The Curve of Knowledge
A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century. By Charles Singer. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 8s. 6d )
A COMPREHENSIVE history of science cannot yet be written, because the facts are not established. Many writers of scientific history have not realised this, and, with a simple faith in the scholarship of their predecessors, have repeated the dreary collections of apocryphal anecdotes and misinterpretations which we know too well. The author of this admirable work has learnt from a life- time of studies in the history and methods of science the limita- tions of our knowledge. He has not attempted to write a history of the knowledge that science has produced, still less of its social and economic causes and effects ; but has confined himself to the promise of his title and has written a history of science, the active process of making knowledge. We may not know whether Roger Bacon invented gunpowder, but we can assess his part in promoting natural philosophy ; the inventor of the telescope will never be known with certainty, but its infinite importance in opening up the closed universe of antiquity is within the historian's grasp.
The theme of the book is expressible by a curve—the rise, decline and revival of the spirit of science. The millennia of craftsmanship in which the inhabitants of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Valley of the Indus laid the foundation of the useful arts and their refinements—medicine, mathematics and astronomy —receive but a few pages, for in those distant years the spirit of science was still unborn.
Science came into being in the seventh century B.c. among those " who spoke a dialect of Greek and numbered themselves among the Hellenes," and their increasing mental coherence and organisation culminated in the great world-systems of Aristotle and Plato, who sought to include within a single scheme the whole activity of the universe, material, human, and divine. The author makes a valuable distinction between ancient and modern science, when he contrasts the unlimited objective of the former, which stopped at nothing short of a blue-print of the cosmos, based though it was on the scantiest of evidence, with the limited objectives of modern science, elucidating the ways of Nature step by step and incorporating the results into the great body of knowledge, accessible to all, yet capable of being grasped by no single mind.
Aristotle, in the author's view, marks the summit of the curve, and after him follows a succession of failures ; first the " failure of nerve " in the Alexandrian period, manifest in the divorce of science and philosophy ; then the failure of inspiration under Imperial Rome ; lastly, the failure of knowledge itself in the Middle Ages. Failure there was, if all but science is excluded from our view, but the whole man may see this regress as a consequence of the growth of the human spirit. The universal systems were brilliant tours de force, but they neither corresponded with reality nor were of use in discovering it. The lamentable weakness of Aristotle's physics, which fettered science for fifteen hundred years, was the result of a premature mating of science and philosophy, and such men as Archimedes, Hero and Ptolemy served science the better for limiting their objectives in the modern manner. The failure, first of scientific inspiration, then of scientific knowledge, in the first millennium of the Christian era is certain, yet it is possible to view this plunge into material ignorance with less regret than is often accorded to it. Man deserted science, not because he was weary of it, but because there loomed before him the need to take part in the greatest movement of all history, the building of what, pace auctoris,. might be called the science, of right living. The world saw religion as more important than natural science, and while the vast research which built the doctrine of the Church was still in progress, no man would set his hand to any lesser task.
Professor Singer's survey of science from its earliest years until its revival in the sixteenth century stands apart from any other in his understanding of the vanished concepts which went to build the ancient world. Matter and mind are enough for all of us today and too much for some ; but until the eighteenth century, men felt the need for links between the two. The world- soul, the influences which stretched from the macrocosm to the microcosm, the chain of natural, animal and vital spirits which joined soul and body are essential parts of early scientific thought, and I know of no work, other than this, which does justice to their importance. The author's study of the period from 1400 to 185o is no less admirable, if less exceptional by reason of its better known content. His treatment of Galileo does justice to that great man who, standing head and shoulders above his con- temporaries, is seen to be the first modem man of science and the progenitor of the mechanical conception of the universe, which, built up half unawares by Newton and the natural philosophers of the eighteenth century, formed the substance of the nineteenth- century world-outlook.
Before laying down the threads of the past the author speculates on the direction in which they will lead us in the future. He thinks that " Science is now reaching a stage in which an adequate scientific equipment will involve some regard to the world as an interconnected whole, in other words, in which Science and Philosophy will dwell less apart. . . . Notably it seems probable that the conceptions of the separation of mind from mind and of mind from matter may need modification." Agreed : and the task may prove to be no smaller than the sum total of all that this
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