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SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD
LOWELL LECTURES, 1925
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SCIENCE
AND THE MODERN WORLD
LOWELL LECTURES, 1925
BY
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester),
Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews)
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
=New York=
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1925
_All rights reserved_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1925.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
---
Set up and printed.
Published October, 1925.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MY COLLEAGUES,
PAST AND PRESENT,
WHOSE FRIENDSHIP IS INSPIRATION.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE 1
II. MATHEMATICS AS AN ELEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF 28
THOUGHT
III. THE CENTURY OF GENIUS 55
IV. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 80
V. THE ROMANTIC REACTION 105
VI. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 134
VII. RELATIVITY 160
VIII. THE QUANTUM THEORY 181
IX. SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 193
X. ABSTRACTION 219
XI. GOD 242
XII. RELIGION AND SCIENCE 252
XIII. REQUISITES FOR SOCIAL PROGRESS 270
PREFACE
The present book embodies a study of some aspects of Western culture
during the past three centuries, in so far as it has been influenced by
the development of science. This study has been guided by the conviction
that the mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which
is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in
question. There may be more than one such scheme, corresponding to
cultural divisions. The various human interests which suggest
cosmologies, and also are influenced by them, are science, aesthetics,
ethics, religion. In every age each of these topics suggests a view of
the world. In so far as the same set of people are swayed by all, or
more than one, of these interests, their effective outlook will be the
joint production from these sources. But each age has it dominant
preoccupation; and, during the three centuries in question, the
cosmology derived from science has been asserting itself at the expense
of older points of view with their origins elsewhere. Men can be
provincial in time, as well as in place. We may ask ourselves whether
the scientific mentality of the modern world in the immediate past is
not a successful example of such provincial limitation.
Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is
its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions
as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the
ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in
shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit,
and—so far as may be—efficient, a process which otherwise is
unconsciously performed without rational tests.
Bearing this in mind, I have avoided the introduction of a variety of
abstruse detail respecting scientific advance. What is wanted, and what
I have striven after, is a sympathetic study of main ideas as seen from
the inside. If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is
the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds
cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them
before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of
the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent:—and the
spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie
dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds
that they have embodied themselves in institutions.
This book in the main consists of a set of eight Lowell Lectures
delivered in the February of 1925. These lectures with some slight
expansion, and the subdivision of one lecture into Chapters VII and
VIII, are here printed as delivered. But some additional matter has
been added, so as to complete the thought of the book on a scale which
could not be included within that lecture course. Of this new matter,
the second chapter—‘Mathematics as an Element in the History of
Thought’—was delivered as a lecture before the Mathematical Society of
Brown University, Providence, R. I.; and the twelfth chapter—‘Religion
and Science’—formed an address delivered in the Phillips Brooks House
at Harvard, and is to be published in the August number of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ of this year (1925). The tenth and eleventh
chapters—‘Abstraction’ and ‘God’—are additions which now appear for
the first time. But the book represents one train of thought, and the
antecedent utilisation of some of its contents is a subsidiary point.
There has been no occasion in the text to make detailed reference to
Lloyd Morgan’s _Emergent Evolution_ or to Alexander’s _Space, Time and
Deity_. It will be obvious to readers that I have found them very
suggestive. I am especially indebted to Alexander’s great work. The wide
scope of the present book makes it impossible to acknowledge in detail
the various sources of information or of ideas. The book is the product
of thought and reading in past years, which were not undertaken with any
anticipation of utilisation for the present purpose. Accordingly it
would now be impossible for me to give reference to my sources for
details, even if it were desirable so to do. But there is no need: the
facts which are relied upon are simple and well known. On the
philosophical side, any consideration of epistemology has been entirely
excluded. It would have been impossible to discuss that topic without
upsetting the whole balance of the work. The key to the book is the
sense of the overwhelming importance of a prevalent philosophy.
My most grateful thanks are due to my colleague Mr. Raphael Demos for
reading the proofs and for the suggestion of many improvements in
expression.
