I
Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the specific title of
_Pretender_ on the son and grandson of James II, the word has retained
in our speech a sinister significance. For us a pretender is one who
makes a false claim to a title. But in speaking of the pretensions of
science, humanists do not mean precisely this. No humanist would deny
that science has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the
phenomena of the objective world and attempting to find law and order
in the flux of events. Nor would he deny that it has added much to our
security and power and has increased our opportunities for a richer
life and character.
Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims are
now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name, and
it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to expose.
While our modern pretenders are unfortunately far greater in number
than the two descendants of James, they do fall into two classes. The
first includes those men of science who are not content to work in
their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created
a fictitious world of the imagination made out of æthers, electrons,
and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and
others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact. This class does
comparatively little direct harm, as it merely creates some confusion
in the orderly domain of science; but, indirectly, it has given a
stimulus and specious authority to the pseudo-scientists. The second
class comprises those who are claiming that the phenomena of the
subjective world also lie in the field of science and have imposed on
the age the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. They would
have us believe that all truth is scientific and that the conclusions
of self-examination are but guess-work. By mere verbal analogies they
have linked the study of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature to the
physical world of mechanical matter and motion. It is the false claims
of these pseudo-sciences which must be exposed and renounced in order
that humanism may come again into its own as the arbiter of character.
As in the Middle Ages canting simulation of goodness, as well as honest
virtue, was covered by the word religion, so to-day vague speculation,
as well as accurate experimentation, is proclaimed as science. By a
curious throw-back we are apparently using the word “science” in the
primitive sense of “all knowledge,” as the Greeks used it. And they,
in spite of their acumen, had not been able to differentiate between
the two equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation
and by personal experience. We have seemingly forgotten that one
of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance was to discover
this difference of method and to limit “science” strictly to the
investigation of objective phenomena. Even Descartes, who attempted to
create a purely mechanical world, excluded the processes of thought as
something foreign to the scientific method.
It was the biologists of the nineteenth century, intoxicated with the
delusion that the magic word evolution was a key to unlock all the
mysteries of the universe, who foisted on the world the idea that man
is but a complicated physical and chemical machine, and who sought to
discredit the dualistic philosophy of the Renaissance physicists. And
of all the biologists, Huxley, the militant propagandist, was the
one who did the most to degrade humanism into the pseudo-sciences of
psychology and sociology. He first correctly emphasised the fact that
there is but one scientific method which is best exemplified by the
subject of mechanics. But--and in this lies the source of his mischief
to clear thinking--_he then defined science as merely organised common
sense_. One has only to analyse this definition to discover its
speciousness and its confusion of thought. His definition has been
almost universally accepted, although it undoes all the lessons taught
us by the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages and the scientific
experimentalists of the Renaissance; and its effect has been to drive
theoretical science back into the hypothetical metaphysics of the
Greeks.
It is merely a truism to say that our contact with the objective
and subjective worlds is based, directly or indirectly, on our
sense-perceptions; and, to be intelligibly transmitted from one person
to another, such data must be common to many individuals. Also, it
is an inevitable tendency of the mind to organise all facts or to
link them together. Thus Huxley really classes all sound knowledge
as science. But, since this sound knowledge, according to him, can
be attained only by following the method of mechanics, which is the
interpretation by the mind of the spatial and temporal relations
between sensible bodies, his inference is clear that the phenomena of
consciousness, the individual mind, and our social relations, are to be
interpreted as problems of matter and motion.
Yet what, actually, is the process of exact science? The answer to this
question should show us whether or not the term does have any precise
and limited significance, and whether or not fundamental confusion must
result from the attempt to make it synonymous with all knowledge.
Exact science, then, is first of all based on the naïve belief in an
objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly and
prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will. The
phenomena of this objective world appeal to us through our sense-organs
by some form of action, which we call energy, and are interpreted by
our minds. We speak of this interpretation as observation; but to be
scientific we must also select the phenomena to be observed, in order
that we may classify their similarities and their dissimilarities.
In the course of time, we have found such precision in many of our
classifications and such regularity in the past actions of phenomena,
that we are able to predict future events. Those predictions, which
from past experience we find to have been accurately verified, we
formulate as laws. For example, we have observed the actions of so
many falling bodies that we have formulated the law of gravitation. It
would be an error to say that a body fell, yesterday, because of this
law; that event was simply one of the observed facts from which the
law was deduced; but it is quite proper to predict that such a body
will fall, to-morrow, in accordance with the law of gravitation. To
sum up, the scientific method is limited to experimental observation
and the formulation of laws; its value lies in the fact that, by its
cultivation, we have done much to allay our apprehensions for the
future and thus have abated the edge of superstition; and we also
have vastly increased our power over our environment, or, in the much
misunderstood aphorism of Francis Bacon, we have found science to be
valuable for its fruits.
In a general way, we may say that the scientist should follow in his
investigations the phenomena of the objective world only until their
special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous system. It is in
the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of the subjective
world after these stimuli have been translated into emotion and thought.
If a scientific prediction, or law, is to be something more than a
vague statement of what will probably occur, we feel the necessity
of measuring the quantity of the event; that is, our minds are not
satisfied until we are able to express it mathematically. Since the
only measurable attributes, concerning which our opinion of more or
less is definite, are geometrical lengths, the aim of all science is,
and must be, to express its laws in the language of mechanics; for that
subject alone deals exclusively with simple, sensible masses and their
geometrical relations in space. We have then the paradox that while
mathematics is the goal of science, in that it is the ideal method,
or language of expression, it is not itself a science since it is
concerned with subjective ideas and is not limited by the restrictions
of sensible bodies. Modern men of science may rebel against this fact;
but even the newer, and more dubious, of the pseudo-sciences are
forced to substantiate their claims with the support of factitious
mathematical formulæ and tables and to simulate the mechanistic method.
The inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena
quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable
machine.
If the phenomena of life are to be classed as an exact science, it is
necessary to postulate that the living organism, also, is a machine,--a
thing of various material parts, acting on each other by mechanical
forces. Such a postulate is pure _fiat_, for we have found no common
factors between what we call vital actions and mechanical and physical
forces. Biology is, at best, confined to the discovery of qualitative
classifications, and the mutual chemical and physical reactions of
the organism; and life is so complex and so variable that very few of
its phenomena can be predicted with any accuracy. For example, the
so-called law of heredity is often cited, but we have made scarcely
any progress towards predicting variations in even an immediately
succeeding generation. Even if a general law of progressive evolution
were granted to have been established, no one could foretell by it the
future variations of any species.
If the scientific method is badly strained when applied to even the
simplest forms of life, it completely fails when used to elucidate the
phenomena of the mind. The fundamental definition of science excludes
the processes of consciousness from its field, for it assumes that
objective phenomena are to be interpreted by the mind. If we attempt to
study the mind objectively, then we come face to face with the absurd
paradox of a thing investigating itself by means of I itself. And the
gibe cast at the scientific psychologists, that they propose to study
the mind by first denying its existence, is only too well founded.
The possibility of a scientific method is based on a rational
interpretation of objective phenomena. Psychology, as a science, would
be a solemn version of _Alice Through the Looking Glass_ in which
real persons are viewed and analysed by their images, or rather by
some other intelligence, such as a dog or an inhabitant of Mars. The
futility of such a process should be apparent if we recollect that an
animal’s mental processes can themselves be estimated and expressed
only as a vaguer and more rudimentary sort of human mind.