In bringing before you this subject of a Rational and Humane Science you
will perhaps forgive me if I dwell for a few moments on some points of
personal history in relation to it. After reading mathematics for some
four years at Cambridge, it happened to me for the next ten years or so
to be engaged in the study of the physical sciences, and in lectures on
these subjects. Naturally, during the earlier part of this period I
accepted the current methods and conclusions without any question. But
as time went on I became aware of a certain dissatisfaction; I felt that
many of the laws of Science, enounced as universal truths, were of very
limited application only, that many of the conclusions, so strongly
insisted on, were of quite doubtful validity; and at last this
increasing dissatisfaction culminated in a rather violent attack or
criticism of Modern Science which I wrote and published about the year
1884.[40]
Now, looking back, at this interval of time, though I admit that my
attack was somewhat hasty and crude in detail, I feel that in its main
contention it was thoroughly justified, and I do not feel the least
inclined to withdraw it.
What was that main contention? It was as follows. Modern Science is an
attempt (and no doubt it would accept this definition of itself) to
survey and classify the phenomena of the world in the pure dry light of
the intellect, uncoloured by feeling; and so far is an effort to
separate the intellectual in man from the merely perceptive, the
emotional, the moral, and so forth. It was in this very fact that my
criticism lay; for I contended that such a separation was in the long
run quite impossible.
But before proceeding to defend this position, let me admit at once that
this attempt of Modern Science to get rid of human feeling and to look
at everything in the dry light of the intellect was in some respects a
very grand one. When you consider what the Old-time Science was, with
its fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon the sun and moon
in eclipses, its immolations of hundreds of human beings to appease some
god of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its superstitions, and its
incapability of regarding anything except from the point of view of that
thing's influence on man's own comfort and his little hopes and fears,
it was indeed a grand advance to try and see _facts_, uncoloured and for
themselves alone. It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above
himself, to which I accord the fullest credit and honour.
And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept growing on me: first, that
the attempt was an impossible one; secondly, that the Science so-called
was not a true Science; and thirdly, that in its pretence to an
intellectual exactitude which it did not really possess, this Modern
Science was leading to a narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism as bad as the
old.
There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt. But how shall I
describe it? Our relations to the world may, quite roughly speaking, be
divided into three groups--those that are sensuous and perceptional,
those that are purely intellectual, and those that are of an emotional
and moral order. Take any object of Nature--a bird, for instance. We may
look upon the bird as an object of sense-perceptions--its form, its
colour, its song, and so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary
skill and quickness in this department, recognising in a moment the note
or even the flight of a songster. Then again we may look upon the bird
from the intellectual side--we may study it in relation to its
surroundings--the form of its wings, the length of its leg, the
character of its beak, and their adaptation to its habits, to its
locality, to its food, and so forth. Thus we may get a whole series of
purely intellectual results--relations of the bird to the world in which
it lives. This is the special field of the present-day Science. But,
again, we may regard the bird in its emotional and moral relations to
_us_. One man at the sight of it may be affected with admiration of its
beauty, with tenderness towards it, or sympathy; another may be
stimulated to wonder whether he can kill it, or whether it is good to
eat! Modern Science is indifferent to what this last set of relations
may be; it does not concern itself much with the first; but it takes the
middle term, the purely intellectual, and seeks to abstract that from
the others, to study the bird, or whatever the object may be, in the one
aspect only. But can that really be done? The answer is, of course, No.
To show my general meaning, and why I consider the claim an impossible
one, let us imagine a little cell--one of the myriads which constitute
the human body--professing in the same sort of way to stand outside the
body and explain the laws of the other cells and the body at large. It
is obvious that the little cell, swept along in the currents of the body
and swayed by its emotions, in close proximity and contact with some
portions of the organism, and far remote from others, cannot possibly
pretend to any such impartial judgment. It is obvious not only that it
would not have all the clues of the problem at its command, but that its
own needs and experiences would prejudice it frightfully in the
interpretation of such clues as it had. Yet man is such a little cell in
the body of Nature, or, if you like, in the body of the Society of which
he forms a part.
There is, however, one way, it seems to me, in which a cell in the
human body _might_ come to an adequate understanding of the body; and
that would be rather through experience than through direct reasoning.
