Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
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Title: Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
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CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE
_AND OTHER ESSAYS_
(NEWLY-ENLARGED AND COMPLETE EDITION)
BY
EDWARD CARPENTER
AUTHOR OF "TOWARDS DEMOCRACY,"
"MY DAYS AND DREAMS," ETC.
[Illustration: logo]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1
First Edition, _June 1889_; Second Edition, _December 1890_;
Third Edition, _November 1893_; Fourth Edition, _July 1895_;
Fifth Edition, _September 1897_; Sixth Edition, _October 1900_;
Seventh Edition, _July 1902_; Eighth Edition, _March 1903_;
Ninth Edition, _January 1906_; Tenth Edition, _January 1908_;
Eleventh Edition, _October 1910_; Twelfth Edition, _Dec. 1912_;
Thirteenth Edition, _Aug. 1914_; Fourteenth Edition, _June 1916_;
Fifteenth Edition, _Sept. 1917_; Complete Edition, _Jan. 1921_
(_All rights reserved_)
PREFACE TO COMPLETE EDITION
(1920)
In looking over this volume, first published in 1889, with a view to a
final Edition, I am glad to note that after all there is not much in it
requiring alteration. Considering that the original issue took place
more than 30 years ago, I had thought that the great changes in
scientific and philosophic thought which have taken place during that
period would probably have rendered "out of date" a good deal of the
book.
As a matter of fact, the first paper--that on Civilisation--was given as
a lecture before the Fabian Society, in 1888; and I shall not easily
forget the furious attacks which were made upon it on that occasion. The
book--published as a whole in 1889--came in for a very similar reception
from the press-critics. They slated it to the top of their bent--except
in those not unfrequent cases when they ignored it as almost beneath
notice. The whole trend of the thought of the time was against its
conclusions; and it is perhaps worth while to recall these facts in
order to measure how far we have travelled in these 30 years. For to-day
(I think we may say) these conclusions are generally admitted as
correct; and the views which seemed so hazarded and precarious at the
earlier date are now fairly accepted and established.
The word Civilisation has undoubtedly during this period suffered an
ominous change of color. It is no longer an easy term denoting all that
is ideal and delightful in social life, but on the contrary, carries
with it a sense of doubt and of criticism, as of something that is by no
means accepted yet, but is rather on its trial--if not actually
condemned!
I am sorry to note, however, that the suggestion made more than once in
the course of my book--namely that the term (Civilisation) should
properly be given an _historical_ instead of ideal value, as applicable
to a certain period only in the history of each people, has not yet been
generally taken up. Yet a paper by some more competent person than
myself on the definite marks and signs of the civilisation-period in
History--their first appearance in the course of human progress and
evolution, and their probable disappearance again at a later
stage--would be greatly interesting and instructive.
My little essay on this subject was written at the time of its
composition with a good deal of imaginative _élan_; and is of course
open to criticism on that side, as being mainly enthusiastic in
character and only slenderly supported by exact _data_, proofs,
historical illustrations, analogies, and so forth. But to largely alter
or amend the essay without seriously crippling it would be impossible;
and though the form may be hurried or inadequate, yet as far as the
actual contents and conclusions are concerned I still adhere to them
absolutely, and believe that time will show them to be fully justified.
With regard to my views on Modern Science the last quarter of a century
has curiously corroborated them. For while on the one hand--as
expected--the progress in actual discovery and application of observed
facts has been enormous, the _theories_ on the other hand about all
these things have receded more and more into the background, and have
passed almost out of sight. While knowing, for instance, infinitely more
about electrical actions and adaptations than we did, we seem to be if
anything further off than ever from any valid theory of what Electricity
_is_. The same with regard to Heat and Light, to Astronomical,
Biological and Geological "laws," and so forth. On such matters Modern
Science is on the verge of confessing itself bankrupt, but not wishing
to do that, it keeps a discreet silence.
The Atom, which I ventured (to the disgust of my scientific friends) to
make fun of 30 years ago, has now exploded of itself as thoroughly as a
German "coal-box"; and the fixed Chemical Elements of older days have of
late dissolved into protean vapours and emanations, ions and electrons,
impossible to follow through their endless transformations. As to the
numerous "Laws of Nature" which in the nineteenth century we were just
about to establish for all eternity, it is only with the greatest
difficulty that any of these can now be discovered--most of them having
got secreted away into the darkness of ancient text-books: where they
lead forlorn and sightless existences, like the fish in the caves of
Kentucky.
