The ideal of a purely objective science is in many ways a great
delusion, for it may effectually blind [p.076] science to its necessary
subjectivism, so far as it gets any substance or content, and to its
necessary formalism, so far as it acts upon a merely external world.
With regard, for example, to the last point, just so far as the ideal of
objectivism is realized, science becomes merely so much technique. By
technique here is meant everything that makes scientific work purely
mechanical. A purely mechanical procedure is the inevitable, the natural
and necessary method of a pure objectivism. Scientists have their formal
etiquette about pre-empted problems or fields of research, their notions
about originality as dependent merely on working a new field--hence the
pre-emption to prevent transgression or theft of originality, their
conceits about bibliographical information, linguistic proficiency and
technical phraseology, their satisfaction over "publication,"
"contribution," "production," and "research," and an almost
Gaston-Alphonse deference of each to each among the different branches
of scientific inquiry; and under technique all these things, as well as
the more familiar matters of method and apparatus and material, are here
included. Physicians, we are told, and not infrequently also their
patients, suffer from a professional ritual and etiquette, but they are
far from being alone in their misery. Scientists, would-be objective
scientists, and all who appeal to them, are a close second. Technique
must have its real uses, but plainly it has its limitations. It is one
of the enabling conditions, a _sine qua non_ of science, if science is
to be objective, but it takes the life out of science. A science that
gets no further, that is only "objective," that is, "pure" and
"inductive" [p.077] is wholly vain, being like a domestic animal which
is only a pet, or rather like a vigorous plant that runs luxuriously to
leaves, never bearing either flowers or fruit. Its much vaunted
observation and experiment may fill a good many pages and a good many
volumes, but material, even material in books, and experiments, even
carefully, minutely reported experiments, are neither roses nor apples.
A fruitful science relates itself to something more than a mere
independent object. A fruitful science involves synthesis, not formal,
but real synthesis, as well as analysis, its decomposed object being
also only the separated details of some organizing activity. Indeed,
however unconsciously, or even however against its own avowed interest
and desire, science has that organizing activity in the real life. The
"real life" has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part of
this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, in spite of, nay,
even because of its abstraction by a distinct class and the assumption
of a professional garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful
science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real
life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a
warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically
described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for
the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in general the instrument
of adaptation to environment, this sometimes takes visible, wholly
material form; sometimes it appears as a method in the practical arts or
in the fine arts or in education or government; sometimes it is only an
[p.078] atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but whatever it
is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its invention as something
that is widely distinguished from mere receptive observation, if this be
even possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's primary
justification.
But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and sentiment of the sort that
quite destroys science, making real science, serious and accurate
science, quite impossible. Well, it does of course dispense with a
purely objective science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the
uncomfortable idea, that, as in some other departments in life, so in
science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its
objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain
its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be
not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is not hopelessly
unscientific. Is a man less interested in having a proper edge on his
razor because eventually he must use it on himself? Nothing but a keen
edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but the truth, the
more accurate it be the better, can ever set anybody free.
Still, all questions of sentiment or of sharp razors or of the accuracy
that liberates aside, we can get support for our scepticism about a
science that, if purely objective, must be also empty and mechanical
from science itself. The consistent evolutionist is obliged to deny pure
objectivity to any scientific knowledge, just as in general he is
obliged to think of all consciousness as never something by itself, but
one of the positive conditions of organic development. To [p.079] be an
evolutionist, and at the same time to think of consciousness as only an
external ornament of life, or in its higher development as the exclusive
privilege of a distinct class, to think of it as an aside in life,
perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also a condition of
development, to suppose science to be solely objective and for its own
sake, is nothing more or less than simply to stultify oneself
completely. Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or not,
whose great business is to remind us that what is here or what is now is
not all, the devotion to science for its own sake, which also in other
times has possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can be at best
only a local and a passing phenomenon. Finally, apart from the
standpoint of evolution or history, it is to be said that human society
at large is sure to resent what may be styled the aristocratic temper
which pure, objective science is all too likely to acquire from the
exclusiveness of its ritual or technique, or say from its abstract and
academic dress, and the resentment of society is important evidence
always. Aristocratic temper, whatever its direction, is certainly as
desirable in social life as it is necessary; it is incident to the
development of all institutions--political, ecclesiastical, industrial,
ceremonial, educational, and, to add to the familiar list,
epistemological; but the resentment which it is sure to awaken is not
one whit less serviceable to society, ensuring as it does, among other
things, the extension of science, the translation of science into life.
