Still we have, thirdly, the agnosticism of science to consider and
appraise. Agnosticism confines knowledge to actual positive experience,
and in its form of "positivism" to an only tentative acceptance of
actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of [p.107] just
those limitations which have been found to belong to science as
objective and special. Objectivism and specialism have both shown
science to be standing in its own light, or at least to be standing in
the way of any direct and positive knowledge of reality. Whatever they
make possible to our virtual as distinct from our positive
consciousness, whatever indirectly or implicitly may through them belong
to our conscious life, formally and visibly, positively and directly, we
cannot know reality. In a word, science must and does recognize an
unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is
accordingly important among the three determining points of science's
circumference. But here is now our problem: Does science put the right
value upon, does it ascribe the right meaning to, its agnosticism? Is
the implied scepticism of the sort that we can cordially accept?
Especially, does science have any due appreciation of the negative, not
to say of the suggested dualism, in the opposition between the knowable
and the unknowable?
Now both objectivism and specialism plainly involve aloofness, which is
perhaps only another word for what in the preceding chapter was called
abstraction. By the first of these two "isms" science is held aloof from
life; by the second, through the many divisions, from itself, that is to
say, part from part. Men who would be scientists withdraw, as we hear
them boast, from affairs, and as they withdraw it is also as if they put
on distorting and even discolouring glasses, through which in one and
another "special" way they would behold the "objective" world. Their
withdrawal [p.108] is thus not merely physical; it is also mental. To
look out of the window one must turn one's head and lift one's eyes and
adjust both head and eyes in other ways; but looking in general, whether
from the needs of an objective or a special view, also demands certain
pertinent adjustments, and the demanded adjustments make the resulting
experience just so far aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted.
Granted that these terms can be only relative in significance. To be
aloof from something is to have it equally aloof from you, and you
should be no more discredited by the separation than it. To be distorted
and discoloured is to be so only with regard to something that in its
own peculiar way may be equally transformed. Such relativity, however,
cannot deprive the differences involved of real significance; it can
only emphasize the general instead of the narrow, local application of
the terms found to be relative. What is relative is not unreal; it is
simply shared, like cousinship. So science, the looking of science,
means real aloofness and real disfiguration.
The truth of this has already been apparent to us in a general way, but
it will be worth while here to be more specific. The space and time, for
example, in which scientists observe things are widely different from
the space and time of will and action. In ordinary life a difference is
felt between the world we know and the world we live, but the extreme
professional attitude of science greatly widens the differences. For
science space and time are quantitative, divisible, formal,
mathematically correct, and independent of what is in them, their
reality or qualitative [p.109] value to active life being hidden or at
least only very indirectly presented--I suggest, in the constant
opposition of their finiteness and infinity--while for will and action
they are qualitative, indivisible, inseparable from what is in them. Who
ever did anything in a composite, divisible space and time? Action in
such a sphere would be hopelessly jerky; with Zeno's flying arrow it
would just always rest _in statu quo_, though its _status in quo_ might
have an indefinite series of positions. Again, the scientists reduce
causation to mere uniformity of co-existences or sequences, which is no
real causation at all, being only so much passive existence or
mechanical process, while will or action is causation, the positive
interaction of things, the active relation, the vital unity, of what was
and is and is to be. It is true that here, too, the causation of real
life is darkly presented by science in a constant opposition between a
single first cause and an eternal series of causes, for such an
opposition makes real causation in an important way quite transcendent
of the mere differences of time; but, setting this concession aside, who
ever did anything in a world either of one cause active long ago or of
an infinite series of causes? And, once more, science needs elements,
while will or life is the eternal denial of elements or anything like
them. Says a well-known writer:[3] "It is one of the greatest dangers of
our time that the naturalistic (or scientific) point of view, which
decomposes the world into elements for the purpose of causal connection,
interferes with the volitional point of view of real life, [p.110] which
can deal only with values, and not with elements." The danger involved
will occupy us in a moment, but the bondage of science to elements, to a
composite world, to a thoroughly "decomposed" reality, will hardly be
questioned. Through contradiction, again, as in the chemist's component
atom, itself not composite; or the biologist's "vital unit," which bids
fair to be the master paradox of the day, science may darkly and
indirectly preserve the world of real life, the world that is neither
one element nor many, but in this case as in the others the indirection,
after all is said, only emphasizes the aloofness.
