TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE
Science, Religion, and Reality. Edited by J. Needham. (Sheldon Press. 12s. 6d.) Science, Religion, and Reality. Edited by J. Needham. (Sheldon Press. 12s. 6d.) SCIENCE tends to become so increasingly specialized that we have passed the stage when the general public is interested in details. Is it possible for any man to keep pace with the progress of the whole of any important branch of science ? Is the scientific revolution, like the revolution in Russia, about to devour its own children ?
As knowledge advances, it becomes more complex. The words employed in any particular department acquire a specialized meaning. Moreover, fresh words have to be coined in order to express brand-new conceptions. Men of science are aware that knowledge of other departments is indispensable for .them if they are to secure breadth of culture without superficiality. We, therefore, welcome the volume Mr. Need- ham capably edits, for in it contributors seek to put in lucid English the advances in, the spheres of science they hay', made their own. Dr. Malinowski introduces us to the relations between magic and religion, Dr. Singer to the historical relations between science and religion, while Signor Aliotta describes science and religion ip the nineteenth century. The point of view of these three able writers is historical, and rightly so, for they provide the background for the under- standing of the remaining five essays. As we firmly believe that this is a valuable volume, we draw attention to some of the changes due to the altered scientific attitude of our genera- tion. One certainly lies in the circumstance that a man of the standing of Sir J. J. Thomson is not afraid to speak of the share taken by intuition in the task of discovery. Lord Balfour, who writes a thoughtful introduction, notes that discoveries are as much the result of what he prefers to call intuitive probability as of reason and experiment. The illusion that the scientist is a being actuated by pure reason has long been shed. Indeed, if we assume that men are so guided, then we fail to grasp the significance of past relations between science and religion admirably expounded by Dr. Singer.
Dean Inge reviews the conclusions of this important book in a pregnant article. In his judgment the gulf that used to yawn between science and religion tends to be bridged, and men of science quite as much as men of religion are engaged in the work of constructing the bridge. In his illuminating survey of the domain of physical science, Mr. Eddington shows that a scientific theory exists to assert a correspondence between the laws of mind and the happenings of the external world. Man can recognize no order except the order to which he himself is obedient ; a universe which did not obey this order would be an irrational universe and for ever inacces- sible to the methods of science. The extraordinary success of scientific explanations in accounting for observed phenomena sometimes seems very surprising ; that mathematics, in par- ticular, should be applicable to material happenings seems little short of incredible. For mathematics is the fruit of a free activity of the mind ; the mind is here constrained by its own laws.
Thinkers of the calibre of the physicist Boltzmann feel the difficulty in bringing the apparently dissociated activity of the department of mathematics into contact with the happenings of the external world, and Weyl unquestionably experiences the same trouble. Boltzmann exhibits distrust of many of the workings of the scientific mind. Science, in his opinion, though very often abstract, possesses a certain validity, since it issues in the prediction of events which are accessible to sense- pereeption—that is all. A profound thinker like Weyl forces us to adopt the conclusion that the only thing that is lbehind everything is mind. It is a conclusion as old as Berkeley and, as new as Weyl. Does the mind create space ? Does the mind, create time ? To both questions Weyl returns an unhesitating affirmative. Does the mind create matter ? Here his conclu- sion is not so unhesitating, but he leans to the affirmative view. At any rate, mind has put space and time within the framework: of matter. The old jest against Berkeley ran :—What is matter ? Never mind. What is mind ? No matter. This book enables us to see that the whole emphasis is shifting to the dominant position growingly being held by mind. We have moved so far from the materialistic attitude put forward by John Tyndall in his Belfast address that this once famous counterblast is to-day almost wholly unintelligible.
The nineteenth century lived on the idea of law, the sense of continuity, the theory of evolution. And suddenly with the discovery of radium combined with the novel doctrines of Clerk-Maxwell and Lorentz, Monsieur and Madame Curie, Poincare and Minkowski, Niels Bohr and Einstein, the very principles and foundations of our scientific world are crashing about our ears. Are there any principles ? Does the earth move at all ? Is there any ether ? What do we exactly mean by the conservation of energy ? Are all mechanical forces merely phases of electro-magnetism ? Do laws evolve and change like living things ? Is it a case where there is a living chess-player and also living chess-pieces ? Do laws advance disconcertingly by leaps and bounds and brusque mutations ? Is their simplicity a mask which we set on the complex anarchy of nature ? Is science a mere convention, a set in fact of cunningly devised fables ? Are the laws of science just the rules of the game ? Is there anything of which we can be sure that it will be true in another thousand years ? Nor are these questions so superfluous as they appear when we find Mr. Eddington hinting that a real law of nature is likely to stand out by the fact that it appears to be irrational, since in that case it is less likely that we have invented it to satisfy our intellectual taste. And from this point of view he inclines to the belief that the quantum principle is the first real law
that has been discovered in physics. R. H. MURRAY.
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