity, Democritus, the great materialist and
atomist, and Plato, the great idealist, were contemporaries and equally
were creatures of their day and generation, and their century was the
century of great achievements in Greek science. Moreover, as regards the
coincident organization of society, we know at least of Plato that he
was keenly conscious of the divisions of society into distinct classes.
And in very much the same way materialism and idealism, not to mention
hedonism and rigorism, or naturalism and supernaturalism, [p.066] have
been inseparately associated with the rise and the successes of modern
science. These philosophies, it must be remembered, are always more than
so many conflicting "isms." They are, too, more than the special
conceits, in theory or in practice, of so many separate social classes
or of the great leaders of these classes. In their very differences they
are the definite, the "public" expression of a conflict, or division,
that inwardly affects every individual member, whatever his class or
profession, which the society contains. In the day and generation of
Democritus and Plato were there not well-defined parties, manifest in
all the different and separately organized phases of life--moral,
industrial, political or religious, namely, the parties of the
conservatives and the radicals? And were there not also, as typical
individual characters, each of them revealing to everybody something
present within his own life, the only conventional loyalist and the more
truly loyal reformer, as well as the idle or careless transgressor and
the coldly calculating traitor? A life so divided and so variously
impersonated was certainly teeming with duplicity.
Nor have we yet finished with the evidence from history. An age of
science has always been not merely an age with a stream to cross, nor
yet merely an age of classes and double living, but also an age of a
thoroughly conscious utilitarianism. Whether materialistically or
idealistically, all things have been treated and also looked upon as
means to some end, not ends in themselves. For the disrupted society all
activity has been more or less consciously calculating and instrumental.
As we know, the disruption means [p.067] actual, when not also
intentional, division of labour, and surely there never has been
division of labour without eventual development of a distinct sense of
the various special instruments and activities as utilities rather than
things of intrinsic value. For a time, it is true, the several classes
and their activities may maintain the semblance of conservatism and
independence; but their inevitable duplicity is bound sooner or later to
give a consciously conventional or utilitarian character to the
conservatism, and just this makes the activity of the people
instrumental or only mediately instead of immediately worthy. If, as
some are sure to contend, the division of labour always tends to end,
and often does end, in the formation of castes, and in consequence the
instrumental character of the activities is forgotten, it needs only to
be said in reply that an invitation is then given to some outside power
to step in and to make use of, instead of just treasuring or hoarding,
the developed instruments or utilities. Caste in the organization of
society not only induces absolutism at home, but also, and in this way
is fully revealed its real but suppressed utilitarianism, invites
conquest from abroad. The days of Greek science were, almost
notoriously, days of conventionalism and utilitarianism: witness the
Sophists and their teaching, and the life which they waited upon for
pay; while the surviving conservatism, by which, as cannot be
questioned, the life of the time was blind to its own real mission or
purpose, made possible and even historically necessary, first, the
Macedonian, and then the Roman conquest of Greece. What the Greeks,
being too conservative, though [p.068] utilitarian, failed to make full
use of, another people, less hampered by tradition, finally
appropriated. And as for the days of modern science, these, so far as
unfolded to our view, have not been unlike in kind: witness the
Machiavellism, with which they began, and the spirit of commercialism,
which has characterized them throughout.
One thing more, too, from the facts of history may have our attention,
although possibly this addition is quite unnecessary--the fact, namely,
of scepticism coupled always with a hopeful curiosity. A disrupted
society, dividing the labour of human life, is as sceptical as it is
conventional, and as given to experiment and exploration, which are
never without their sense of mystery, and even to conquest, never
without its risks, as it is utilitarian. Was it curiosity or mere
Hellenic conceit, the sense of adventure or the mere dogmatism of a
Greek, that took Alexander abroad with his armies, or that earlier
turned the attention of Athens to the possibilities of the West? And
which, curiosity or religious and political propagandism, a pagan greed
or a Christian piety, inspired the Western and Southern voyages of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Which gave rise even to the Crusades?
It would be interesting, if our present purposes only warranted the
undertaking, to trace the forerunning conditions of a period of
scientific endeavour. We could then show both how scientific curiosity
has developed as but one expression of a general interest in
experimental endeavour, in adventure and in conquests of all sorts, and
especially how this interest, with its mingling of doubt and [p.069]
confident seeking, has been preceded by a period of art. Art, appeal as
it always is from the human as expressed in the established ways of some
given social organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive to a
mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed activities, but not yet
willing to let the experimental and instrumental character of those
activities have free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of
course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing the human, it
never gets, so to speak, out of sight of home. Science, the successor of
art, shows home, that is, the human and the subjective, left far behind.