So science is aloof, and in being aloof it disfigures and defaces
reality, and the argument for agnosticism is consequently unassailable.
No one more effectively has shown this than Immanuel Kant, although one
may question Kant's final appraisal of the fact. Here certainly is no
place for an exposition of the Kantian philosophy, but, briefly and
simply put, that philosophy has characterized space and time and the
relation of cause and effect, not to mention certain other very general
data of experience, as the _a priori_ forms of all valid, objective
knowledge, and being translated this is to say that these so-called
forms are the enabling attitudes of the merely looking consciousness or
the peculiar glasses which, as it were, the mind puts on whenever it
turns just to look. The typical Boston girl, according to the
cartoonists, is never without her glasses. In like manner the typically,
professionally correct looking consciousness, the observing, scientific
mind, is never without those enabling attitudes. Do you ask if they are
then only subjective attitudes? [p.111] They are subjective only as they
are relative. They are subjective only as they express the aloofness of
the scientific observer. And they are subjective, lastly, only in so far
as can be consistent with Kant's further characterization of them as in
every instance imbued with essential opposition or "antinomy." Remember
that an attitude that harbours opposition is always tip-toeing to
overcome the bounds of its own natural vision. Such an attitude cannot
be unmixedly subjective.
But what now is the danger of science's agnosticism, of science's own
admission that being "objective" and "special," or being under the
constraint of certain enabling attitudes, or being at best only
tentative in all its doctrines, it is not and cannot possibly be
formally realistic? One might imagine, or expect, that confession of its
limitations would be good for the soul of science, and in truth we shall
certainly find some advantage resulting from the confession, but even
science's agnosticism is faulty in a serious way. The writer quoted
above has told us that the great danger always threatening science is
that the scientific will interfere with the volitional point of view,
and this is equivalent to fearing, in the interests of science, that the
scientist will forget his agnosticism and try to render what he cannot
know in terms of what he does know, or that the man of affairs will look
to science for his programmes of action. Such a fear, however, may play
to the professional conceits and the professional isolation and
abstraction of the scientific point of view, but it is very far from
grasping the true import of the conflict between knowledge and
unknowable [p.112] reality. I should myself assert, in partial if not in
complete opposition to Professor Münsterberg, that science's very
natural danger is that the scientific and the volitional point of view
will be kept apart, that the professionalism and the formalism and what
Kant called the phenomenalism of science will prevent their
interference. At least, this danger is just as great, and just as
seriously a danger, as the other. Most people know well enough that
keeping science and life or theory and practice apart has the effect of
making the former lose itself in a highly morbid intellectualism, and
the latter in the dead monotony, of a mere existence, sometimes
presumptuously styled "practical life," but such a result seems not to
trouble either Professor Münsterberg or the conventional scientist whose
cause the vigorous professor has espoused. In other regions,
fortunately, a formal disparity is not accepted as arguing to a natural
divorce, but is even considered, let it be said, a reason for
association; and as for the disparity between science and will, it is
quite true that life without science is lifeless and that science
without life is meaningless.
Perhaps the crowning fault of the agnostic scientist is his lack of
humour. He takes himself too seriously. The lover, when his fair one has
formally disagreed with him, rejecting his suit with her outspoken "No"
and promising lasting friendship and good-will even to assurances of
assistance in his next venture, takes hope, smiles grimly within
himself, and feels sure still that she and he, however disparite, are
meant to live together for better or worse. But the rejected scientist
takes the unknowable's "No" as if it [p.113] were final, and then,
retiring to his study or laboratory, proceeds, though in a morbid,
abnormal way, to mingle the scientific and volitional standpoints every
time he writes a line or makes an experiment. We watch him as he goes,
and find his case not without its humour. If the true lover upon being
rejected were satisfied thereafter with caressing the lady's photograph,
then he and the agnostic scientist would be in the same class.
