Once let that [the human ideal] slip out of the thought, and science is
of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian papiri.--RICHARD
JEFFERIES.
It would appear then, from the preceding paper, that in some sense a
mistake has been made in the method of modern scientific work; not that
the vast amount of labour expended in it has been altogether wasted, for
in return for this there is a mass of practical results and detailed
observations to show; but that in attempting to solve the problem of
science by the intellect alone, a radical mistake has been made which
_could_ only land us in absurdity, and that this mistake has for the
time being also vitiated the results that have been attained. For--in
reference to this last point--the divorce of the intellectual from the
emotional has caused a great portion of our scientific observations to
become merely pedantic and trifling; while it has turned the practical
results--as industrial and military machinery, etc.--into engines of
evil as often as into engines of good.
Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely intellectual
representation of the universe has, as already said, been searching for
a thing which does not exist. The very facts of Nature, as we call them,
are at least half feeling. If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact
and to produce a statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense
element, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out; and though our
resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no value. We
might as well try to take the clay out of a brick. It must never be
forgotten that the logical processes--important as they are--cannot
stand by themselves, have no standing ground of their own. They
presuppose assumptions and are the expression of things that are
unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest logic is a mere hooking
together of links in a chain, and the last link is of no use--you can
put no stress on it--unless the first is secured somewhere. The strength
of the intellectual chain is no greater than that of the staple from
which it hangs--and that is a human feeling The strength of Euclid is no
greater than that of the axioms--and _they_ are feelings; they are
unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, "I _feel_ like
that." In fact all the propositions of Geometry are nothing but the
analysis and elaborate expression, so to speak, of these primary
convictions--and the Geometry-structure stands and falls with them.
There is no such thing as intellectual truth--that is, I mean, a truth
which can be stated as existing apart from feeling. If, for instance, a
proposition in Geometry can be really shown to be based on the axioms,
it is true, not intellectually or absolutely, but as an expression of my
primary Geometrical sense; and if my giving a few pence to a crossing
sweeper is based not on a mere impression of duty, or an anxiety to
appear charitable, or wish to escape his importunity, but on genuine
regard for the man, then it is true, not in any absolute signification,
but just as an expression of what it professes to represent--namely my
primary sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is the
expression of the deepest feeling, and if there is an absolute truth it
can only be known and expressed by him who has the absolute feeling or
Being within himself.
This being so--and the nature of the intellectual processes being, like
the links in a chain, transitional--it becomes obvious that the
intellectual results may figure as a _means_ but never as an end in
themselves. To hang any weight of reliance on them in the latter sense
is like the Chinese Trick--described by Marco Polo--of throwing a rope's
end up in the air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that
our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are
formed as a means towards _practical_ applications. In that sense they
are transitional; they are formed, not as substantial truths, but merely
as links in a chain towards some definite practical result. For this
purpose we may form whatever theories are convenient: if we are
calculating the strength of bridges, we may adopt what generalisations
we like concerning mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual
and practical results; if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use of
any theory that will do. The theory does not matter, as long as it hauls
the practical result after it, just as it does not matter whether your
cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as you can get your ship into
dock with it. In this sense our Modern Science is, I conceive,
admirable. For practical results and brief predictions it affords a
quantity of useful generalisations--shorthand notes and conventional
symbols and pocket summaries of phenomena--which bear about the same
relation to the actual world that a map does to the country it is
supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have any resemblance to the
real thing--but, when you understand the principle on which it is
formed, it is exceedingly useful for finding your way about. As long as
Science therefore keeps the practical end in view, and starting from
sense seeks to return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is
perfectly legitimate; but the moment it credits its theory with a
positive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of
facts--and endeavours to pass by means of it into unverifiable and
abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of
space, or the remote past or future--it is simply throwing its rope's
end into the sky and trying to climb up! That "the wish is father to the
thought" is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the individual,
feeling precedes thinking--as the body precedes the clothes. In history,
the Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physiological
parallel; for behind the brain and determining its action stands the
great sympathetic nerve--the organ of the emotions. In fact here the
brain appears as distinctly transitional. It stands between the nerves
of sense on the one hand and the great sympathetic on the other.
Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole method of thinking
will be revolutionised; change the axiom or primary sensation in a
science, and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current
Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed; but let a
new axiomatic emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play instead of
unlimited grab), and the base of the science will be altered, and will
necessitate a new construction.
So when people argue (on politics, morality, art, etc.) it will
generally be found that they differ at the _base_; they go out, perhaps
quite unconsciously, from different axioms and hence they _cannot_
agree. Occasionally of course a strict examination will show that, while
agreeing at the base, one of them has made a false step in deduction; in
that case his thought does _not_ represent his primary feeling, and when
this is pointed out he is forced to alter it. But more often it is found
that the difference lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of
reason; and they disagree to the end. In this case neither is right and
neither is wrong. They simply feel differently; they are different
persons.
The Thought then is the expression, the outgrowth, the covering of
underlying Feeling. And in the great life of Man as a whole, as in the
lesser life of the individual, his continual new birth and inward growth
causes his thought-systems also continually to change and be replaced by
new ones. Like the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing plant or tree they
give form for a time to the life within; then they fall off and are
replaced. The husk prepares the bud underneath, which is to throw it
off. The thought prepares and protects the feeling underneath, which
growing will inevitably reject it; and when a thought has been formed it
is already _false_, _i.e._, ready to fall.
We are now, then, in a position to come back to the question of a
genuine Science, truly so-called.
As there is no invariable and absolute datum on the fringe of
Humanity--no definable flying atom on which we can found our
reasonings--and as Modern Science, considered as an actual
representation of the universe, falls miserably to pieces in
consequence--is it possible that we have made a mistake in the
_direction_ in which we have sought for our datum; and may it be that we
should look for that in the very Centre of Humanity instead of in its
remotest circumference? In that direction evidently, if we could
penetrate, we should expect to find, not a shadowy intellectual
generalisation, but the very opposite of that--an intense immutable
_feeling_ or state, an axiomatic condition of Being. Is it possible that
here, blazing like a sun (if we could only see it--and the sun is its
allegory in the physical world), there exists within us absolutely such
a thing--the one _fact_ in the universe, of which all else are shadows,
_to_ which everything has relation, and round which, itself
unanalysable, all thought circles and all phenomena stand as indirect
modes of expression?
Is it possible? That is the question--the question which each one of us
has to solve. At any rate, let us throw this out as a suggestion. Let us
suggest that as we have got nothing satisfactory by cleaning the
sense-element out of phenomena, we should take the opposite course and
put as much sense into them as we can!
"Facts" are, at least, half feelings. Let us acknowledge this and not
empty the feeling out of them, but deepen and enlarge that which we
already have in them. Who knows whether we have ever _seen_ the blue
sky? Who knows whether we have ever seen each other? Is it not a
commonplace to say that one man sees in the common objects of Nature
what another is wholly unconscious of? "The primrose on the river's brim
a yellow primrose is to him--and nothing more." To what extent may the
facts of Nature thus be deepened and made more substantial to us--and
whither will this process lead us?
Do we not want to feel _more_, not less, in the presence of
phenomena--to enter into a living relation with the blue sky, and the
incense-laden air, and the plants and the animals--nay, even with
poisonous and hurtful things to have a keener _sense_ of their
hurtfulness? Is it not a strange kind of science, that which wakes the
mind to pursue the shadows of things, but dulls the senses to the
reality of them--which causes a man to try to bottle the pure atmosphere
of heaven and then to shut himself in a gas-reeking, ill-ventilated
laboratory while he analyses it; or allows him to vivisect a dog,
unconscious that he is blaspheming the pure and holy relation between
man and the animals in doing so? Surely the man of Science (in its
higher sense, that is) should be lynx-eyed as an Indian, keen-scented as
a hound--with all senses and feelings trained by constant use and a pure
and healthy life in close contact with Nature, and with a heart beating
in sympathy with every creature. Such a man would have at command, so to
speak, the keyboard of the universe; but the mechanical, unhealthy,
indoor-living student--is he not really _ignorant of the
facts_?--Certainly, since he has not felt them, he is.