Harvard University,
June 29, 1925.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCIENCE AND THE MODERN
WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE
The progress of civilisation is not wholly a uniform drift towards
better things. It may perhaps wear this aspect if we map it on a scale
which is large enough. But such broad views obscure the details on which
rest our whole understanding of the process. New epochs emerge with
comparative suddenness, if we have regard to the scores of thousands of
years throughout which the complete history extends. Secluded races
suddenly take their places in the main stream of events: technological
discoveries transform the mechanism of human life: a primitive art
quickly flowers into full satisfaction of some aesthetic craving: great
religions in their crusading youth spread through the nations the peace
of Heaven and the sword of the Lord.
The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western
Christianity and the rise of modern science. It was an age of ferment.
Nothing was settled, though much was opened—new worlds and new ideas. In
science, Copernicus and Vesalius may be chosen as representative
figures: they typify the new cosmology and the scientific emphasis on
direct observation. Giordano Bruno was the martyr; but the cause for
which he suffered was not that of science, but that of free imaginative
speculation. His death in the year 1600 ushered in the first century of
modern science in the strict sense of the term. In his execution there
was an unconscious symbolism: for the subsequent tone of scientific
thought has contained distrust of his type of general speculativeness.
The Reformation, for all its importance, may be considered as a domestic
affair of the European races. Even the Christianity of the East viewed
it with profound disengagement. Furthermore, such disruptions are no new
phenomena in the history of Christianity or of other religions. When we
project this great revolution upon the whole history of the Christian
Church, we cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human
life. For good or for evil, it was a great transformation of religion;
but it was not the coming of religion. It did not itself claim to be so.
Reformers maintained that they were only restoring what had been
forgotten.
It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science. In every way it
contrasts with the contemporary religious movement. The Reformation was
a popular uprising, and for a century and a half drenched Europe in
blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a
minority among the intellectual élite. In a generation which saw the
Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that
happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honourable
detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. The
way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute
to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which
the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger,
it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little
stir.
The thesis which these lectures will illustrate is that this quiet
growth of science has practically recoloured our mentality so that modes
of thought which in former times were exceptional, are now broadly
spread through the educated world. This new colouring of ways of thought
had been proceeding slowly for many ages in the European peoples. At
last it issued in the rapid development of science; and has thereby
strengthened itself by its most obvious application. The new mentality
is more important even than the new science and the new technology. It
has altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the imaginative
contents of our minds; so that now the old stimuli provoke a new
response. Perhaps my metaphor of a new colour is too strong. What I mean
is just that slightest change of tone which yet makes all the
difference. This is exactly illustrated by a sentence from a published
letter of that adorable genius, William James. When he was finishing his
great treatise on the _Principles of Psychology_, he wrote to his
brother Henry James, ‘I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of
irreducible and stubborn facts.’
This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in
the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts.
All the world over and at all times there have been practical men,
absorbed in ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’: all the world over and at
all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been
absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of
passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to
abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society.
Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This
balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects
cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet. The main
business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread
inheritance from generation to generation.
Another contrast which singles out science from among the European
movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is its
universality. Modern science was born in Europe, but its home is the
whole world. In the last two centuries there has been a long and
confused impact of Western modes upon the civilisation of Asia. The wise
men of the East have been puzzling, and are puzzling, as to what may be
the regulative secret of life which can be passed from West to East
without the wanton destruction of their own inheritance which they so
rightly prize. More and more it is becoming evident that what the West
can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific
outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to
race, wherever there is a rational society.
In this course of lectures I shall not discuss the details of scientific
discovery. My theme is the energising of a state of mind in the modern
world, its broad generalisations, and its impact upon other spiritual
forces. There are two ways of reading history, forwards and backwards.
In the history of thought, we require both methods. A climate of
opinion—to use the happy phrase of a seventeenth century writer—requires
for its understanding the consideration of its antecedents and its
issues. Accordingly in this lecture I shall consider some of the
antecedents of our modern approach to the investigation of nature.