But, as is needless to say, I am not writing a novel. So, romance aside,
unquestionably the forms and doctrines of the scientific consciousness
are peculiar, being, as has been shown, logically subtle, imaginary and
innocent of direct practical realism, being, in short, the inhabitants
of a world quite their own, and to impose them intact upon active life
cannot fail to bring disaster, the usual disaster of a misfit. Yet, let
us bring to mind, in the first place, that the scientific consciousness
is not essentially different from consciousness in general, and that
consciousness in general deals, and always must deal with artificial
forms, with symbols, constructions, and transformations; and in the
second place, that it always knows with some measure of sophistication
that what it deals with is symbolic or constructed. Conscious creatures,
from the moment they begin to draw breath, are trained to see one thing
objectively and to understand or construe quite another thing for active
expression. There is no visual sensation without muscular sensation, and
most men, if not all men, have really learned in the long years of their
own and their race's experience to get along without _seeing_ [p.114]
and yet also without foregoing the sensations in their muscles! Man's
long training, in a word, has taught him to use what he sees as not
direct reality, but only a symbol of reality, and so in volition always
to allow for the "practical" unreality of the objects before his
consciousness. The mere words bread and butter, for example, or even the
visible things in a restaurant window, have never brought satiety to a
hungry child, nor do I myself fear that they ever will. Moreover, the
long training that is the surety against danger, and that at the same
time has made man keenly awake to the value as well as the humour of
symbolism, is just what has rendered the high development of
professional science possible, and is also what makes possible and
properly controls the application of science to practical life.
It may now be asserted that the facts are not in accord with the view to
which I have just given expression, that sometimes, and very of ten too,
the forms and doctrines of science are imposed without modification or
translation upon practical life. Thus, though the names for edibles
themselves as present to the eye--or to any other sense--are not normal
substitutes for food, nevertheless some people, whether from poverty or
from indigestion, have fed on them, just as they have taken long
journeys with maps, time-tables, and guide books. In education, too, the
formal conditions of science have suggested object-lessons and pure
induction; in political organization we have had programmes of extreme
elemental individualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract communism
and Christian Socialism; in religion God [p.115] has been like a thing
seen, perhaps a tree walking or a man working, whether with hoe or rake
or with other implement, perhaps a trident, and belief has been
identified with an articulate dogma or formula; and many a realistic
novel, treating the details of life as a scientist might treat them, or
many a psychological novel, more problematic than artistic, has been put
upon the market. But what can all this mean, undoubtedly true as it is,
save that science belongs to life, yet is applied to it with difficulty
and only under conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles,
poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, is responsible
for the unnatural substitution, and in cases of education, politics,
religion, and literature, the substitution is equally a makeshift which
the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic
programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work.
Mere induction will not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and no
articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game throughout; its vital
character, its very integrity is its experimental character; it is not a
settled, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static.
Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or by storm and stress
of the incongruous and misapplied, being inspired, not by somebody's
complacent optimism, but by a sacrificial, always heroic idealism; and
its scientific practices, however truly a mixing of things formally
incongruous or disparite, are just aids to its reality. Moreover, those
science-formed practices are always in some measure sophisticated. Human
nature is rather a fine thing in its way, as [p.116] many a man has
flattered himself and his kind by saying. Witness the homeless,
ill-clad, starving child feeding over the odorous grating and before the
well-stocked window of the restaurant, and feeling, if not actually
saying: "As long as I cannot have and eat, it is good to smell and see."