Here again--in my chapters on Science--though some expressions remain
which are now out of date, I have thought it best to leave them as
originally written: the meanings and general conclusions being still
valid and as they were. It will be seen that the general drift of these
chapters is to point the moral that the true field of science is to be
found in Life, and that the best way to _know_ things is to _experience_
their meaning and to identify oneself with them through Action. From a
study on these principles will ultimately emerge a Science truly humane
and creative, masterful, and capable of building a true home for
men--instead of the feverish, spectral and self-deluding thing which has
usurped the name up to now.
Something the same will happen with the conception of Morality. The
abstract codes on this subject, which have wrought so much havoc by
their fatal intrusion on the field of human Life, are rapidly fading
away. These ghosts, like the ghosts of Nature's "Laws," are receiving
their _quietus_. And the general outline which was suggested in "The
Defence of Criminals" has now been traced more positively in the chapter
on "The New Morality" inserted at the end of the present volume.
Morality has at last to become truly human, and the real expression of
our organic need. Man has to be liberated from the cramps and
suppressions and fixations which have hitherto paralysed him in the
moral field. He has to emerge from the swathing bands of his pupal stage
into the free air of heaven, and to become in the highest sense
self-determining and creative.
Thus three things, (1) the realisation of a new order of Society, in
closest touch with Nature, and in which the diseases of class-domination
and Parasitism will have finally ceased; (2) the realisation of a
Science which will no longer be a mere thing of the brain, but a part of
Actual Life; and (3) the realisation of a Morality which will signalise
and express the vital and organic unity of man with his fellows--these
three things will become the heralds of a new era of humanity--an era
which will possibly prefer _not_ to call itself by the name of
Civilisation.
In order to corroborate and confirm the first paper in the book an
Appendix has now been added containing notes and _data_ on the life and
customs of many "uncivilised" peoples; for much of which Appendix I am
indebted to the assistance of my widely-read and resourceful friend, E.
Bertram Lloyd.
E. C.
_December, 1920._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE TO COMPLETE EDITION 7
CIVILISATION: ITS CAUSE AND CURE 15
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM 79
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE: A FORECAST 120
DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS: A CRITICISM OF MORALITY 143
EXFOLIATION: LAMARCK _versus_ DARWIN 181
CUSTOM 206
A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE 219
THE NEW MORALITY 243
APPENDIX--BEING NOTES ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS
AND CUSTOMS OF PRE-CIVILISED PEOPLES 265
CIVILISATION:
ITS CAUSE AND CURE
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for
civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it?--WHITMAN.
We find ourselves to-day in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of
society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to the most
optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us,
indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the
various races of man have to pass through--as children pass through
measles or whooping cough; but if it is a disease, there is this serious
consideration to be made, that while History tells us of many nations
that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of
some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in
which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more
normal and healthy condition. In other words the development of human
society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain
definite and apparently final stage in the process we call
Civilisation; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested.
Of course it may at first sound extravagant to use the word disease in
connection with Civilisation at all, but a little thought should show
that the association is not ill-grounded. To take the matter on its
physical side first, I find that in Mullhall's Dictionary of Statistics
(1884) the number of accredited doctors and surgeons in the United
Kingdom is put at over 23,000. If the extent of the national sickness is
such that we require 23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely
be rather serious! And _they_ do not cure us. Wherever we look to-day,
in mansion or in slum, we see the features and hear the complaints of
ill-health; the difficulty is really to find a healthy person. The state
of the modern civilised man in this respect--our coughs, colds,
mufflers, dread of a waft of chill air, &c.--is anything but creditable,
and it seems to be the fact that, notwithstanding all our libraries of
medical science, our knowledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are
actually less capable of taking care of ourselves than the animals are.
Indeed, talking of animals, we are--as Shelley I think points out--fast
depraving the _domestic_ breeds. The cow, the horse, the sheep, and even
the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming ever more and more subject to
disease, and are liable to ills which in their wilder state they knew
not of. And finally the savage races of the earth do not escape the
baneful influence. Wherever Civilisation touches them, they die like
flies from the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along with
it, and often its mere contact is sufficient to destroy whole races.