In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a
widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an _Order of
Things_, and, in particular, of an _Order of Nature_. I have used the
word _instinctive_ advisedly. It does not matter what men say in words,
so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The
words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred,
words do not count. This remark is important in respect to the history
of scientific thought. For we shall find that since the time of Hume,
the fashionable scientific philosophy has been such as to deny the
rationality of science. This conclusion lies upon the surface of Hume’s
philosophy. Take, for example, the following passage from Section IV of
his _Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding_:
“In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It
could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause; and the first
invention or conception of it, _à priori_, must be entirely
arbitrary.”
If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so
that the first invention of it must be _entirely_ arbitrary, it follows
at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing
_entirely arbitrary_ connections which are not warranted by anything
intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects. Some variant of
Hume’s philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But
scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the
philosophic mountain.
In view of this strange contradiction in scientific thought, it is of
the first importance to consider the antecedents of a faith which is
impervious to the demand for a consistent rationality. We have therefore
to trace the rise of the instinctive faith that there is an Order of
Nature which can be traced in every detailed occurrence.
Of course we all share in this faith, and we therefore believe that the
reason for the faith is our apprehension of its truth. But the formation
of a general idea—such as the idea of the Order of Nature—, and the
grasp of its importance, and the observation of its exemplification in a
variety of occasions are by no means the necessary consequences of the
truth of the idea in question. Familiar things happen, and mankind does
not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the
analysis of the obvious. Accordingly I wish to consider the stages in
which this analysis became explicit, and finally became unalterably
impressed upon the educated minds of Western Europe.
Obviously, the main recurrences of life are too insistent to escape the
notice of the least rational of humans; and even before the dawn of
rationality, they have impressed themselves upon the instincts of
animals. It is unnecessary to labour the point, that in broad outline
certain general states of nature recur, and that our very natures have
adapted themselves to such repetitions.
But there is a complementary fact which is equally true and equally
obvious:—nothing ever really recurs in exact detail. No two days are
identical, no two winters. What has gone, has gone forever. Accordingly
the practical philosophy of mankind has been to expect the broad
recurrences, and to accept the details as emanating from the inscrutable
womb of things, beyond the ken of rationality. Men expected the sun to
rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
Certainly from the classical Greek civilisation onwards there have been
men, and indeed groups of men, who have placed themselves beyond this
acceptance of an ultimate irrationality. Such men have endeavoured to
explain all phenomena as the outcome of an order of things which extends
to every detail. Geniuses such as Aristotle, or Archimedes, or Roger
Bacon, must have been endowed with the full scientific mentality, which
instinctively holds that all things great and small are conceivable as
exemplifications of general principles which reign throughout the
natural order.
But until the close of the Middle Ages the general educated public did
not feel that intimate conviction, and that detailed interest, in such
an idea, so as to lead to an unceasing supply of men, with ability and
opportunity adequate to maintain a coordinated search for the discovery
of these hypothetical principles. Either people were doubtful about the
existence of such principles, or were doubtful about any success in
finding them, or took no interest in thinking about them, or were
oblivious to their practical importance when found. For whatever reason,
search was languid, if we have regard to the opportunities of a high
civilisation and the length of time concerned. Why did the pace suddenly
quicken in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? At the close of the
Middle Ages a new mentality discloses itself. Invention stimulated
thought, thought quickened physical speculation, Greek manuscripts
disclosed what the ancients had discovered. Finally although in the year
1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 B. C.,
yet in the year 1700, Newton’s _Principia_ had been written and the
world was well started on the modern epoch.