Witness, also, the educator or the statesman or the priest or the
novelist. Each knows his makeshift and feels some of the humour of it,
and in his closet, when not before his public, acknowledges the violence
to which he is lending himself.
And another fact, besides that of the actual applications of science,
which, however violent, prove the need as well as the dangers, and
besides the sophistication, perhaps also the sense of humour, which
always accompanies the applications and at least tempers their violence,
must also be mentioned. Those science-formed programmes always go in
pairs. Individualism and socialism, realism and mysticism, Epicureanism
and Stoicism, orthodoxy and heresy are inseparable, socially and
historically; and the effect of such pairing is plainly to correct
whatever of violence the sense of symbolism and the sophistication and
the humour of the time may be unequal to. Thus in the movements and
programmes of society for any given misfit there is always a
counter-misfit. Possibly human life, at least as socially organized, is
only a competition of misfits, its programmes coming, not through the
acquired supremacy of one side or the other, but through the constant
mediation, the balancing and interacting of the two, and the misfits are
perhaps exclusively the gifts of science or at least [p.117] of the
observer's consciousness generally, and man is at once serious and
humorous enough to impose what science gives on the real life of his
fellows, as a ready-made clothier might on a stray countryman; but is a
city, then, to have no Hyam, and is the life of society also to dispense
with the gifts of science because they are imperfect? There are worse
things than clothes not made to measure or than the men who sell or buy
them. There is the life that never changes its old clothes for new.
There are the clothes that never get on the market at all.
Accordingly the interference of the scientific with the volitional point
of view is, to say the least, not the only danger which the scientist or
the practical man needs to recognize. There is also the danger that the
disparity between science and life, or between knowledge and the
unknowable, will be construed to mean that the two are never to live
together. Science may be innocent of any direct accord with reality,
being in form quite innocent of a real realism, but after all, whether
by itself or in its various applications or renderings in human life, it
is so innocent only in a qualified sense, only with reference to the
form of its specific doctrine and attitudes taken individually. As
itself a living whole, part acting upon part, each abstraction corrected
by some counter-abstraction or perhaps by some inner self-opposition, as
conscious too of its own conditions and limitations, as sophisticated
and even humorous, both for all logical purposes and for all purposes of
applicability in the life of society it is realism itself. As harbouring
what above was called, in so many words, an [p.118] inner active spirit
of veracity or power for reality, a constant agent of validity and
applicability, it is itself a party to the real life.
But return to the idea of the divorce of science and life, which is such
an easy conclusion of agnosticism. If divorced, it was said, they are
lost, the one in a morbid intellectualism, the other in the dead
monotony of mere existence. Now, in view of the fact that many have
found such a divorce to possess the highest ideal value, it seems worth
while to remark that after all is said the separation can be only
apparent, not real. Even if we neglect wholly the writing and the
experimentation of the scientist, as volitional as they are scientific,
and the practical consciousness, moral or prudential, of the disciple of
the "real life," as scientific as it is volitional, we shall find such
to be the case. We know men who have what may be styled, and what
sometimes is abusively styled, a double life. They have their science,
perhaps their laboratories and their books and their own pet doctrines,
and they have also their social affiliations in business and in politics
and in religion; and, whether it be ideal or unideal, admirable or
reprehensible, their life certainly does seem double, because their
sociology and their business, or their political theory and their party
ties, or their biology and their religion simply will not mix; but their
apparent duplicity has apparently little or nothing to rest upon. It may
count as two, numerically, but such counting never makes being. Men
should count less and think more. On the terms of such a numerical
separation, as was said, the science can be only formal, the life only
dead; but such a [p.119] science and such a life make one existence, not
two; and, however amusing the conclusion may be, it is nevertheless true
that the science, for just what it is, has been applied, making the life
just what it is. Are scientific technique with its aloofness and logical
abstractions and a life that in its own special, affairs can be only
conventional and ritualistic, or say routine in the study or the
laboratory and routine in the church or market-place, are these so
different as really to be, whatever the appearances, independent and
distinct? They may count as two for being in just so many different
places, but the man, scientist or practitioner, is always necessarily
with himself, and in this sense never in more than one place, so that in
character and value the two routines are one and the same. Moreover, the
ennui which together they are sure to induce must end sooner or later in
a common cry for help, in a passion for reality that will turn each
toward the other with an irresistible appeal.