It is conceivable that there might be some cell in the body which,
through the nerves, etc., was in actual touch and sympathetic
relationship with every other cell. Then it certainly would have the
materials of the required solution. Every change in other parts of the
body would register itself in this particular cell; and its little brain
(if it had one), without exactly making any great effort, would reflect
sympathetically the structure of the whole body--would become, in fact,
a mirror of it. This will perhaps give you the key to my notion of what
a true Science might be.
But before proceeding to that, I want to go a little more in detail into
the fallacy of the absolute intellectual view of Science. I say, first,
that a complete summary of any object or process in Nature is
impossible; secondly, that such summary as we do make is, and must
inevitably and necessarily be, coloured by the underlying _feeling_ with
which we approach that phase of Nature.
To take the first point. You say, Why is a complete summary not
possible? A watch or other machine may be completely described and
defined; why should not (with a little more knowledge) a fir-tree, or
the human eye, or the solar system, be completely described and defined?
And this brings us to what may be called the Machine-view of Science.
It is curious (and yet I think it will presently be seen that it is
quite what might have been expected) that during this century or so, in
which Machinery has played such an important part in our daily and
social life, mechanical ideas have come to colour all our conceptions of
Science and the Universe. Modern Science holds it as a kind of ideal
(even though finding it at times difficult to realise) to reduce
everything to mechanical action, and to show each process of Nature
intelligible in the same sense as a Machine is intelligible. Yet this
conception, this ideal, involves a complete fallacy. For the moment you
come to think of it, you see that _no_ part of Nature really even
resembles a machine.
What is a machine in the ordinary sense? It is an aggregation of parts
put together to fulfil certain definite actions and no others. A
sewing-machine fulfils the purpose of sewing, a watch fulfils that of
keeping time, and they fulfil those purposes only. All their parts
subserve those actions, and in that sense may be completely
described--as far as just their mechanical action is concerned--the same
by a thousand mechanicians. But I make bold to say that _no_ object in
Nature fulfils just one action, or series of actions, and no others. On
the contrary, every object fulfils an endless series of actions.
Let us take the Human Eye. And I choose this as an instance most adverse
to my position, for there is no doubt that the Human Eye is one of the
most highly specialised objects in creation. Helmholtz, as you know, is
said to have remarked concerning it that if an Optician had sent him an
instrument so defective he should have returned it with his compliments.
Helmholtz was a great man, and I will not do him the injustice to
suppose that he did not know what he was saying. He knew that, regarded
as a machine for focussing rays of light, the eye was decidedly
defective; but then he knew well enough, doubtless, _why_ it was
defective--namely, because it is by no means merely such a machine, but
a great deal more.
The Eye, in fact, not only fulfils the action of focussing rays of
light--like an Opera Glass or a Telescope--but it might be compared to
another instrument, a Photographic Camera, in respect of the fact that
it forms a picture of the outer world which it throws on a sensitive
plate at the back--the Retina. But then, again, it is unlike any of
these "machines," in the fact that it was never made by any Optician,
human or divine, for any one definite purpose. On the contrary, as we
know, it has grown, it has evolved; it has come down to us over the
centuries, and over thousands and thousands of centuries, from dim
beginnings in the lowliest organisms who first conceived the faculty of
Sight, continually modified, continually shapen by small increments in
various directions, in accordance with the myriad needs of a myriad
creatures, living, some of them in water, some of them in air, requiring
some of them to see at close quarters, some at great distances, some by
one kind of light, some by another, and so forth. So that to-day it not
only contains a great range of inherited, yet latent, faculties, but it
is actually, in its complex structure, an epitome and partial record of
its own extraordinary history.
As an instance of this last point, let me remind you that Sight was
originally a differentiation of Touch. The light, the shadows, falling
on the sensitive general surface of a primitive organism provoke a
tactile irritation. In the course of evolution this sense specialises
itself at some point of the surface into what we call Sight. Now,
to-day, when the little picture formed by the fore-part of the Human Eye
falls upon the Retina at the back, it falls upon a screen formed by the
myriad congregated finger-tips, so to speak, of the optic nerve--the
rods and cones, so-called--which cover like a mosaic the whole ground of
the Retina, and _feel_ with their sensitive points the images of the
objects in the outer world. And so Sight is still Touch--it is the power
of feeling or touching at a distance--as one sometimes in fact becomes
aware in looking at things.