There have been great civilisations in which the peculiar balance of
mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced
the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of
Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we
admire the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands of
years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently devoting
their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and to the
population concerned, China forms the largest volume of civilisation
which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic
capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet
Chinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe
that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in
science. The same may be said of India. Furthermore, if the Persians had
enslaved the Greeks, there is no definite ground for belief that science
would have flourished in Europe. The Romans showed no particular
originality in that line. Even as it was, the Greeks, though they
founded the movement, did not sustain it with the concentrated interest
which modern Europe has shown. I am not alluding to the last few
generations of the European peoples on both sides of the ocean; I mean
the smaller Europe of the Reformation period, distracted as it was with
wars and religious disputes. Consider the world of the eastern
Mediterranean, from Sicily to western Asia, during the period of about
1400 years from the death of Archimedes [in 212 B. C.] to the irruption
of the Tartars. There were wars and revolutions and large changes of
religion: but nothing much worse than the wars of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries throughout Europe. There was a great and wealthy
civilisation, Pagan, Christian, Mahometan. In that period a great deal
was added to science. But on the whole the progress was slow and
wavering; and, except in mathematics, the men of the Renaissance
practically started from the position which Archimedes had reached.
There had been some progress in medicine and some progress in astronomy.
But the total advance was very little compared to the marvellous success
of the seventeenth century. For example, compare the progress of
scientific knowledge from the year 1560, just before the births of
Galileo and of Kepler, up to the year 1700, when Newton was in the
height of his fame, with the progress in the ancient period, already
mentioned, exactly ten times as long.
Nevertheless, Greece was the mother of Europe; and it is to Greece that
we must look in order to find the origin of our modern ideas. We all
know that on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean there was a very
flourishing school of Ionian philosophers, deeply interested in theories
concerning nature. Their ideas have been transmitted to us, enriched by
the genius of Plato and Aristotle. But, with the exception of Aristotle,
and it is a large exception, this school of thought had not attained to
the complete scientific mentality. In some ways, it was better. The
Greek genius was philosophical, lucid and logical. The men of this group
were primarily asking philosophical questions. What is the substratum of
nature? Is it fire, or earth, or water, or some combination of any two,
or of all three? Or is it a mere flux, not reducible to some static
material? Mathematics interested them mightily. They invented its
generality, analysed its premises, and made notable discoveries of
theorems by a rigid adherence to deductive reasoning. Their minds were
infected with an eager generality. They demanded clear, bold ideas, and
strict reasoning from them. All this was excellent; it was genius; it
was ideal preparatory work. But it was not science as we understand it.
The patience of minute observation was not nearly so prominent. Their
genius was not so apt for the state of imaginative muddled suspense
which precedes successful inductive generalisation. They were lucid
thinkers and bold reasoners.
Of course there were exceptions, and at the very top: for example,
Aristotle and Archimedes. Also for patient observation, there were the
astronomers. There was a mathematical lucidity about the stars, and a
fascination about the small numerable band of run-a-way planets.
Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative
background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.
The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them
to later ages, was essentially dramatic. It is not necessarily wrong for
this reason: but it was overwhelmingly dramatic. It thus conceived
nature as articulated in the way of a work of dramatic art, for the
exemplification of general ideas converging to an end. Nature was
differentiated so as to provide its proper end for each thing. There was
the centre of the universe as the end of motion for those things which
are heavy, and the celestial spheres as the end of motion for those
things whose natures lead them upwards. The celestial spheres were for
things which are impassible and ingenerable, the lower regions for
things impassible and generable. Nature was a drama in which each thing
played its part.
I do not say that this is a view to which Aristotle would have
subscribed without severe reservations, in fact without the sort of
reservations which we ourselves would make. But it was the view which
subsequent Greek thought extracted from Aristotle and passed on to the
Middle Ages. The effect of such an imaginative setting for nature was to
damp down the historical spirit. For it was the end which seemed
illuminating, so why bother about the beginning? The Reformation and the
scientific movement were two aspects of the historical revolt which was
the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal
to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient
causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of
thought. Also for this reason Galileo and his adversaries were at
hopeless cross purposes, as can be seen from his _Dialogues on the Two
Systems of the World_.
Galileo keeps harping on how things happen, whereas his adversaries had
a complete theory as to why things happen. Unfortunately the two
theories did not bring out the same results. Galileo insists upon
‘irreducible and stubborn facts,’ and Simplicius, his opponent, brings
forward reasons, completely satisfactory, at least to himself. It is a
great mistake to conceive this historical revolt as an appeal to reason.