The process of the true Science consists first in the naming and
defining of phenomena (_i.e._, the facts of human consciousness), and
secondly, in the discovery of the true relation of these phenomena to
each other; and since the definitions of phenomena and their relations
keep varying with the standpoint of the observer, the process evidently
involves all experience, and ultimately the discovery of that last fact
of experience to which and through which all the other facts are
related. It is therefore an age-long process, and has to do with the
emotional and moral part of man as well as with the logical and
intellectual. It is, in fact, the discovery of the nature of Man
himself, and of the true order of his being.
Modern Science--though seeking for a unity in Nature--fails to find it,
because, from the nature of the case, any large body of knowledge in
which all people will agree is limited to certain small regions of human
experience--regions in which very likely no unity is discoverable. It
takes the emerald, and breaks it up; treats of its colour and
light-refracting qualities on the one hand; of its crystalline structure
and hardness on the other; of its weight and density; and of its
chemical properties; all separately, and producing long strings of
generalisation from each aspect of the subject. But how all these
qualities are conjoined together, what their relation is which
_constitutes_ the emerald--yea, even the smallest bit of emerald
dust--it (wisely) does not attempt to say. It takes the man and dissects
him; treats of his blood, his nerves, his bones, his brain; of his
senses of sight, of touch, of hearing; but of that which binds these
together into a unity, of their true relation to each other in the man,
it is silent.
Yet the man knows of himself that he _is_ a unity; he knows that all
parts of his body have relation to _him_, and to each other; he knows
that his senses of sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell are
conjoined in the focus of his individual life, in his "I am;" he knows
that all his faculties and powers, however much they may belong to
different planes, spiritual or material, or may come under the
inquisition of different Sciences, have an order of their own among each
other--that there _is_ an ultimate Science of them--even though he be
not yet wholly versed in it. And he knows, moreover, that in a grain of
dust, or in an emerald, or in an orange, or in any object of Nature, the
different attributes of the object--which the Sciences thus treat of
separately--are only the reflexion of his different senses; so that the
problem of the conjunction of different attributes in a body comes back
to the same problem of the union of various senses and powers in
himself--each individual object being only a case, externalised as it
were, and made a matter of consciousness, of the general relation to
each other of his own sensations and feelings. Knowing all his--I
say--he sees that the understanding of Nature in general and of the laws
or relations which he thinks he perceives among external things must
always depend on the relations and laws which he tacitly assumes, or
which he is directly conscious of, as existing between the various parts
of his own being; and that the ultimate truth which Science--the divine
Science--is really in search of is a moral or psychologic Truth--an
understanding of what man is, and the discovery of the true relation to
each other of all his faculties--involving all experience, and an
exercise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emotional and
spiritual, instead of one set of faculties only.
Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, shall we know the law of
the emerald and the orange, or of Nature generally; and the law of
ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately, by intellectual
investigation; it is mainly learnt by life. The relation of gravity to
vitality is learnt not so much by outer experiment in a laboratory as by
long experience within ourselves from the day when as infants we cannot
lift ourselves above the floor, through the years of the proud strength
of manhood scaling the loftiest mountains, to the hour when our
disengaged spirits finally overcome and pass beyond the attraction of
the earth; and just as the sense of weight--which first appears as a
quite external sensation--is thus at last found to stand in most
pregnant relation with our deepest selves, so of the other senses which
feed the individual life--the senses of light, of warmth, of taste, of
sound, of smell. Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the
tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed, a sense which
identifies itself with the health and well-being of the whole body; the
pleasure of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface pleasure, and
its discrimination of food more than a mere regard for the nutrition of
the ordinary corporeal functions. The sense of Light, which begins in
the material eye, grows and deepens inwardly till the consciousness of
it pervades the whole body and mind with a kind of inward illumination
or divine Reason, showing the places of all things and enfolding the
sense of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in the same manner is
related to and leads up to Love; and Sound, in the voices of our friends
or the divine chords of music, has passed away from being an external
phenomenon and has established itself as the language of our most tender
and intimate emotions.
