BOOKS OF THE DAY

Science for the Citizen (C. P. Snow) . .

The Last Years of Peace (E. L. Woodward) World Finance, 1937-8 (Honor Croome) The Town of Tomorrow (Geoffrey Boumphrey)

Lilian Baylis (Dyneley Hussey) .. Shakespeare Discovered (W. J. Lawrence)

• • • • • • • • • •

967 968 970 970 972 974

Writers and Singers (Anthony Powell) .. • • 975 Mr. Prokosch's Poems (Michael Roberts) 976 Trade Barriers .. .. .. .. .. 978 In a Valley of this Restless Mind (Evelyn Waugh) 978 Detective Fiction (Nicholas Blake) .. 980 Fiction (Forrest Reid) .. 984 Current Literature .. 986

SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

By C. P. SNOW Tins is a marvellous book.. It is nothing less than an attempt to present the interested layman with the whole fundamental structure of science. No such task has ever been undertaken before ; Professor Hogben has not only tried it, but carried it out with a completeness one would not have believed possible. He has brought off one of the most impressive and valuable achievements of our generation.

Only a very learned man could have contemplated devoting himself to this piece of exposition. Most scientists do not know enough of the history of their own branch, let alone of others, even to have written a table of contents for the attempt. Of the few who are learned enough, almost no one else would have had enough faith in men's ability to be taught ; that faith is one of the unique features both of this book and of Mathematics for the Million. Professor Hogben believes that men are both able to understand, and want to understand : he has shirked nothing, given them the difficult facts along vOth the easy generalisations, put in the mathematics and shown them how to set about learning it. An intelligent man who knew no science at all could, by working for three months at this book, answer a good many questions on a Higher Schools Certificate science paper. That sounds a ridiculous compli- ment for an original work of scientific popularisation ; actually it is a very great one.

But neither faith in men's desire to know, nor erudition, nor both together were enough equipment to produce this book. It needed something very different—some intense and personal vision of the scientific process. No one could have begun to present the complexities of science without first finding for himself a pattern which underlay it all. That pattern the author sees in the intimate relation of science and the social achieve- ments of mankind. He means by this that the social needs of a civilisation set the problems which the science of the time must solve ; however pure and abstract the science may appear to be, it draws its impetus from the practical needs of ordinary men. Thus Clark Maxwell's equations of the electro- magnetic field can be represented as one of the most purely intellectual achievements of mankind ; but Maxwell grew up in an age when wireless telegraphy was being talked about everywhere, when there was a "craving for the wireless tele- graph." In the same way "without deep-shaft mining in the sixteenth century, when abundant slave labour was no longer to hand, there would have been no social urge to study air- pressure, ventilation and explosion. Balloons would not have been invented, chemistry would have barely surpassed the level reached in the third millennium B.C., and the conditions for discovering the electric current would have been lacking."

In my opinion, this view is about eighty or ninety per cent. true, and wants taking with a good deal of qualification. But Professor Hogben believes in it with passionate intensity, both as an explanation of the past and as a guide to our actions in the future. For him, science is a means to social betterment ; he deliberately calls his book "a primer to an age of plenty."

Stimulated by this belief, intense, angry and yet violently benevolent, he finds the whole course of science lit up by the particular achievements that have added something to the powers of ordinary men. He does not divide his book into the ordinary compartments of" chemistry," "physics," and so on, but, instead, into an account of each of the fundamental applied tasks which science has been set to master—to use his titles, "The Conquest of Time Reckoning and Space Measurement," "The• Conquest of Substitutes," "The Conquest of Power," Science for the Citizen. By Lancelot Hogben. (Allen and Unwin. I2S. 6d.)

" The Conquest of Hunger and Disease," "The Conquest of Behaviour."

More than anything else, it is this vision of science which made the book possible and which endowed it with its tremen- dous power. The book catches one with the impetus of the author's own consistency and passion. It possesses something of the readability, the stimulatingness and intense exhilaration, of Wells's Outline of History—and for very similar reasons. One finishes the book warm with the feeling of having been shown a new world of knowledge. There are few more exciting intellectual experiences than to realise a mass of random facts suddenly falling into place ; no professional scientist goes through his education without gaining such moments several times. Professor Hogben will bring the same pleasure to many.

He will tremendously enrich the meaning of the word "culture." For anyone with a genuine intellectual appetite, there is no longer any excuse for being cut off from a great part of man's mental achievement. Our present literary " cul- ture " has many merits more certainly than Professor Hogben would himself admit ; the real reproach is that its exponents are too complacent, too easily satisfied with a minute share of what is waiting to be known. It is a good thing, of course, to enjoy the Greek Anthology and the Divine Comedy ; no man in the twentieth century is fully educated unless he has responded to all they represent. But they should not be an alibi against understanding the achievements of the modern world ; those one cannot understand without a scientific,

as well as literary, culture. '

In fact, no one has much claim to consider himself fully educated nowadays unless he knows the substance of both of Professor Hogben's expositions. For anyone who wants to cultivate himself, they are the best guide in existence. They are, indeed, the pioneer works of a new scientific culture, or, as he calls it, scientific humanism.

To produce such an effect, their author must be a man of great stature and great gifts. I should like to take his achieve- ments so much for granted as to finish with one or two hypercriticisms. One cannot expect everything from any man. The task the author set himself required a variety of qualities which no one alive possesses : probably he combines more of them than any man of his time. But still, as I read this book with the deepest admiration, I could not help regretting that he did not possess two more gifts : the first, an intellectual subtlety which would sometimes take him away from the broad generalisations into problems where he was compelled to feel his way. The lack of this particular quality occasionally makes him miss the point, especially in mathematical or abstract arguments ; it also makes it easier for him to preserve intact his undiluted faith in the relation of science to social achievement. With much of the mathematics in which he is not interested, for instance, the relation to social needs is no closer than that of a game of chess ; and yet such mathematics has been important to science.

The other quality which one misses in his work would have been Valuable to the leader of a new humanism : it is an instinc- tive wisdom about human beings. His own frailties and limitations and self-centredness sometimes distract one ; they give humanity to the work, perhaps, but they detract a little from the enormous dignity of the conception and the aspirations which he makes one share.

These grumbles are small and ungenerous, though. There is only one thing which need be said : the civilised world is indebted to him.