But then again on and beyond all these things--beyond the focussing and
photographing of rays, beyond the latent adaptations to the needs of
innumerable creatures, and the epitomising of ages of evolution--the
Human Eye has faculties even more far-reaching perhaps and wonderful. It
is the marvellous organ of human Expression. By the dilatations and
contractions of the iris, by the altering convexities of the lens and
the eyeball, and in a hundred other ways, it manages somehow to convey
intelligence of Command, Control, Power, of Pity, Love, Sympathy, and
all those myriad emotions which flit through the human mind--an endless
series--a perfect encyclopædia. It is difficult even to imagine the eye
without this power of language. And what other functions it may have it
is not necessary to inquire. Highly specialised though it is, it is
already obvious enough that to call it a Machine for focussing rays of
light is monstrously and ludicrously inadequate--even as it would be to
call the Heart (the very centre of emotion and life, and the symbol of
human love and courage) a common Pump.
Nature is an infinitude, and can at no point be circumscribed by the
human intellect. Nor obviously is there any sense in taking one little
portion of Nature and isolating it from the rest, and then describing it
exhaustively _as if_ it really were so isolated. A thousand mechanicians
will agree, as I have said, in their description of a machine, because
in fact they will agree to view the machine just in the one aspect of
its particular action; but ask a thousand people to describe one and the
same face--or, better still, get a thousand portrait-painters, skilled
in their art, to paint portraits of the same face--and you know
perfectly well that all the likenesses will be different. And why will
they be different? Simply because every face, however rude, has infinite
sides, infinite aspects, and each painter selects what he paints from
his own point of view. And the same is true of every object and process
in Nature.
Then if these things are true (you ask again) how is it that scientific
men _do_ arrive at definite conclusions, and do agree with each other so
far as they do?
It is, and obviously must be, by the method of isolation; by the method
of selecting certain aspects of the problems presented to them, and
ignoring others. For since _all_ the relations of any phenomenon of
Nature cannot possibly be compassed, the only way _must_ be to ignore
some and concentrate attention on others; and when there is a kind of
tacit agreement as to which aspects shall be passed over and which
considered, there is naturally an agreement in the results. Thus by this
method, waiving all other aspects of the problem, the Eye may be
described and defined as an optical instrument, the Heart as a common
Pump, and the Solar System as a neat illustration of certain mechanical
laws discovered by Galileo and Newton.
On the subject of the Solar System and Astronomy I will dwell for a few
moments, as here--in this great example of the perfection of Modern
Science--we have again a case apparently most adverse to my contention.
The generalisations by which Newton established the nature of the
planetary orbits has been a wonder to succeeding generations; the
positions of the planets can be foretold, eclipses can be calculated
with amazing accuracy. Yet every tyro in Mathematics knows that the
equations which give these results can only be solved by what is called
"neglecting small quantities"--that is, the problems cannot be solved in
their entirety, but by leaving out certain terms and elements, which do
not appear important, a solution can be approached. And naturally it has
been an important point to show that these small quantities _may_ be
safely neglected. In the case, for instance, of the orbits of the
planets round the sun, and of the moon round the earth, it was for a
long time taken as proved that the small variations in the shape and
position of each elliptic orbit would never be accompanied by any
permanent increase or diminution in its _size_--that is, that the _mean
distances_ of the planets from the sun, and of the moon from the earth,
would always remain within certain limits. Of late years however
Professor George Darwin, taking up one of these poor little neglected
quantities in the theory of the moon, found that it indicated after all
very vast and very permanent, though of course very slow, changes in her
mean distance from the earth; so that now it appears probable that the
Moon's true orbit, instead of being a limited ellipse, is a continually
though gradually enlarging Spiral, which may some day carry the Moon to
a great distance from the earth. If an eclipse were calculated for
twenty years in advance on the Elliptic theory or the Spiral theory, it
would probably--so slow would be the divergence--make no perceptible
difference; but in a hundred centuries the two theories would lead to
results utterly different.
Thus the certitude of Astronomy as a Science arises largely from the
fact that our _times_ are so brief compared with Celestial periods. The
proper periods of Celestial changes are to be reckoned by thousands,
perhaps millions, of years; but we, ignoring _that_ aspect of the
problem, fix our observations on one little point of time, and are quite
satisfied with the result!