On the contrary, it was through and through an anti-intellectualist
movement. It was the return to the contemplation of brute fact; and it
was based on a recoil from the inflexible rationality of medieval
thought. In making this statement I am merely summarising what at the
time the adherents of the old régime themselves asserted. For example,
in the fourth book of Father Paul Sarpi’s _History of the Council of
Trent_, you will find that in the year 1551 the Papal Legates who
presided over the Council ordered: ‘That the Divines ought to confirm
their opinions with the holy Scripture, Traditions of the Apostles,
sacred and approved Councils, and by the Constitutions and Authorities
of the holy Fathers; that they ought to use brevity, and avoid
superfluous and unprofitable questions, and perverse contentions....
This order did not please the Italian Divines; who said it was a novity,
and a condemning of School-Divinity, which, in all difficulties, _useth
reason_, and because it was not lawful [_i.e._, by this decree] to treat
as St. Thomas [Aquinas], St. Bonaventure, and other famous men did.’
It is impossible not to feel sympathy with these Italian divines,
maintaining the lost cause of unbridled rationalism. They were deserted
on all hands. The Protestants were in full revolt against them. The
Papacy failed to support them, and the Bishops of the Council could not
even understand them. For a few sentences below the foregoing quotation,
we read: ‘Though many complained here-of [_i.e._, of the Decree], yet it
prevailed but little, because generally the Fathers [_i.e._, the
Bishops] desired to hear men speak with intelligible terms, not
abstrusely, as in the matter of Justification, and others already
handled.’
Poor belated medievalists! When they used reason they were not even
intelligible to the ruling powers of their epoch. It will take centuries
before stubborn facts are reducible by reason, and meanwhile the
pendulum swings slowly and heavily to the extreme of the historical
method.
Forty-three years after the Italian divines had written this memorial,
Richard Hooker in his famous _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ makes
exactly the same complaint of his Puritan adversaries.[1] Hooker’s
balanced thought—from which the appellation ‘The Judicious Hooker’ is
derived—, and his diffuse style, which is the vehicle of such thought,
make his writings singularly unfit for the process of summarising by a
short, pointed quotation. But, in the section referred to, he reproaches
his opponents with _Their Disparagement of Reason_; and in support of
his own position definitely refers to ‘The greatest amongst the
school-divines,’ by which designation I presume that he refers to St.
Thomas Aquinas.
Footnote 1:
_Cf._ Book III, Section VIII.
Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published just before Sarpi’s
_Council of Trent_. Accordingly there was complete independence between
the two works. But both the Italian divines of 1551, and Hooker at the
end of that century testify to the anti-rationalist trend of thought at
that epoch, and in this respect contrast their own age with the epoch of
scholasticism.
This reaction was undoubtedly a very necessary corrective to the
unguarded rationalism of the Middle Ages. But reactions run to extremes.
Accordingly, although one outcome of this reaction was the birth of
modern science, yet we must remember that science thereby inherited the
bias of thought to which it owes its origin.
The effect of Greek dramatic literature was many-sided so far as
concerns the various ways in which it indirectly affected medieval
thought. The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists
today, are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a
tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by
science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern
thought. The absorbing interest in the particular heroic incidents, as
an example and a verification of the workings of fate, reappears in our
epoch as concentration of interest on the crucial experiments. It was my
good fortune to be present at the meeting of the Royal Society in London
when the Astronomer Royal for England announced that the photographic
plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his colleagues in Greenwich
Observatory, had verified the prediction of Einstein that rays of light
are bent as they pass in the neighbourhood of the sun. The whole
atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we
were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the
development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the
very staging:—the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the
picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific
generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its
first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great
adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.
Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not
unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of
things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms
of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is
only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the
drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific
thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.
The conception of the moral order in the Greek plays was certainly not a
discovery of the dramatists. It must have passed into the literary
tradition from the general serious opinion of the times. But in finding
this magnificent expression, it thereby deepened the stream of thought
from which it arose. The spectacle of a moral order was impressed upon
the imagination of classical civilisation.