All the senses thus, as they develop and deepen, are found to unite in
the very focus of individual life. Slowly, and through long experience,
their relation to each other, _their very meaning_ unfolds, or will
unfold; and as this process takes place the man knows himself _one_, a
unity, of which the various faculties are the different manifestations.
Then further through his less localised feelings or more glorified
senses the individual finds his relation to other individuals. Through
his loves and hatreds, through his senses of attraction, repulsion,
cohesion, solidarity, order, justice, charity, right, wrong and the
rest--these feelings, each like the others deepening back more and more
as time goes on--he gradually discovers his true and abiding
relationship to other individuals, and to the divine society of which
they all form a part--and so at last, if we may venture to say so, his
relationship to the absolute and universal. At present, since our most
important relation to each other is conceived of as one of rivalry and
Competition, we of course think of the objects of Nature as being
chiefly engaged in a Struggle for Existence with each other; but when we
become aware of all our senses and feelings, and of ourselves as
individuals, as having relation to the Absolute and universal,
proceeding from it, as the branches and twigs of a tree from the
trunk--then we shall become aware of a Divine or absolute science in
Nature; we shall at last understand that all objects have a permanent
and indissoluble relation to each other, and shall see their true
meaning--though not till then.
Is it possible then that Science, having hitherto--and we shall see in
time that this process has been really most valuable and important--gone
outwards from the centre towards the very fringe of Humanity--emptying
facts as far as possible as it went of all feeling, and reducing itself
at last to the most shadowy generalisations on the very verge of sense
and nonsense--is it possible, I say, that it will now return, and
_first_ filling up facts with feeling as far as practicable (that is, by
direct and the most living contact with Nature in every form, learning
to enter into direct personal sense-relationship with every phenomenon
and phase), will so gradually ascend to the great central fact and
feeling, and then at last and for the first time become fully conscious
of a vast organisation--absolutely perfect and intimately knit from its
centre to its utmost circumference--(the true cosmos of Man--the
conceptions of man and god combined)--existing inchoate or embryonic in
every individual man, animal, plant, or other creature--the object of
all life, experience, suffering, and toil--the ground of all sensation,
and the hidden, yet proper, theme of all thought and study?
For this is it possible that Science will, speaking broadly, have to
leave the laboratory and become one with Life; or that the great
currents of human life will have to be turned on into these often Augean
stables of intellectual pruriency?--the investigation of Nature no
longer a matter of the intellect alone, but of patient listening and the
quiet eye, and of love and faith, and of all deep human experience,
bearing not superciliously its weight towards the interpretation of the
least phenomenon--every "fact" thus deepened to its utmost--all
experience (rather than experiment) courted, and filial walking with
Nature, rather than tearing of veils aside--the life of the open air,
and on the land and the waters, the companionship of the animals and the
trees and the stars, the knowledge of their habits at first hand and
through individual relationship to them, the recognition of their voices
and languages, and listening well what they themselves have to say; the
keenest education of the senses towards the physical powers and
elements, and the acceptance of _all_ human experience, without
exception--till Science become a reality.