As another illustration of my meaning, consider the Fixed Stars,
so-called. These stars in their groups and clusters, which we know so
well by sight, have remained apparently in the very same, or nearly the
same, relative positions during all the 2,000 or 3,000 years that we
have any record of the shapes of the Constellations. Yet now by minute
telescopic and spectroscopic examination we know that they are moving,
and have been moving all the time, in various differing directions with
great velocities, amounting to miles per second. Nevertheless, so great
are the spaces concerned, so great the times, that all this long period
has not sufficed to bring them into any greatly changed attitude with
regard to each other! What would you think of an intelligent foreigner
who, coming to England to study the game of cricket, remained on the
cricket field for a quarter of a minute--during which time the players
would have hardly changed their positions--and having noted a few
points, went away and wrote a volume on the laws of the game? And what
are we to think of poor little Man who, having noted the stars for a
few centuries, is so sure that he understands their movements, and that
he is versed in all the "ordinances of heaven."
Thus it would appear that every Nature-problem is so enormously complex
that it can only be got at by what we have called the Method of
Ignorance. Let us take a practical Science problem like that of
Vaccination. The question here, put in its simplest terms, seems to be,
Whether Vaccination, with calf or human lymph, prevents or alleviates
Smallpox; and if it does, whether it does so without engendering other
evils at least as great. At first sight this may appear to you a very
simple question, and easy to solve; but the moment you come to think
about it, you see its extreme complexity. In the first place, it is
obvious that in a question like this, individual cases afford no test.
It is obvious that the fact that A. is vaccinated and has not taken
small-pox proves nothing, for there is nothing to show that he would
have taken it if he had not been vaccinated. And when you have got
people vaccinated by the hundred and the thousand, you still are not
certain; for these people may belong to a certain class, or a certain
locality, or may have certain habits and conditions of life, which may
account for their comparative immunity, and these causes must be
eliminated before any definite conclusion can be reached. Thus it is not
till the great mass of the population is vaccinated that we can expect
reliable statistics. But the introduction of a practice of this kind on
so great a scale necessarily takes a long period of years, and meanwhile
changes are taking place in the habits of the people, Sanitation is
being improved, customs of Diet are altering, possibly (as so often
happens in the history of an epidemic) the disease, having run its
course, is beginning spontaneously to decline. And thus another series
of possible causes has to be discussed.
Then, supposing the question, notwithstanding all these difficulties, to
be so far settled in favour of the present system--there still arises
that whole other series of difficulties with regard to the possibility
of the spread of _other_ diseases by the practice, and with regard to
the _extent_ of such spread, before we can arrive at any finale. This
series of questions is almost as complex as the other; and it includes
that great element of uncertainty--the question what interval of time
may elapse between inoculation with a disease and its actual appearance.
For if in several cases children break out with erysipelas immediately
after vaccination, of course there is a certain presumption that
vaccination has been the cause; but if the erysipelas only appears some
years after, its connection with the operation may, though real, be
impossible to trace.
The matter standing thus, it seems to us almost a mystery how it was
that the medical authorities of the early days of Jennerism were so
cocksure of their conclusions--until we remember that in arriving at
those conclusions they practically _ignored_ all these other points
that I have mentioned, like changes of Sanitation, spontaneous decline
of Small-pox, the spread of other diseases, etc., and simply limited
themselves to one small aspect of the problem. But now, after this
interval of time, when the neglected facts and aspects have meanwhile
_forced_ themselves on our attention, how remarkable is the change of
attitude as evidenced by the finding of the late Royal Commission!
(1896).
From all this do not understand me to deride Science--for I have no
intention of doing that; on the contrary, I think the debt we owe to
modern investigation quite incalculable; but I only wish to warn you how
complex all these problems are, how impossible that notion of settling
even one of them by a cut-and-dried intellectual formula.
But you will ask (for this is the second point I mentioned some little
time back) _how_ people's emotions and feelings come in to colour their
scientific conclusions? And the answer is--very simply, namely by
directing their choice as to what aspects of the problem they will
ignore and what aspects they will envisage; by determining their point
of view, in fact. To return to that illustration of several
portrait-painters painting the same face; just as each painter is led by
his feeling, his sympathies, his general temperament, to select certain
points in the face and to pass over others, so each group of scientific
men in each generation is led by its sympathies, its idiosyncrasies, to
envisage certain aspects of the problems of the day and to ignore
others.