The time came when that great society decayed, and Europe passed into
the Middle Ages. The direct influence of Greek literature vanished. But
the concept of the moral order and of the order of nature had enshrined
itself in the Stoic philosophy. For example, Lecky in his _History of
European Morals_ tells us ‘Seneca maintains that the Divinity has
determined all things by an inexorable law of destiny, which He has
decreed, but which He Himself obeys.’ But the most effective way in
which the Stoics influenced the mentality of the Middle Ages was by the
diffused sense of order which arose from Roman law. Again to quote
Lecky, ‘The Roman legislation was in a two-fold manner the child of
philosophy. It was in the first place formed upon the philosophical
model, for, instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the
existing requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of
right to which it endeavoured to conform; and, in the next place, these
principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism.’ In spite of the actual
anarchy throughout large regions in Europe after the collapse of the
Empire, the sense of legal order always haunted the racial memories of
the Imperial populations. Also the Western Church was always there as a
living embodiment of the traditions of Imperial rule.
It is important to notice that this legal impress upon medieval
civilisation was not in the form of a few wise precepts which should
permeate conduct. It was the conception of a definite articulated system
which defines the legality of the detailed structure of social organism,
and of the detailed way in which it should function. There was nothing
vague. It was not a question of admirable maxims, but of definite
procedure to put things right and to keep them there. The Middle Ages
formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense
of order. There may have been some deficiency in respect to practice.
But the idea never for a moment lost its grip. It was preëminently an
epoch of orderly thought, rationalist through and through. The very
anarchy quickened the sense for coherent system; just as the modern
anarchy of Europe has stimulated the intellectual vision of a League of
Nations.
But for science something more is wanted than a general sense of the
order in things. It needs but a sentence to point out how the habit of
definite exact thought was implanted in the European mind by the long
dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic divinity. The habit
remained after the philosophy had been repudiated, the priceless habit
of looking for an exact point and of sticking to it when found. Galileo
owes more to Aristotle than appears on the surface of his _Dialogues_:
he owes to him his clear head and his analytic mind.
I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest
contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement.
I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be
correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner,
exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible
labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive
conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive
power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be
unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the
European mind?
When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of
other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source
for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the
rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and
with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised
and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication
of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the
explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the
European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this
I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.
In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too
arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on
instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the
fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal,
inscrutable origin of things. There was not the same confidence as in
the intelligible rationality of a personal being. I am not arguing that
the European trust in the scrutability of nature was logically justified
even by its own theology. My only point is to understand how it arose.
My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science,
generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory,
is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
But science is not merely the outcome of instinctive faith. It also
requires an active interest in the simple occurrences of life for their
own sake.
This qualification ‘for their own sake’ is important. The first phase of
the Middle Ages was an age of symbolism. It was an age of vast ideas,
and of primitive technique. There was little to be done with nature,
except to coin a hard living from it. But there were realms of thought
to be explored, realms of philosophy and realms of theology. Primitive
art could symbolise those ideas which filled all thoughtful minds. The
first phase of medieval art has a haunting charm beyond compare: its own
intrinsic quality is enhanced by the fact that its message, which
stretched beyond art’s own self-justification of aesthetic achievement,
was the symbolism of things lying behind nature itself. In this symbolic
phase, medieval art energised in nature as its medium, but pointed to
another world.