Is it possible that in some sense, instead of reducing each branch of
Science to its lowest terms, we shall have to read it in the light of
its _highest_ factors, and "take it up" into the Science above--that we
shall have to take up the mechanical sciences into the physical, the
physical into the vital, the vital into the social and ethical, and so
forth, before we can understand them? Is it possible that the phenomena
of Chemistry only find their due place and importance in their relation
to living beings and processes; that the phenomena of vitality and the
laws of Biology and Zoology--Evolution included--can only be "explained"
by their dependence on self-hood--both in plants and animals; that
Political Economy and the Social Sciences (which deal with men as
individual selves) must, to be understood aright, be studied in the
light of those great ethical principles and enthusiasms, which to a
certain extent override the individual self; and that, finally, Ethics
or the study of moral problems is only comprehensible when the student
has become aware of a region beyond Ethics, into which questions of
morality and immorality, of right and wrong, do not and cannot enter?
Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method Ruskin has given a
great and signal instance in his treatment of Political Economy; it
remains, perhaps, for others to follow his example in the other branches
of Science.[31]
With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen that Science
has two alternatives before it--either to be merely intellectual and to
seek for its start-point in some quite external (and imaginary) thing
like the Atom, or to be divine and to seek for its absolute in the
innermost recesses of humanity. We have two similar alternatives in the
doctrine of Evolution, which looks either to one end of the scale or the
other for its interpretation--either to the amoeba or to the man--to
something it knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows most
of. Goethe, when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived the idea of
leaf-metamorphosis, which he afterwards enunciated in the now accepted
doctrine that all parts of a plant--seed-vessel, pistil, stamens,
petals, sepals, stalk, etc.--may be regarded as modifications of a leaf
or leaves. In this view the distinctions between the parts are effaced,
and we have only one part instead of many--but the question is "what is
that part?" It is of course arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is
continually varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a stalk,
and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. What then is it? For the
moment we are baffled.
So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole organic
kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it
obliterates distinctions. Geoffroy St. Hilaire proposed to show the
French Academy that a Cephalopod could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by
supposing the latter bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet.
There is a continuous variation from the mollusc to the man--all the
lines of distinction run and waver--classes and species cease to
exist--and Science, instead of many, sees only _one_ thing. What then is
that one thing? Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or what is it? Are we
to say that man may be looked upon as a variation of a mollusc or an
amoeba, or that the amoeba may be looked on as a variation of man? Here
are two directions of thought; which shall we choose? But the plain
truth is, the Intellect can give no satisfactory answer. Whichever, or
whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite arbitrary--just as much so as
the choice of the "leaf" in the other case. There is no answer to be
given. And thus it is that _the appearance of the doctrine of Evolution
is the signal of the destruction of Science_ (in the ordinary
acceptation of the word). For Evolution is the successive obliteration
of the arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by their existence
_constitute_ Science, and as soon as Evolution covers the whole ground
of Nature inorganic and organic (as before long it will do)--the whole
of Nature runs and wavers before the eye of Science, the latter
recognises that its distinctions _are_ arbitrary, and turns upon and
destroys itself. This has happened before, I believe--ages back in the
history of the human race--and probably will happen again.
The only conceivable answer to the question, "What is that which is now
a mollusc and now a man and now an inorganic atom?"[32] is given by man
himself--and his answer is, I fear, not "scientific." It is "I Am." "I
am that which varies." And the force of his answer depends on what he
means by the word "I." And so also the only conceivable answer to the
absolute datum question is to be found in the meaning of the word
"I"--in the deepening back of consciousness itself. Man is the measure
of all things. If we are to use Science as a minister to the most
external part of man--to provide him with cheap boots and shoes,
etc.--then we do right to seek our absolute datum in his external part,
and to take his _foot_ as our first measure. We found a science on feet
and pounds, and it serves its purpose well enough. But if we want to
find a garment for his inner being--or, rather, one that shall fit the
_whole_ man--to wear which will be a delight to him and, as it were, a
very interpretation of himself--it seems obvious that we must not take
our measure from outside, but from his very most central principle. The
whole question is, whether there _is_ any absolute datum in this
direction or not. There have been men through all ages of history (and
from before) who have declared that there is. They have perhaps been
conscious of it in themselves. On the other hand there have been men
who, starting from their feet, declared that consciousness itself was a
mere incident of the human machine--as the whistle of the engine--and
thus the matter stands. On the whole, at the present day, the _feet_
have it, and (notwithstanding their variety in size and boot-induced
conformation) are generally accepted as the best absolute datum
available.