Once more, then, there is danger for science not merely in the
interference, but in the obstinate independence of the scientific and
the volitional point of view. A protected science may have no less, but
also it has no more justification than a protected industry. Competition
with life and will may often bring science low, degrading its methods
and impairing its professional success, but protection involves at least
equal risks. Professor Münsterberg--but may he forgive me my Homeric
epithets--is a too zealous epistemologic protectionist.
The difficulty as to the agnosticism of science may be presented in
another way. Dismissing all thought [p.120] of either interference or
divorce and all thought of the scientist forgetting his agnosticism or
taking it too soberly, we may say that the scientific agnostic, being
under the spell of the scientific way of dealing with things, is
disposed to treat the unknowable as if it were but one more thing or
fact among all the other things or facts with which he is wont to deal.
The world for him is then composed of two departments or groups, which
like a good scientist he classifies and labels, the knowable and the
unknowable; and nothing could be simpler or more natural. Though the
point of what follows may be lost in its appearance of mere wordiness,
so to speak, the world of his interest, of his formal knowledge,
includes, among the other things, that which he knows to be unknowable,
and with the inclusion and the knowledge of unknowability he imagines
his responsibility to the unknowable both to begin and end. Or, again,
the agnostic scientist regards the unknowable as something apart from
the knowable, as something not for him to know and also not having any
vital, intrinsic relations to what he does know, but something
nevertheless objectively presentable to a creature with knowing
faculties altogether different from his. The unknowable is thus for him
still the object of a looking and thinking consciousness, yet never of
his looking and thinking consciousness; it is knowable, and formally
knowable, yet not to him, not through any of the forms of knowledge, the
enabling attitudes, at his command. And nothing, I say once more, could
be simpler or more natural. But, properly and professionally scientific
as it may be to give to agnosticism this turn, it is very [p.121]
decidedly an excellent example of professional blindness, being a sort
of _reductio ad absurdum_, of the scientific point of view, for plainly
it treats the unknowable as a matter, first, of knowledge--the scientist's
knowledge of its unknowability, and as a matter, second, for
knowledge--the knowledge of the creature with the different faculties.
Surely such treatment is not honestly agnostic. Science, therefore, if
it would be honest as well as scientific, must forget its
professionalism and take the negative of the unknowable in another way.
In what way? In making reply to this question I must resort to a
distinction, which I have frequently found useful, between the dogmatic
and the merely instrumental. Thus agnosticism may be dogmatic, as the
conventional scientist would hold it, flatly declaring for an
unknowable, or it may be instrumental, esteeming the unknowability in
things, not merely as relative to the existing conditions of knowledge,
but also as a constant demand upon science that it never rest in itself,
that it for ever treat its results as only a means to some end. So
viewed an instrumental agnosticism is also teleological, but not in any
sense of a fixed and static telos. Telic character or purposiveness and
fixity are like oil and water. Whatever the traditional theologian may
think or say, they simply will not mix.