The whole history of Science illustrates this. We are all familiar with
the way in which the predilections of religious feeling in the time of
Copernicus and Galileo retarded the progress of astronomical Science. As
long as people believed that a divine drama of redemption had been
enacted on this earth alone, they naturally concluded that this earth
was the centre of the universe, and refused to look at facts which
contradicted their conclusion. When Galileo turned his newly-made
telescope on Jupiter and saw it circled by its satellites, he saw in
this an image of the Copernican system and of the planets circling round
the central Sun; but when he asked others to share his observation and
his inference, they would not. "O, my dear Kepler," he writes in a
letter to his fellow astronomer, "how I wish we could have one hearty
laugh together. Here at Padua is the principal Professor of Philosophy,
whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and
planets through my glass; but he pertinaciously refuses to do so. What
shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly!"
And though we laugh at the folly of those before us, we do the same
things ourselves to-day. Take the science of Political Economy. A
revolution has taken place in that, almost comparable to the change from
the geocentric to the heliocentric view in Astronomy. During the
distinctively commercial period of the last 100 years, the leading
students of social science, being themselves filled with the spirit of
the time, have been fain to look upon the acquisition of private wealth
as the one absorbing motive of human nature; and so it has come about
that the economists, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, have founded
their science on self-seeking and competition, as the base of their
analysis. To-day another series of economists coming to the front--their
minds preoccupied with the great facts of Community of life and
Co-operation--have discovered that Society is in the main an
illustration of these latter principles, and have evolved a quite new
phase of the science. It is not that Society has changed so much during
this period, as that the altered point of view of the students of
Society has caused them simply to fix their attention on a different
aspect of the problem and a different range of facts.
I have alluded already to the way in which the prevalent use of
Machinery in practical life has affected our mental outlook on the
world. It is curious that during this mechanical age of the last 100
years or so, we have not only come to regard Society in a mechanical
light, as a concourse of separate individuals bound together by a mere
cash-nexus, but have extended the same idea to the universe at large,
which we look upon as a concourse of separate atoms, associated together
by gravitation, or possibly by mere mutual impact. Yet it is certain
that both these views are false, since the individuals who compose
Society are _not_ separate from each other; and the theory that the
universe, in its ultimate analysis, is composed of a vast number of
discrete atoms is simply unthinkable.
When we come to a practical and modern question like Medicine, the
influence of the spirit in which it is approached on the course of the
science is very easy to see. For if the science of Medicine is
approached (as it perhaps mostly is to-day) in a spirit of combined Fear
and Self-indulgence--fear for one's own personal safety, combined with a
kind of anxiety to continue living in the indulgence of habits known to
be unhealthy--if it is approached in this uncomfortable and
contradictory state of mind, it is pretty obvious that its course will
be similarly uncomfortable: that it will consist for the most part in a
search for drugs which shall, without effort on our part, palliate the
effects of our misconduct; in the discovery, as in a kind of nightmare,
that the air round us is full of billions of microbes; in a terrified
study of these messengers of disease, and in a frantic effort to ward
them off by inoculations, vaccinations, vivisections, and so forth,
without end.
If, on the other hand, the science is approached from quite a different
side--from that of the love of Health, and the desire to make life
lovely, beautiful and clean; if the student is filled not only with
this, but with a great belief in the essential _power_ of Man, and his
command in creation, to control not only all these little microbes
whose name is Legion, but through his mind all the processes of his
body; then it is obvious enough that a whole series of different facts
will arise before his eyes and become the subject of his study--facts of
sanitation, of the laws of cleanly life, diet, clothing and so forth,
methods of control, and the details and practice of the influence of the
mental upon the physical part of man--facts quite equally real with the
others, equally important, equally numerous perhaps and complex, but
forming a totally different range of science.
In conclusion, you begin to see doubtless that I do not believe in a
science of mere Formulas, which can be poured from one brain to another
like water in a pot. I believe in something more organic to
Humanity--which shall combine Sense, Intellect and Soul; which shall
include the keenest training of the Senses, the exactest use of the
Brain, and the subordination of both of these to the finest and most
generous attitude of Man towards Nature.
To come to quite practical aspects, I think that Physical Science, and
for that matter Natural History too, ought to be founded on the closest
observation and actual intimacy with Nature. It is notorious that in
many respects the perceptions, the Nature-intuitions, of savage races
far outdo those of civilised man. We have let that side go slack, and
too often the man of science when he comes out of his study is a mere
baby in the external world. I look back with a kind of shame when I
think that I studied the mathematical side of Astronomy for three or
four years at Cambridge and absolutely at the time hardly knew one star
from another in the sky. But such are the methods of teaching that have
been in use. They ought however to be reversed, and practical
acquaintance with the facts should come a long way first, and then be
succeeded by inductive and deductive reasoning when the difficulties of
the subject have forced themselves on the student's mind.