In order to understand the contrast between these early Middle Ages and
the atmosphere required by the scientific mentality, we should compare
the sixth century in Italy with the sixteenth century. In both centuries
the Italian genius was laying the foundations of a new epoch. The
history of the three centuries preceding the earlier period, despite the
promise for the future introduced by the rise of Christianity, is
overwhelmingly infected by the sense of the decline of civilisation. In
each generation something has been lost. As we read the records, we are
haunted by the shadow of the coming barbarism. There are great men, with
fine achievements in action or in thought. But their total effect is
merely for some short time to arrest the general decline. In the sixth
century we are, so far as Italy is concerned, at the lowest point of the
curve. But in that century every action is laying the foundation for the
tremendous rise of the new European civilisation. In the background the
Byzantine Empire, under Justinian, in three ways determined the
character of the early Middle Ages in Western Europe. In the first
place, its armies, under Belisarius and Narses, cleared Italy from the
Gothic domination. In this way, the stage was freed for the exercise of
the old Italian genius for creating organisations which shall be
protective of ideals of cultural activity. It is impossible not to
sympathise with the Goths: yet there can be no doubt but that a thousand
years of the Papacy were infinitely more valuable for Europe than any
effects derivable from a well-established Gothic kingdom of Italy.
In the second place, the codification of the Roman law established the
ideal of legality which dominated the sociological thought of Europe in
the succeeding centuries. Law is both an engine for government, and a
condition restraining government. The canon law of the Church, and the
civil law of the State, owe to Justinian’s lawyers their influence on
the development of Europe. They established in the Western mind the
ideal that an authority should be at once lawful, and law-enforcing, and
should in itself exhibit a rationally adjusted system of organisation.
The sixth century in Italy gave the initial exhibition of the way in
which the impress of these ideas was fostered by contact with the
Byzantine Empire.
Thirdly, in the non-political spheres of art and learning Constantinople
exhibited a standard of realised achievement which, partly by the
impulse to direct imitation, and partly by the indirect inspiration
arising from the mere knowledge that such things existed, acted as a
perpetual spur to Western culture. The wisdom of the Byzantines, as it
stood in the imagination of the first phase of medieval mentality, and
the wisdom of the Egyptians as it stood in the imagination of the early
Greeks, played analogous rôles. Probably the actual knowledge of these
respective wisdoms was, in either case, about as much as was good for
the recipients. They knew enough to know the sort of standards which are
attainable, and not enough to be fettered by static and traditional ways
of thought. Accordingly, in both cases men went ahead on their own and
did better. No account of the rise of the European scientific mentality
can omit some notice of this influence of the Byzantine civilisation in
the background. In the sixth century there is a crisis in the history of
the relations between the Byzantines and the West; and this crisis is to
be contrasted with the influence of Greek literature on European thought
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The two outstanding men, who
in the Italy of the sixth century laid the foundations of the future,
were St. Benedict and Gregory the Great. By reference to them, we can at
once see how absolutely in ruins was the approach to the scientific
mentality which had been attained by the Greeks. We are at the zero
point of scientific temperature. But the life-work of Gregory and of
Benedict contributed elements to the reconstruction of Europe which
secured that this reconstruction, when it arrived, should include a more
effective scientific mentality than that of the ancient world. The
Greeks were over-theoretical. For them science was an offshoot of
philosophy. Gregory and Benedict were practical men, with an eye for the
importance of ordinary things; and they combined this practical
temperament with their religious and cultural activities. In particular,
we owe it to St. Benedict that the monasteries were the homes of
practical agriculturalists, as well as of saints and of artists and of
men of learning. The alliance of science with technology, by which
learning is kept in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, owes
much to the practical bent of the early Benedictines. Modern science
derives from Rome as well as from Greece, and this Roman strain explains
its gain in an energy of thought kept closely in contact with the world
of facts.
But the influence of this contact between the monasteries and the facts
of nature showed itself first in art. The rise of Naturalism in the
later Middle Ages was the entry into the European mind of the final
ingredient necessary for the rise of science. It was the rise of
interest in natural objects, and in natural occurrences, for their own
sakes. The natural foliage of a district was sculptured in
out-of-the-way spots of the later buildings, merely as exhibiting
delight in those familiar objects. The whole atmosphere of every art
exhibited a direct joy in the apprehension of the things which lie
around us. The craftsmen who executed the late medieval decorative
sculpture, Giotto, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and, at the
present day, the New England poet Robert Frost, are all akin to each
other in this respect. The simple immediate facts are the topics of
interest, and these reappear in the thought of science as the
‘irreducible stubborn facts.’
