1Hil, SET-OFFS AGAINST MODERN SCIENCE. T HAT science has as much
right to its airs of self-con- fidence, as an unparallelled series of almost unex- ampled successes could give it, every intelligent man will admit. In the line of its own discoveries it has achieved wonders, and the only word of admonition that it is reasonable to pronounce is, that these wonders have turned the heads of too many scientific men, and led them to claim as the province of science, what science, as they understand it, has no prospect of ever conquering at all. To illustrate what we mean by this mistaken self-confidence or arrogance of science, we will make three quotations. Two are from a book of which we said some- thing last week, Dr. Maudsley's book on "Body and Will," of which one may describe the fault as this, that it applies the scientific method very successfully where the ordinary scientific method is appropriate, and wholly ignores—nay, resolutely denies—all facts to which the scientific method, as men of science understand it, is wholly inappropriate. Here is one passage :—" Can there be a greater absurdity, when we think of it, a more completely knowledge-annihilating device, than to pretend to keep provinces of knowledge, however acquired, rigorously asunder ! To assert liberty and self-sufficingness in one science, and necessity and interdependence in all other sciences, is really the negation of all science. It is a gaping contradiction in the very foundation of knowledge, which renders any stable superstructure impossible; for how can man, being one, have real knowledge unless it is unity of knowledge ? How make for himself a synthesis of the world, if he is required to preserve an absolute separation, an impassable chasm, between two regions of knowledge ?" That represents precisely the very vice of modern science,—that it will admit no paradoxes, no differences too deep for the unifying power of the human intellect, and, therefore, attempts to introduce an artificial unity into provinces which, the more we study them, the more we find to contain principles which cannot by any legerdemain of the intellect be shaded off into each other. And it is characteristic of the arrogance of science, that it is that very same school of science—the school of physical science—which denies most peremptorily, even to the principle of uniform causation, any intuitional universality, which, never- theless, assumes to impose that principle on the conscience and the will, against the protest of self-knowledge. One would suppose that a principle which has been only em- pirically established, should be perfectly open to empirical exceptions. Yet, paradox being of the very truth of human life as we know it, and science, as learnt from the physical provinces of existence, not enduring paradox, the whole effort of such science as Dr. Maudsley's is devoted to suppressing the evidences of paradox which abound in all human experience when candidly recorded. If we replied to Dr. Maudsley that no sensible man had ever asserted "liberty and self-sufficingness " as the principle of any science, but solely thus much,—that directly you rise into the region of human action, you find for the first time, amidst the most ample traces of the necessity and inter- dependence of the lower regions of life, a new principle of liberty, though of liberty ranging within very narrow limits, a principle of which there had been no sign in the physical region, he would, we suppose, reply that no matter how limited its range, real liberty, if it exist at all, is the negation of causation as we know it, and therefore the negation of science. To which we should rejoin,— Yes, if you define science as meaning anything less than know- ledge, if you define it as denoting only that department of know- ledge in which uniform causation rules, of course it is so. But as you not only admit, but even assert, that our only knowledge of the uniformity of causation is purely empirical, have you the smallest right to pooh-pooh, as a priori impossible, a new frag- ment of knowledge of which it is the distinctive mark that under the same antecedent conditions you know two different actions to be equally possible ?
Now, take another instance of the marvellous arrogance with which Dr. Maudsley imposes the yoke of the physical sciences on the moral order which he is investigating. He says very justly that "if there be an intuitive truth in the hope and
conviction of a future realisation of lofty ideals, it does not follow that the realisation will take place on earth." But then he goes on :—" It is, perchance, a cosmic instinct of the matter of which we are constituted. In the countless millions of space- pervading orbs, it may have been, and. may be again, the functions of many to take up the tale of organic evolution, and. to carry the process to higher and higher levels,—even to or- ganisations that are utterly inconceivable to us, constituted as we are. For us men and. for our salvation, the earth and its sun are all in all ; but in the universe and its evolution, new heavens and new earths may be natural incidents, and the whole solar system to which the earth belongs of no greater moment than the life of the meanest insect is in the history of that system, of no greater proportion than a moment in its duration. How grotesquely ludicrous, then, the absurdity of man's vainly attempted conceptions of a great first cause or purpose of things." In other words, Dr. Maudsley scorns to attach any value to what he calls elsewhere the "evolutional nisus," inspiring idealism, when it happens to be found—where alone, indeed, it ever is found,—in the mind of man, but is not disinclined to regard it, as appertaining intrinsically to the nature of "cosmic matter," as matter. Verily, those who ignore the paradoxes of freedom and faith are condemned by a sort of Nemesis to believe in paradoxes of their own even more astounding. What evidence is there of an "evolutional nisus " tending towards idealism in iron or carbon ? Is "the evolu- tional nisus " which astronomers suppose to be already exhausted. in the moon, only successfully imprisoned there ? And why does "cosmic matter" retain idealistic aspirations in one place, and lose them in another? Can anything be plainer than that the materialist who recognises the idealistic faith in man,—as he cannot but recognise it, if he is to open his mind to facts at all, —and yet ascribes this idealistic faith to "cosmic matter" as such, does so solely and absolutely because, on his theory, there is nothing better left to ascribe it to? The truth is, however, that of idealism proper there is not a trace in the physical universe, and that if there be any "cosmic instinct" of idealism at all, it must be due to an inspiring mind in the universe, and. not to "cosmic matter."