So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties [p.080] have now
appeared as affecting the objectivism of science. The first, that of
burial in technique, gave us our starting-point, and the second has come
to light with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a would-be
objective science, through its bondage to technique, made formal and
empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a
would-be objective science materially--that is, for its scientific
doctrines--and formally--that is, for its motives and methods--is always
in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and
so not purely, or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in
brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be empty, a matter
merely of dead rites and dry symbols and irrelevant ideas, or it must be
pertinent and practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence is
gone. A purely objective science seems to get only subjectivity for its
pains.
Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is far from denying any
meaning to such words as object or objectivity. The object is denied
only as an external independent existence. The object still remains to
experience as possibly of mediative value to its beholders, mediating
between the actual in their life and the possible, between the partial
life and the whole life, the old and the new, the social, which is
always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to
the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or,
conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing
witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is
an independent, wholly external world, but [p.081] that there is a whole
or a possible or a personal. "Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona
Macleod. "It is a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its own
whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of man its word, and the
heart of woman its silence." We are all one. Man and nature, which man
beholds, or the subject and the object, of which the subject is
conscious, are one; but an objective science would hide this from us,
not tell it to us.
But besides burying science in technique, and besides involving it in an
only disguised, albeit a socially significant subjectivity, the ideal of
wholly objective knowledge has also made science conservative in a way
that must have peculiar interest here. Reference is not now made to the
double truth or the double life which an objective science sanctions so
cordially that men can hold so-called advanced scientific ideas without
feeling them in any serious conflict with the traditional teachings of
religion and morality, but to something else perhaps not wholly
unrelated to this, and certainly not less suggestive of contradiction.
While science is commonly supposed to be advanced and radical and up to
date, if anything is, it is so only in a way which calls for a very
important qualification, for it manages to perpetuate, not indeed the
letter, but the spirit of old views. At its best a purely objective
science can give only a new material content, or a new arrangement
perhaps of an old content, to existing and time-worn forms of thought;
it cannot possibly do that in which real progress must always consist,
namely, develop, recognize, and adopt new forms of thought, new
categories; [p.082] it cannot do that without betraying its own ideal of
mere objectivism. Objective science--to give a commonplace example--has
said relatively to a certain doctrine of creation that spirit did not
precede matter, but instead matter preceded spirit, and--except for the
excitement of the drawn battle which such a startling declaration has
precipitated--this can hardly be said to have involved any great
advance. Cause and effect have indeed been made to change places by the
new deal, and perhaps in common fairness it was high time that a change
be made, but no new conception of causation itself has been recognized.
The new creationalism, the materialistic, has no essential advantage
over the old. Again, while deposing the First Cause, an objective
science has made all things causes after the same plan--individual,
arbitrary, antecedent causes; and this is only to multiply indefinitely,
perhaps infinitely, the offensive creationalism. "Not so," says some
one; "there is a splendid democracy in it, and it implies a great deal
more than mere multiplication. Indefiniteness, or at least infinity,
transforms anything or everything to which it is applied. By making all
things causes one forces into science the important principle of the
equation of action and reaction, everything being seen as acted upon as
well as acting, and this principle, as if by turning creationalism
fatally against itself, yields a new standpoint, that of mechanicalism."
Granted, and granted cordially, but has a purely objective science any
right to change its standpoint?
