SCIENCE AND LIFE W HEN men of the nineteenth century looked
upon the triumphs that science had achieved—new modes of travel and communication, new medicines, new fires, new lamps, discoveries and inventions of a thousand kinds—they were apt to feel very well satisfied with their own age and extravagantly hopeful for posterity. They seemed to have initiated a period in which man should gain complete dominion over nature and prosperity and ease should be universal. Such was the respect paid to science that sometimes it would be treated as though it were the final standard of truth, the arbiter in questions of religion and metaphysics, politics and art. Some scientists, flushed with their success, were willing to pontificate upon any subject that might crop up. It was not that they took all human knowledge for their pro- vince ; the complexity of science was already so great that specialization was necessary, and a physicist might know nothing at all of biology or even of chemistry. But they took it for granted that they were qualified, in the name of science, to pronounce judgment upon life. It was natural (as Professor Horace Lamb pointed out in his presidential address to the British Association) that some sort of reaction should set in. Men reasoned in this fashion : " Well, you have given us material comforts, you have made us lazier and, in a sense, better fed. But are we the happier for it ? Is there less anguish and disease of soul amongst us ? You have given us machines and what has happened ? By that fact you have thrown thousands of men out of employment, and, worse than that, you have killed the pride and delight in their work which gave character and nobility to our old craftsmen. You find a cure for an old disease, and our scientific civilization brings twenty others to fill its place. And one great advance we owe to you in especial—you have taught us to kill ten men at a blow where previously we could kill only one. " There is a graver crime to answer for. You have been so occupied in the analysis of matter that you have been unable to observe the spirit. You have explained, not only life (we could almost forgive you that) but even values and aspirations and the glories of the soul as the epiphenomena of matter. And so you have presented us with a dreary and dead world, you have taken away our incentives, you have discouraged a whole generation of men and left them wandering anxiously without any fine or illuminating purpose. Perhaps the strongest among us are not deluded by your pretensions ; the God they wor- shipped was never that naive fancy you have been able to destroy ; they see too that, though you collect and classify phenomena, their interpretation is not for you alone. But weaker men have been entrapped in your silly superstitions of purposelessness and materialism, and a new insolence and ignorance has appeared amongst us.'! So spoke the extreme objectors to science, and there was a degree of truth in all they said. Their censures could not properly be brought against science itself, but they were true when they were advanced against certain nineteenth century scientists. Professor Lamb quotes a milder, less extreme statement of the case from the speeches of President Wilson :- "Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for the past. It made us credulous of quick improvement, hopeful oL discovering panaceas, confident of success in every new thing I should fear nothing better than utter destruction from a revolution: conceived and led in the scientific spirit. Science has not changed the laws of social growth or betterment. Science has not changed. the nature of society, has not made history a whit easier to under-. stand, human nature a whit easier to reform. It has won for us great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear- and from disease, a freedom to use nature as a familiar servant ; but it has not freed us from ourselves."
To which indictment Professor Lamb pleads guilty, but he asks ;— " Why should science, as we understand it, be held responsible for the failure of hopes which it can never have authorized ? Its province, as I have tried to define it, is vast, but has its limits. It can have no pretensions to improve human nature • it may alter the environment, multiply the resources, widen the intellectual prospect, but it cannot fairly bo asked to bear the responsibility for the use which is made of these gifts. That must be determined by other and, let us admit it, by higher considerations."
These are generous and pacific words. It may be that in the past science has met with too indiscriminate a worship. It may be that too often it was not the genuine discoveries but the metaphysical theories of scientists that caught the public attention ; and scientists have always been bad metaphysicians. Even that chief orna- ment of English learning, Sir Isaac Newton, was a subject for ridicule when he meddled with theology. But science loses none of its honour through being confined to its proper quarters. We must remember that the prevalence of materialism has not to be charged against science alone, or even against science chiefly. The strength of religious con- viction failed and philosophy itself took to shabby ways ; and it is the insufficiency of these two, and the fact that they did not play their proper roles in the functionalism of knowledge, that accounts for that great loss of heart and loss of awareness in spiritual issues. It is by a renaissance of these two that balance and health can be restored ; not by any oppression of science. Meanwhile there is a high measure of respect to be paid to science. We must realize that the first object of science is not to produce utilitarian results : these may come by the way and we accept them with gratitude. But the hunger for the knowledge of nature is integral in man ; it is a mark of his heritage and a distinction shared by no other creature. Towards that knowledge science produces an ever-increasing store of information, and in this is her chief nobility.
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