The mind of Europe was now prepared for its new venture of thought. It
is unnecessary to tell in detail the various incidents which marked the
rise of science: the growth of wealth and leisure; the expansion of
universities; the invention of printing; the taking of Constantinople;
Copernicus; Vasco da Gama; Columbus; the telescope. The soil, the
climate, the seeds, were there, and the forest grew. Science has never
shaken off the impress of its origin in the historical revolt of the
later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic
movement, based upon a naïve faith. What reasoning it has wanted, has
been borrowed from mathematics which is a surviving relic of Greek
rationalism, following the deductive method. Science repudiates
philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its faith or
to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its
refutation by Hume.
Of course the historical revolt was fully justified. It was wanted. It
was more than wanted: it was an absolute necessity for healthy progress.
The world required centuries of contemplation of irreducible and
stubborn facts. It is difficult for men to do more than one thing at a
time, and that was the sort of thing they had to do after the
rationalistic orgy of the Middle Ages. It was a very sensible reaction;
but it was not a protest on behalf of reason.
There is, however, a Nemesis which waits upon those who deliberately
avoid avenues of knowledge. Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages,
‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that
you may be mistaken.’
The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable
foundations of physics have broken up: also for the first time
physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as
distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought
are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether,
electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern,
function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking
about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by
mechanics?
The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas
derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle’s
successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the
knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as
physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has
lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology
has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths.
If science is not to degenerate into a medley of _ad hoc_ hypotheses, it
must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of
its own foundations.
In the succeeding lectures of this course, I shall trace the successes
and the failures of the particular conceptions of cosmology with which
the European intellect has clothed itself in the last three centuries.
General climates of opinion persist for periods of about two to three
generations, that is to say, for periods of sixty to a hundred years.
There are also shorter waves of thought, which play on the surface of
the tidal movement. We shall find, therefore, transformations in the
European outlook, slowly modifying the successive centuries. There
persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific
cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute
matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of
configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless,
purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine
imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its
being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also
it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited
to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. It is not
wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types
of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they
occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection.
But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle
employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for
coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow
efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme
methodological success. For it directed attention to just those groups
of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required
investigation.
The success of the scheme has adversely affected the various currents of
European thought. The historical revolt was anti-rationalistic, because
the rationalism of the scholastics required a sharp correction by
contact with brute fact. But the revival of philosophy in the hands of
Descartes and his successors was entirely coloured in its development by
the acceptance of the scientific cosmology at its face value. The
success of their ultimate ideas confirmed scientists in their refusal to
modify them as the result of an enquiry into their rationality. Every
philosophy was bound in some way or other to swallow them whole. Also
the example of science affected other regions of thought. The historical
revolt has thus been exaggerated into the exclusion of philosophy from
its proper rôle of harmonising the various abstractions of
methodological thought. Thought is abstract; and the intolerant use of
abstractions is the major vice of the intellect. This vice is not wholly
corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience. For after all, you
need only attend to those aspects of your concrete experience which lie
within some limited scheme. There are two methods for the purification
of ideas. One of them is dispassionate observation by means of the
bodily senses. But observation is selection. Accordingly, it is
difficult to transcend a scheme of abstraction whose success is
sufficiently wide. The other method is by comparing the various schemes
of abstraction which are well founded in our various types of
experience. This comparison takes the form of satisfying the demands of
the Italian scholastic divines whom Paul Sarpi mentioned. They asked
that _reason_ should be used. Faith in reason is the trust that the
ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere
arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not
find mere arbitrary mystery. The faith in the order of nature which has
made possible the growth of science is a particular example of a deeper
faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation.
It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed
in our own immediate present experience. There is no parting from your
own shadow. To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves
we are more than ourselves: to know that our experience, dim and
fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality: to know
that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they
should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system
includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of
aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies
upon the universe as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands
before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken
progress towards finer, subtler issues.