Under the foot _régime_ the universe is generally conceived of as a
medley of objects and forces, more or less orderly and distinct from
man, in the midst of which man is placed--the purpose and tendency of
his life being "adaptation to his environment." To understand this we
may imagine Mrs. Brown in the middle of Oxford Street. 'Buses and cabs
are running in different directions, carts and drays are rattling on all
sides of her. This is her environment, and she has to adapt herself to
it. She has to learn the laws of the vehicles and their movements, to
stand on this side or on that, to run here and stop there, conceivably
to jump into one at a favourable moment, to make use of the law of its
movement, and so get carried to her destination as comfortably as may
be. A long course of this sort of thing "adapts" Mrs. Brown
considerably, and she becomes more active, both in mind and body, than
before. That is all very well. But Mrs. Brown has a _destination_.
(Indeed how would she ever have got into the middle of Oxford Street at
all, if she had not had one? and if she did get there with no
destination at all, but merely to skip about, would there be any Mrs.
Brown left in a short time?) The question is, "What is the destination
of Man?"
About this last question unfortunately we hear little. The theory is (I
hope I am not doing it injustice) that by studying your environment
sufficiently you will find out--that is, that by investigating
Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Ethics, etc., you will discover the destiny
of man. But this seems to me the same as saying that by studying the
laws of cabs and 'buses sufficiently you will find out where you are
going to. These are ways and means. Study them by all means, that is
right enough; but do not think _they_ will tell you where to go. You
have to use them, not they you.
In order therefore for the environment to act, there must be a
destination. This I suppose is expressed in the biological dictum,
"organism is made by function as well as environment." What then is the
function of Man? And here we come back again to the meaning of the word
"I."
Nothwithstanding then the prevalence of the foot régime, and that the
heathen so furiously rage together in their belief in it, let us suggest
that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a
foot-consciousness. For, as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from
being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and
becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of
the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of colour,
and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third--as
to the "god-intoxicated" Arab of the desert--a living presence like the
ancient Dyaus or Zeus; so may not the whole of human consciousness
gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a
divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness
connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also
in every man the makings of a universal consciousness? That there are in
us phases of consciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily
senses, is a matter of daily experience; that we perceive and know
things which are not conveyed to us by our bodily eyes or heard by our
bodily ears, is certain; that there rise in us waves of consciousness
from those around us, from the people, the race, to which we belong, is
also certain; may there not then be in us the makings of a perception
and knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is here and
now, but which shall be good for all time and everywhere? Does there not
exist, in truth, as we have already hinted--an inner Illumination--of
which what we call light in the outer world is the partial expression
and manifestation--by which we can ultimately see things, _as they are_,
beholding all creation, the animals, the angels, the plants, the figures
of our friends and all the ranks and races of human kind, in their true
being and order--not by any local act of perception but by a cosmical
intuition and presence, identifying ourselves with what we see? Does
there not exist a perfected sense of Hearing--as of the morning-stars
singing together--an understanding of the words that are spoken all
through the universe, the hidden meaning of all things, the word which
is creation itself--a profound and far pervading sense, of which our
ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and initiation? Do
we not become aware of an inner sense of Health and of Holiness--the
translation and final outcome of the external sense of taste--which has
power to determine for us absolutely and without any ado, without
argument and without denial, what is good and appropriate to be done or
suffered in every case that can arise?
And so on; it is not necessary to say more. If there are such powers in
man, then there is indeed an exact science possible. Short of it there
is only a temporary and phantom science. "Whatever is known to us by
(direct) consciousness," says Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, "is
known to us beyond possibility of question;" what is known by our local
and temporary consciousness is known _for the moment_ beyond possibility
of question; what is known by our permanent and universal consciousness
is permanently known beyond possibility of question.[33]