Now, take a third instance of the curious and rash arro- gance of the spirit bred by the physical sciences. In last week's Academy, in a review of Mr. Douglas Galton's recent book by a very able student of physical science, Mr. Grant Allen, to whom we owe many original and. ingenious: specu- lations on vegetable physiology,—for example, one on the origin of the strawberry,—we find the following passage :— " The other point" [dealt with by Mr. Gallon] "is the investigations into the efficacy of prayer. These are narrated with a quaint, scientific naïveté, which is not intended, doubtless, to be ironical, but which is as perfect a speci- meti of irony, in the pure Greek sense of the word, as we ever remember to have seen. The transparent candour, reverence, and scientific precision of Mr. Galton's reasoning will prove (quite unintentionally) a thousand. times more annoying to dogmatism than any other tone that could possibly have been adopted. Abase the dogmatists can stand, but gentle persuasion and clear logic are really too trying. When Mr. Galion remarks that he has not yet examined into the truth of Father Clarke's statement that substantial curative effects are often produced.by pilgrimages to Lourdes,' or notes the absence of any marked answer to the daily prayer 'that the nobility may be endued with grace, wisdom, and understanding,' or cites the history of English ducal houses in opposition to the belief of the Psalmist that the descendants of the righteous shall continue, while those of the wicked shall fail, he is only honestly applying the methods with which he is familiar elsewhere to the_ particular subject under dispute; but it is almost impossible for unscientific readers not to suspect him of intentional satire." Is it possible to imagine a sublimer tone of arrogant assumption that prayer never receives any answer, than. we find here, or one which is less becoming in a writer whose mind has been educated by the study of physics and physiology ? The inner world is a sealed book, as it would seem, to the student of the modern physical sciences, who does not even know so much as this, that all Christian prayer at all events, is cast in St. Chrysostom's form, "Fulfil now, 0 Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them," and that far more and far better answers to prayer come in the shape of purified desires than of granted wishes. And yet he dogma- times on prayer with this sublime scorn for all the story of the
ages. Even Mr. Matthew Arnold,—whom men of science have daimed as their champion on questions of this kind,—has asserted the truth of the paradox which is the very key to the efficacy of prayer,—" He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal," and has called it the sublime "secret of Jesus," "the secret by which emphatically his Gospel brought life and immortality to light." Even Mr. Arnold has declared that there is a secret life which is full of paradoxes to the man who looks only at the outward world, or even at the world of physical science, a secret life in which the paradoxes of self-abnegation, and all that the Christian includes in the life of prayer, are not only true, but the only living truth; and yet because they do not fall in with the methods of physical science, we find the whole life of prayer laughed to scorn by the successful student of the physical sciences.
Science has had a great and glorious career. But great and glorious as that career has been, we do not hesitate to say that all its achievements put together are of infinitely less value to man than the secret which Mr. Matthew Arnold calls "the secret of Jesus,"—a secret the true interpretation of which involves doubt- less a great deal of theology which Mr. Arnold himself rejects, and a great deal of psychology against which both Mr. Grant Allen and Dr. Mandsley would hardly think it worth while, in their sublime arrogance, even to protest. But the study of insanity, and investigations into plant-life, even though they include the origin of the strawberry, hardly furnish a sufficient basis for the science of spiritual life.
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