But the word Disease is applicable to our social as well as to our
physical condition. For as in the body disease arises from the loss of
the physical unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the form of
warfare or discord between the various parts, or of the abnormal
development of individual organs, or the consumption of the system by
predatory germs and growths; so in our modern life we find the unity
gone which constitutes true society, and in its place warfare of classes
and individuals, abnormal development of some to the detriment of
others, and consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites.
If the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should say it is--both in
its direct and its derived sense--to the civilised societies of to-day.
Again, mentally, is not our condition most unsatisfactory? I am not
alluding to the number and importance of the lunatic asylums which cover
our land, nor to the fact that maladies of the brain and nervous system
are now so common; but to the strange sense of mental unrest which marks
our populations, and which amply justifies Ruskin's cutting epigram:
that our two objects in life are, "Whatever we have--to get more; and
wherever we are--to go somewhere else." This sense of unrest, of
disease, penetrates down even into the deepest regions of man's
being--into his moral nature--disclosing itself there, as it has done
in all nations notably at the time of their full civilisation, as the
sense of Sin.[1] All down the Christian centuries we find this strange
sense of inward strife and discord developed, in marked contrast to the
naive insouciance of the pagan and primitive world; and, what is
strangest, we even find people glorying in this consciousness--which,
while it may be the harbinger of better things to come, is and can be in
itself only the evidence of loss of unity, and therefore of ill-health,
in the very centre of human life.
Of course we are aware with regard to Civilisation that the word is
sometimes used in a kind of ideal sense, as to indicate a state of
future culture towards which we are tending--the implied assumption
being that a sufficiently long course of top hats and telephones will in
the end bring us to this ideal condition; while any little drawbacks in
the process, such as we have just pointed out, are explained as being
merely accidental and temporary. Men sometimes speak of civilising and
ennobling influences as if the two terms were interchangeable, and of
course if they like to use the word Civilisation in this sense they have
a right to; but whether the actual tendencies of modern life taken in
the mass _are_ ennobling (except in a quite indirect way hereafter to be
dwelt upon) is, to say the least, a doubtful question. Any one who
would get an idea of the glorious being that is as a matter of fact
being turned out by the present process should read Mr. Kay Robinson's
article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for May, 1883, in which he
prophesies (quite solemnly and in the name of science) that the human
being of the future will be a toothless, bald, toeless creature with
flaccid muscles and limbs almost incapable of locomotion!
Perhaps it is safer on the whole not to use the word Civilisation in
such ideal sense, but to limit its use (as is done to-day by all writers
on primitive society) to a definite historical stage through which the
various nations pass, and in which we actually find ourselves at the
present time. Though there is of course a difficulty in marking the
commencement of any period of historical evolution very definitely, yet
all students of this subject agree that the growth of property and the
ideas and institutions flowing from it did at a certain point bring
about such a change in the structure of human society that the new stage
might fairly be distinguished from the earlier stages of Savagery and
Barbarism by a separate term. The growth of Wealth, it is shown, and
with it the conception of Private Property, brought on certain very
definite new forms of social life; it destroyed the ancient system of
society based upon the _gens_, that is, a society of equals founded upon
blood-relationship, and introduced a society of classes founded upon
differences of material possession; it destroyed the ancient system of
mother-right and inheritance through the female line, and turned the
woman into the property of the man; it brought with it private ownership
of land, and so created a class of landless aliens, and a whole system
of rent, mortgage, interest, etc.; it introduced slavery, serfdom and
wage-labour, which are only various forms of the dominance of one class
over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and
the policeman. Every race that we know, that has become what we call
civilised, has passed through these changes; and though the details may
vary and have varied a little, the main order of change has been
practically the same in all cases. We are justified therefore in calling
Civilisation a historical stage, whose commencement dates roughly from
the division of society into classes founded on property and the
adoption of class-government. Lewis Morgan in his _Ancient Society_ adds
the invention of writing and the consequent adoption of written History
and written Law; Engels in his _Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigenthums und des Staats_ points out the importance of the
appearance of the Merchant, even in his most primitive form, as a mark
of the civilisation-period; while the French writers of the last century
made a good point in inventing the term _nations policées_
(policemanised nations) as a substitute for civilised nations; for
perhaps there is no better or more universal mark of the period we are
considering, and of its social degradation, than the appearance of the
crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the rage of any decent North
American Indians if they had been told they required _policemen_ to keep
them in order!]