Then in Natural History and Botany I think that we have hitherto not
only neglected the perceptive side, but also what may be called the
intuitive and emotional aspects. If any one will attend to the subject,
I believe they will perceive that there are dormant in the mind the
finest intuitions and instincts of relationship to the various animals
and plants--intuitions which have played a far more important part in
the life of barbaric races than they do to-day.[41] Primitive peoples
have a remarkable instinct of the medicinal and dietetic uses of herbs
and plants--an instinct which we also find well developed among
animals--and I believe that this kind of knowledge would grow largely
if, so to speak, it were given a chance. The formal classification of
animals and plants--which now forms the main part of these
sciences--would then come in simply as an aid and an auxiliary to the
more direct and human study.
Again, let us take the science of Physiology. At present this is mainly
carried on by means of Dissection or Vivisection. But both these methods
are unsatisfactory. Dissection, because it amounts to studying the
organisation of a living creature by the examination of its dead
carcase; and Vivisection, because it is not only open to a similar
objection, but because it necessarily violates the highest relation of
man to the animal he is studying. There is, I believe, another method--a
method which has been known in the East for centuries, though little
regarded in the West--which may perhaps be called the method of Health.
It consists in rendering the body, by proper habits of life, pure and
healthy, till it becomes, as it were, transparent to the inner eye, and
then projecting the consciousness _inward_ so as to become almost as
sensible of the structure and function of the various internal organs,
as it usually is of the outer surface of the body. Of course this is a
process which cannot be effectuated at once, and which may need help and
corroboration by external methods of study, but I believe it is one
which will lead to considerable results. There is no doubt that many of
the Yogis of India attain to great skill in it.
Similarly, from what we have already said about Political Economy, it
is obvious that satisfactory results in that science must depend
immensely on the high degree of social instinct and feeling with which
the student approaches it, and on the thoroughness of his acquaintance
with the _actual life_ of a people; and that the development of these
factors is fully as important a part of the science as that which
consists in the logical ordering and arrangement of the material
obtained.
I need not, I think, go any further into detail of new methods in each
Science. You remember what I said at the beginning about the Cell
studying the Body of which it formed a part. We may imagine, if we like,
three stages in this process. In the first stage the Cell regards the
other cells and the Body simply from the point of view of how they
affect _it_, and its comfort and safety. This might be taken to
correspond to the Old-time Science. In the second stage the Cell, with
its tiny experience of the other cells and the small part of the body in
which it is placed, becomes highly intellectual, and professes to lay
down the laws of the structure of the body generally. This corresponds
to the attitude of Modern Science. In the third stage the Cell, growing
and evolving, and coming daily into closer sympathetic relationship with
all parts of the body, begins to find its true relation to the other
cells, not to use _them_, but to fulfil its part in the whole. Gradually
drawing all the threads together and coming more and more, so to say,
into a central position, it at last in its little brain spontaneously
and inevitably reflects the whole, and becomes the mirror of it. This
would answer to what we have called a really rational and humane
Science.
Man has to find and to _feel_ his true relation to other creatures and
to the whole of which he is a part, and has to use his brain to further
this. Science _is_, as we all know, the search for Unity. That is its
ideal. It unites innumerable phenomena under one law; and then it unites
many laws under one higher; always seeking for the ultimate complete
integration. But (is it not obvious?) Man cannot find that unity _of_
the Whole until he feels his unity _with_ the Whole. To found a Science
of one-ness on the murderous Warfare and insane Competition of men with
each other, and on the Slaughter and Vivisection of animals--the search
for unity on the practice of disunity--is an absurdity, which can only
in the long run reveal itself as such.
I do not know whether it seems obvious to you, but it does to me, that
Man will never find in theory the unity of outer Nature till he reaches
in practice the unity of his own. When he has learnt to harmonise in
himself all his powers, bodily and mental, his desires, faculties,
needs, and bring them into perfect co-operation--when he has found the
true hierarchy of himself--then somehow I think that Nature round him
will reflect this order, and range itself in clear and intelligible
harmony about him.
But I can say no more. I have dragged you by the neck, as it were,
through a recondite and difficult subject; and even so I do not feel
that I have by any means done justice to it. But it is possible,
perhaps, that I have cast the germ of an idea among you, which, if you
think over it at leisure, may develop into something of value.