Of the two kinds of agnosticism, the first hardly calls for further
treatment, for it is plainly that which has been recently examined and
found to be more scientific, or at least more professionally scientific,
than fully and personally honest, and the second is [p.122] very nearly
akin to positivism, but must be scrutinized closely, for it certainly
leads beyond the usual bounds of positivism. The positivist in science,
as has been indicated above, accepts only actual positive experience and
accepts that only tentatively. The working hypothesis is thus the master
of his mind. What he knows, however well established in his actual,
positive consciousness, is at best only relative and mediative. But--and
just here appears the defect of his position, or just here we see him
still only the professional scientist--the mediation which absorbs his
interest is merely one of formal knowledge; what he knows always leads
him just to more knowledge; his formulated hypotheses as they are tested
are but aids to new formulations: whereas, besides this mediation, there
always is another at least equally significant, for knowledge under the
very conditions of its rise and formulation must for ever be a means to
something besides mere knowledge. Recognition of this other mediation,
accordingly, is all-important to any final appraisal of the meaning of
agnosticism, to an appraisal that is justified just through being
superior to the special interests of formal and professional science. Is
it not one of the functions of the various negatives in our human life
really to save life from the narrowness of its various professional
abstractions, and is not the attitude of agnosticism but one of these
negations?
And now, if for a paragraph or two I may be even offensively abstruse,
the conditions of our positive experience, of our actual knowledge, are
such, and are commonly recognized to be such, that there must always be
an unknown. Every working hypothesis [p.123] by implication points to an
unknown. It is equally true, however, that the conditions of positive
experience are such that there is no fixity to this unknown; and the
unknown changes in consequence, both in possible content and in possible
quality or value, with every change in knowledge. But _always_ an
unknown which is _never_ the same unknown must mean something more than
merely a yet-to-be-known; yes, it must mean even more than an
infinitely, eternally remote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, or
its being infinitely distant, simply makes it something besides positive
knowledge actual or possible. It must mean something which, though not
knowledge, is nevertheless in knowledge, now and always; something
served by all knowledge but itself other than any knowledge; something,
then, which exceeds or transcends whatever the formal enabling
conditions of knowledge are capable of presenting, but is itself
intimately and vitally involved in the presentation; or, once more,
something which is not at all in the character of a separate unknowable
thing or sphere of things, nor even of a separate part in the things
known or knowable, but is in the character rather of an unknowability,
perhaps in a sense a relative unknowability, belonging to the very
things and to every part of the very things that are known or, let me
say, inhering in the bare possibility of all knowledge. Must there not
be a sense in which just that which makes knowledge possible is itself
quite impossible to knowledge? Who makes a law must be superior to the
law, or "legally supreme," and what makes knowledge possible can hardly
be fully and directly an object [p.124] of knowledge. Given actual,
positive knowledge, then, and there must always be not merely an
unknown, but also an unknowable; an unknowable, however, that is in and
of the knowledge, not in place or in character a thing by itself.
I said I should be abstruse, and I have not yet finished. In fully
appraising agnosticism we need to consider at close range another idea
of the positivist. Thus for the positivist knowledge is not a having,
but a getting--on the principle that unto him that hath shall be given;
not a knowing, but a questioning and seeking; not a being, but a
becoming--that has its ground in a being so real as to be without fixity
of form. And this is plainly equivalent to making movement and action
essential to the very nature of the knowing mind or to making knowledge
dynamic instead of static, and infinitely plastic--even like life
itself, that is always greater than its cross-sections or specific
forms. But in general to an active nature nothing can ever be quite
external; to a truly active nature there can be no essential
impossibility. For reflect. The mere existence of anything external or
of anything impossible would in just so far remove and deny the
intrinsic character of the activity; in just so far it would set the
supposedly active being in fixity of life and definiteness of form. For
an essentially active nature, therefore, all things--all things in
heaven and earth--are both present and possible, and so, specifically,
if that active nature be the knowing mind there can be no unknowable
that is at the same time alien and altogether impossible to the knower.