If we take this historical definition of Civilisation, we shall see that
our English Civilisation began hardly more than a thousand years ago,
and even so the remains of the more primitive society lasted long after
that. In the case of Rome--if we reckon from the later times of the
early kings down to the fall of Rome--we have again about a thousand
years. The Jewish civilisation from David and Solomon downwards
lasted--with breaks--somewhat over a thousand years; the Greek
civilisation less; the series of Egyptian civilisations which we can now
distinguish lasted altogether very much longer; but the important points
to see are, first, that the process has been quite similar in character
in these various (and numerous other) cases,[2] quite as similar in fact
as the course of the same disease in various persons; and secondly that
in no case, as said before, has any nation come _through_ and passed
beyond this stage; but that in most cases it has succumbed soon after
the main symptoms had been developed.
But it will be said, It may be true that Civilisation regarded as a
stage of human history presents some features of disease; but is there
any reason for supposing that disease in some form or other was any less
present in the previous stage--that of Barbarism? To which I reply, I
think there is good reason. Without committing ourselves to the
unlikely theory that the "noble savage" was an ideal human being
physically or in any other respect, and while certain that in many
points he was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think we must
allow him the superiority in some directions; and one of these was his
comparative freedom from disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew up among the
Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew the North American natives as
well as any white man has ever done, says (in his _Ancient Society_, p.
45), "Barbarism ends with the production of grand Barbarians." And
though there are no native races on the earth to-day who are actually in
the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism;[3] yet, if we take the
most advanced tribes that we know of--such as the said Iroquois Indians
of twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kaffir tribes round Lake
Nyassa in Africa, now (and possibly for a few years more) comparatively
untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the river Uaupes, thirty
or forty years back, of Wallace's _Travels on the Amazon_--all tribes in
what Morgan would call the _middle_ stage of Barbarism--we undoubtedly
in each case discover a fine and (which is our point here) _healthy_
people. Captain Cook in his first Voyage says of the natives of
Otaheite, "We saw no critical disease during our stay upon the island,
and but few instances of sickness, which were accidental fits of the
colic;" and, later on, of the New Zealanders, "They enjoy perfect and
uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and
old, men and women, crowded about us ... we never saw a single person
who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers we have
seen naked did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or
any marks that an eruption had left behind." These are pretty strong
words. Of course diseases exist among such peoples, even where they have
never been in contact with civilisation, but I think we may say that
among the higher types of savages they are rarer, and nothing like so
various and so prevalent as they are in our modern life; while the power
of recovery from _wounds_ (which are of course the most frequent form of
disablement) is generally admitted to be something astonishing. Speaking
of the Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, "Their state of health enables them to
survive injuries which would be almost instantly fatal to any civilised
European." Mr. Frank Oates in his Diary[4] mentions the case of a man
who was condemned to death by the king. He was hacked down with axes,
and left for dead. "What must have been intended for the _coup de grâce_
was a cut in the back of the head, which had chipped a large piece out
of the skull, and must have been meant to cut the spinal cord where it
joins the brain. It had, however, been made a little higher than this,
but had left such a wound as I should have thought that no one could
have survived ... when I held the lanthorn to investigate the wound I
started back in amazement to see a hole at the base of the skull,
perhaps two inches long and an inch and a half wide, and I will not
venture to say how deep, but the depth too must have been an affair of
inches. Of course this hole penetrated into the substance of the brain,
and probably for some distance. I dare say a mouse could have sat in
it." Yet the man was not so much disconcerted. Like Old King Cole, "He
asked for a pipe and a drink of brandy," and ultimately made a perfect
recovery! Of course it might be said that such a story only proves the
lowness of organisation of the brains of savages; but to the Kaffirs at
any rate this would not apply; they are a quick-witted race, with large
brains, and exceedingly acute in argument, as Colenso found to his cost.
Another point which indicates superabundant health is the amazing animal
spirits of these native races! The shouting, singing, dancing kept up
nights long among the Kaffirs are exhausting merely to witness, while
the graver North American Indian exhibits a corresponding power of life
in his eagerness for battle or his stoic resistance of pain.[5]
Similarly when we come to consider the social life of the wilder
races--however rudimentary and undeveloped it may be--the almost
universal testimony of students and travelers is that within its limits
it is more harmonious and compact than that of the civilised nations.