But to follow out the line of thought here suggested would take us too
far afield. Let it suffice, then, that we see these two things: how
historically and socially the investigations of science, whatever their
relations to an antecedent art, such as that of the Greeks or of
Christendom in the Renaissance, are but an incident within a general
life of appeal to nature--that is, of exploration and conquest--and then
how the scepticism, involved in the inquiries of science, is intrinsic
to a life that, for reasons now clear to us, has become both
conventional and utilitarian, both formal--or unreal in itself--and
consciously only instrumental. The first of these brings to mind what
was referred to in a previous chapter, that science is man in his doubt
seeking the companionship of nature; and the second will aid us greatly
in understanding the attitude and method of science, to which, having
the evidence of history, we have next to turn.
We have found the rise of science to imply a general abstraction of the
various factors in human [p.070] life, and to be itself, in particular,
the abstraction of the consciousness of nature, nature being the
totality of the manifest conditions of life. This abstraction has been
developed and intensified by the formation of distinct social classes;
and, in the special case of the consciousness of nature, by the
formation of a class of scientists, so called, who cultivate their
science for its own sake. We have found the rise of science to imply
also a general duplicity, evident within the field of science in what is
known as dualism. Duplicity is a natural accompaniment of all
abstraction, and it has, as we saw at least in part, a certain
protective and corrective function, which both the logic of experience
and the social and historical conditions of its expression and
development warranted us in ascribing to it. And, finally, we have found
that in actual life abstraction and duplicity make activity conventional
and utilitarian, that is to say, consciously instrumental or--let me now
say--experimental. In just these conditions, then, the general
abstraction and duplicity, the conscious formalism and regard for
utility, and the sense of experimentation, we have the determinant,
formative influences of science's attitude and method, for any given set
of conditions always makes the method with which the conditions
themselves are met. Socrates, with his method of cross-questioning so
fatal to all ideas that should give knowledge any visible form or
resting-place, was but the spirit of his time, the spirit of radical
inquiry become incarnate and assertive in public places. He was but a
visible, public exponent of the critical examination of life which the
self-consciousness of his time made necessary. [p.071] Indeed, no
organic form, no living creature, ever reflected the character of its
environment more fully, or more successfully effected an adaptive life
than the method, with its searching questions, and its subtle, logical
gymnastic, of that honestly and radically inquisitive Sophist. And the
standpoint and the procedure of science, in respect to the relation to
their environment, are closely comparable with the method of Socrates.
Thus science seeks a complete abstraction of the looking consciousness,
and then with a timely duplicity it looks to a wholly external, natural
world. So in the field of its peculiar abstraction does science take the
character and colour of its surroundings. But, further, it presumes upon
the peculiar forms and conditions of its subjective, looking
consciousness, the activities of the mind, being mediative or
instrumental to the presentation of the external objective world, and it
uses also the activities of life at large, both the bread-and-butter
activities and the mechanical inventions, both the political and the
industrial organizations, as supplementary aids to its observations; for
just science, the looking consciousness, is the end, and this end is
presumed to justify every available means. So, again, does science take
the cue from its environment, expressing in its own way and to its own
purposes the general experimentalism; and this the more significantly
when we remember that, besides being experimental, treating the mind as
an instrument and life's activities at large as only aids more or less
directly pertinent to the mind's work, it is agnostic. Its peculiar
agnosticism not only reflects [p.072] its duplicity, as was before
suggested, but in addition shows how very abstract its knowledge is,
and--I know no better phrase--how timelily adventurous. A time of
science is a time when all things final are beyond; yet also, when all
things present, however mysteriously, are really leading yonder.
Further, science always divides the field of its operations, and so,
besides greatly compounding its abstractness, reflects in its own way,
or, as it were, projects on its own plane, what I will call the
specialism of the contemporary social organization. There is division of
labour in this, but there is also a difficulty, which, among other
difficulties, is hereafter to be considered.
And there is, finally, one more characterization of science which is
suggested by the conditions of its rise, but by something in those
conditions not yet brought into clear view. An age of science is an age
of a rising, although perhaps formally suppressed and disguised
individualism, and quite in sympathy, the method of science is
"inductive," science, though interested in classification, always having
regard for the natural rights of particular things, of single
individuals, reasoning from the particular to the general, as the phrase
runs, not in the reverse order. Individualism has been a much
misunderstood thing, be it a social movement or a logical condition of
inductive thinking. The individual as person or as objective datum has
been greatly abused. But at least for the present, waiving any
discussion of the true character of the individual or any protest that
the individual and the definite or particular must not be confused, I
would only assert, but I venture to assert [p.073] strongly, first, that
behind the conventionalism and utilitarianism of the life of a society
divided into distinct classes, behind the abstraction and the inevitable
duplicity, behind the sense of experiment and adventure, the individual
person is the real power, and secondly, that in induction science has
only translated this real individualism of its time into an attitude or
method for the conduct of its looking consciousness. In this way, as in
those other ways, has science been educated to its peculiar manner.
We have thus seen how science arises, and how its rise gives it a
certain character. But already suspicion of limitations in the view of
science, and so of a case for doubt with regard to it, has come to us.
Abstraction and duplicity both suggest limitations, though these may not
be unmixed. What the specific difficulties are, however, and how far
they really justify our doubting, must be reserved for the ensuing
chapter.
[p.074]