Possibly this does not mean very much. Then approach the matter from
another side, risking a [p.083] reference to one of science's pet
conceits, the "question of fact." It has been for science a question of
fact, of mere objective fact, whether matter made mind or mind made
matter; whether this or that thing is or is not a cause of some other
thing; whether certain very low, perhaps unicellular organisms show
purpose in their activities or do not, are gifted with a natural
tendency to social life, a real interest in their kind, or are not so
gifted; or--to take just one more case--whether the changes in the brain
that precede bodily movement are or are not directed by consciousness,
consciousness being in one case in causal relation with the brain, and
in the other only an idle, external accompaniment, an "epi-phenomenon";
but in each of these questions of objective fact we see the scientist
only standing in his own light, obscuring the view of what above all
else it is important to see. Are mind and matter, cause and effect,
purpose, society, brain-processes and consciousness such
well-established conceptions, are they such independent constants in the
scientist's formulæ, that wholly uncritical questions of fact are all
that one needs to ask about them? Why, when one really thinks about it,
to assume, as the questions of fact of an objective science are made to
assume, that anything either is or is not something else, is about as
blinding and ill-advised as could well be. It has the pleasing form of
open-mindedness, but only the form. It is very much as if some earnest,
yearning truth-seeker should exclaim: "I would see clearly; therefore I
will not open my eyes." No doubt it keeps the scientist busy, eternally
busy, dealing and redealing his facts or data, as busy indeed as the
playful [p.084] cat that so hotly pursues her own tail, but it does not
contribute much that is positive and progressive. The very best that one
can say for it is that it turns the kaleidoscope of human experience,
leading as it usually does to a new arrangement of hard, unchanging
things. To the question, for example, about lower organisms showing
purpose or social feeling in their activity, the scientist, after most
careful experiments, may answer in the negative, and be quite emphatic
in his answer too; but almost at once he--or some one for him--will
appreciate that mankind, when scrutinized and experimented upon in the
same way, under the same instruments and through the same laboratory
methods, is similarly deficient; and then, somehow, the wind is taken
out of his sails, since social feeling and purpose refuse to be so
easily disposed of. In this case, as in all cases, the question of mere
objective fact simply returns, as importunate as ever, for another
reckoning, with Shelley's cloud silently laughing at its own cenotaph.
And what is the difficulty? Once more the difficulty is in the
assumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions.
Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all
so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by
an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective
principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact
we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions
of meaning. Thus, not: Are low organisms, or any organisms, social or
purposive? but: What, if anything, do the processes of their [p.085]
lives testify as to the real nature of society or purpose?
The conservative character of objective science, or the view-point in
its question of fact which the conservatism determines, is the chief
source of the negative attitude of science so familiar to all and so
often an object of complaint. To take, perhaps, the most widely
interesting case, for science to suppose that God either is or is
not--because he must either be or not be the particular thing men have
thought him--is to beg the theological question altogether. Indeed, for
this question of God's existence and for any other question of objective
fact a negative answer is almost, if not quite, a foregone conclusion,
since the very putting of the question is, _ipso facto_, evidence that a
new idea of the thing inquired about--of God, perhaps, or purpose or
society--is at least just below the horizon of man's consciousness, and
so that the old idea has already lost its validity. Nothing ever is
where you seek it, or what you seek in it, for the simple reason that
your conscious seeking has changed it. Why, then, look--perhaps with a
telescope after a God in the skies--for what you should know you cannot
find? Why despair when a question meets a "no" of its own dictation? The
real questioner lives in a living world, in which all things change and
die, yet only for rebirth, while the "objective" questioner simply
cannot see that the negative of his answer can be only relative to what
is already passing.
In so many ways, then, a would-be objective science is open to
criticism, and affords in consequence a cause for doubt. Only
subjectivity can make it fruitfully [p.086] and worthily scientific.
Only a change in the form of its question can make it substantially as
well as formally progressive. Only a tempering of its negative answers
to a merely relative meaning can make it honest. It is looking at what
is not, and in a way which is artificial, and it sees everything only in
the clear light of its own shadow. Surely to be scientific is human; to
be objective is to rival the lover's unselfishness.