Even the very forms of the knower's knowledge must for ever compass
[p.125] pass more than they may visibly present. The knowing itself in
its own right and nature must be more than formal knowing, or than the
"objective," "special" science, in which the formal knowing has its
professional realization. And the knower, as he knows, in and through
his knowledge must always be compassing just that which is not
impossible to him, but only unknowable--that is, impossible merely to
his direct, formal knowledge. Is the inedible or the invisible or the
impenetrable or the unbearable or the illegible or even the
unintelligible ever wholly impossible? Such negatives, and in fact all
negatives, besides saving life from the narrowness of its various forms,
do this positive thing: they open the door of life's wider, nay, of
life's infinite opportunity or possibility, and at the same time they
render those various definite forms really mediative or instrumental,
making them parts in an essentially purposive existence. With just this
meaning, then, a meaning larger and deeper than that usual to
positivism, the attitude of the agnostic is instrumental and
teleological. Agnosticism simply endows the knower--must we not even put
our conclusion so?--with a wider freedom than that of knowledge, and yet
also makes his knowledge both share and serve the wider freedom that is
given.
Instead, then, of pointing to a known "unknowable," before which either
some non-human creature or some human vice-regent of such a creature is
not obliged to be so knowingly humble, instead of establishing the
conceit that knowledge or science is wholly for its own sake and so of
divorcing knowledge and real life, instead of making castes out of the
social [p.126] classes of those who look and those who do, the
unknowable must be taken to point to the necessary unity of knowledge
and life, of theory and practice, to the fact that all looking is
incident to a running and before a leaping, that all knowledge is
responsible to life, and that only life, however directly unknowable,
can ever inform knowledge. It even suggests I think with Carlyle that
"the end of man is action, not thought, though it were the noblest."
Yet, in truth, though its own emphasis may thus exalt action, it cannot
mean any depreciation of thought or knowledge, only their enlistment in
the service of life.
* * * * *
At this point it would be interesting to show in detail how action--that
is, volition or application to life as central to the meaning of
agnosticism--is not only the logically appropriate nor yet only the
sentimentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and actually
real motive, the natural outcome of the scientific standpoint in each
one of its three attitudes. Such a showing might follow historical and
sociological lines, or it might appeal to psychology or it might be
abstrusely logical, but I can ask attention only to a few suggestions of
so general a character as not to be easily classified.
The natural consequence of objectivism is something like that attributed
by many to modern militarism, since it ends by inducing the very thing
it claims to prevent. An objective science discloses the mechanical
nature of man's environment, besides making man himself also a good deal
of a machine. But a machine, whether environment or personal being, is
always a [p.127] tool whose fine, accurate adjustments are just so much
presented opportunity that by a sort of hypnotism turns the scientist's
consciousness into that of an effective agent in the world. Somehow a
real machine must move, and in the case before us with the movement the
asserted distinction between looking subject and seen object collapses
hopelessly. Witness such a collapse, as the runner, who has been
studying the stream before him, takes his leap, or in history as an age
of self-consciousness, conventionalism, and utilitarianism, is followed
by the rise of Napoleon. So does objectivism pass over into action. As
for the special Science, it may be impractical, because partial, but we
have seen how at least formally it loses its partiality, becoming even
all-inclusive, indirectly compensating for its narrowness of view and so
becoming virtually co-extensive with all its associates in science. The
dividing partitions may still stand, but only as unsubstantial forms
wholly transparent and ineffective, so that the undivided universe is
really present to consciousness. The undivided universe, however, as
present to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot be fully
realized in any formal consciousness. The natural decline of an asserted
specialism, then, or the development of specialism into a mere form
without substance, into a virtual universalism, makes science
applicable. It makes science applicable, for in the first place it gives
freedom from the bondage of mere special technique, just as, for
example, the decline of religious--or irreligious?--sectarianism, a form
of specialism certainly, is sure to free religion from the bondage of
ritual, and in the second place, as was the [p.128] fate of objectivism,
it makes the distinction between self and not-self, subject and object,
man and nature, only a formal one, since the real unity of the objective
world is exactly that in which the self has its true realization. In
like manner a religion turned non-sectarian shows man truly living and
moving and having his being, not aloof from God, but in God. Thirdly,
whether because of the freedom from technique or ritual or because, as
the waters of science become quiet with the union of its many streams,
the objective world does clearly mirror the image of the self, the
decline of specialism, like the decline of sectarianism, brings what
some are pleased to call the liberation of the human spirit. The
psychologist would call it the development of knowledge into will--in a
word, the application of science, and the historian would record it as
the dawn of a new era. Psychologically and historically the human spirit
is liberated and nature is let loose at the same time. Details can
always be observed objectively and specially or separately; the whole,
on the other hand, is bound to draw the observer into itself and so to
change the observation into motive and will. And, lastly, as for
agnosticism, suffice it to say, in addition to what has been said, that
the suppressed passion for reality to which agnosticism must always
testify ensures in good time the assertion of the volitional as distinct
from the merely scientific point of view. Whatever this may mean
psychologically, historically and sociologically it means that a time of
agnosticism leads to all sorts of applications of science, such as
those, for example, in legislation and in industry. In morals [p.129]
and religion, too, the same wish and will to use the results of science
shows itself, as in the social settlements, in scientific charity, in
the "institutional" church, and in the university extension movement.
Agnosticism, marking, as it always does, dissatisfaction both with the
uninformed and with the conventionally informed life, and also rendering
mere formal knowledge, however logically correct and thinkable, unreal
or artificial, calls for a larger freedom of life through the mediation
of knowledge.
But interesting as such reflections as the foregoing are, and
interesting also as it would be to undertake an account of will in
general in its relation to a consciousness which in so far as scientific
is always artificial and symbolic, and is in particular, as we have
found, always a poise between opposing points of view,[4] I must bring
to an end this rather lengthy examination of the standpoint of science.
If I have not already tarried too long, the special task of this volume
certainly does not warrant further attention even to so important a
department of human experience.
In conclusion, then, it is now quite apparent that science is a fruitful
field for the doubter. Science lacks self-sufficiency. Socially it means
the rise of a caste, and logically it involves abstraction and
consequent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, as shown
in its attitudes and methods, are chimerical, or impossible. In general
and in particular it has a [p.130] paradoxical standpoint, being not
less given to contradictions than ordinary consciousness.
But, as must be added, the case for the doubter of science has led also
toward a belief in science. Not infrequently in the course of the
foregoing discussion it must have seemed even as if belief rather than
doubt were the controlling motive. A little child has said that faith
consists in "believing what you know to be untrue," and our present
state of mind cannot be far from such a faith. Actually the science
which we may believe in is the science of which we are also confirmed
doubters. We doubt the formal attitude and the formal doctrines just
because they are abstract, phenomenal, paradoxical, but at the same time
we have to believe in the spirit--there seems to be no other word
available--as an ever-present agent of validity, because, in spite of
all, the very incongruities save these formal doctrines from their
apparent artificiality and abstraction, and put them in touch with what
is whole and real. And if, as was suggested, the scientific
consciousness is only the specially developed consciousness of ordinary
life, then we have gained also a new confidence even in the unreflective
paradoxical consciousness of everyday life. Yet, that we may more fully
comprehend what this means, we shall next consider at some length the
possible value of the defects in experience which have now been
observed. Ideas, which have appeared heretofore as little better than
hints or suggestions, can then be presented in clearer form.
[1] See an article: "Epistemology and Physical Science--A Fatal
Parallelism," in the _Philosophical Review_, Vol. VII, No. 4, July,
1896.
[2] See articles: "Pluralism: Empedocles and Democritus," in the
_Philosophical Review_, Vol. X, No. 3, May, 1901; "A Study in the Logic
of the Early Greek Philosophy--Being, not-Being, and Becoming," in the
_Monist_, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; and "The Poetry of Anaxagoras's
Metaphysics," in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Method_, Vol. IV, No 4.
[3] See Münsterberg's _Psychology and Life_, p. 267. Houghton Mifflin
and Co., 1899.
[4] For an interesting account, mainly psychological in standpoint, of
will as involving such a poise, see Münsterberg's _Grundzüge der
Psychologie_, Vol. I, chap. xv., Leipzig, 1900.
[p.131]