The members of the tribe are not organically at warfare with each other;
society is not divided into classes which prey upon each other; nor is
it consumed by parasites. There is more true social unity, less of
disease. Though the customs of each tribe are rigid, absurd, and often
frightfully cruel,[6] and though all outsiders are liable to be regarded
as enemies, yet _within those limits_ the members live peacefully
together--their pursuits, their work, are undertaken in common, thieving
and violence are rare, social feeling and community of interest are
strong. "In their own bands Indians are perfectly honest. In all my
intercourse with them I have heard of not over half-a-dozen cases of
such theft. But this wonderfully exceptional honesty extends no further
than to the members of his immediate band. To all outside of it, the
Indian is not only one of the most arrant thieves in the world, but this
quality or faculty is held in the highest estimation." (Dodge, p. 64.)
If a man set out on a journey (this among the Kaffirs) "he need not
trouble himself about provisions, for he is sure to fall in with some
hut, or perhaps a village, and is equally sure of obtaining both food
and shelter."[7] "I have lived," says A. R. Wallace in his _Malay
Archipelago_ vol. ii. p. 460, "with communities in South America and the
East, who have no laws or law courts, but the public opinion of the
village ... yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide
distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and
servant, which are the product of our civilisation." Indeed this
_community_ of life in the early societies, this absence of division
into classes, and of the contrast between rich and poor, is now admitted
on all sides as a marked feature of difference between the conditions of
the primitive and of civilised man.[8]
Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of the Barbarian, probably
no one will be found to dispute the contention that he is more
easy-minded and that his consciousness of Sin is less developed than in
his civilised brother. Our unrest is the penalty we pay for our wider
life. The missionary retires routed from the savage in whom he can awake
no sense of his supreme wickedness. An American lady had a servant, a
negro-woman, who on one occasion asked leave of absence for the next
morning, saying she wished to attend the Holy Communion? "I have no
objection," said the mistress, "to grant you leave; but do you think you
_ought_ to attend Communion? You know you have never said you were sorry
about that goose you stole last week." "Lor' missus," replied the
woman, "do ye think I'd let an old goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed
Lord and Master?" But joking apart, and however necessary for man's
ultimate evolution may be the temporary development of this
consciousness of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition of the
mind in which it is absent is the most distinctively _healthy_; nor can
it be concealed that some of the greatest works of Art have been
produced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom it was absent; and
could not possibly have been produced where it was strongly developed.
Though, as already said, the latest stage of Barbarism, _i.e._, that
just preceding Civilisation, is unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet
we have in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the various nations
indirect records of this stage; and these records assure us of a
condition of man very similar to, though somewhat more developed than,
the condition of the existing races I have mentioned above. Besides
this, we have in the numerous traditions of the Golden Age,[9] legends
of the Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that a great
number of races in advancing towards Civilisation were conscious at some
point or other of having lost a primitive condition of ease and
contentment, and that they embodied this consciousness, with poetical
adornment and licence, in imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise.
Some people indeed, seeing the universality of these stories, and the
remarkable fragments of wisdom embedded in them and other extremely
ancient myths and writings, have supposed that there really was a
general pre-historic Eden-garden or Atlantis; but the necessities of the
case hardly seem to compel this supposition. That each human soul,
however, bears within itself some kind of reminiscence of a more
harmonious and perfect state of being, which it has at some time
experienced, seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid; and this by
itself might give rise to manifold traditions and myths.
II
However all this may be, the question immediately before us--having
established the more healthy, though more limited, condition of the
pre-civilisation peoples--is, why this lapse or fall? What is the
meaning of this manifold and intensified manifestation of
Disease--physical, social, intellectual, and moral? What is its place
and part in the great whole of human evolution?
And this involves us in a digression, which must occupy a few pages, on
the nature of Health.
When we come to analyse the conception of Disease, physical or mental,
in society or in the individual, it evidently means, as already hinted
once or twice, _loss of unity_. Health, therefore, should mean unity,
and it is curious that the history of the word entirely corroborates
this idea. As is well known, the words health, whole, holy, are from
the same stock; and they indicate to us the fact that far back in the
past those who created this group of words had a conception of the
meaning of Health very different from ours, and which they embodied
unconsciously in the word itself and its strange relatives.
These are, for instance, and among others: heal, hallow, hale, holy,
whole, wholesome; German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour); Latin salus (as
in salutation, salvation); Greek kalos; also compare hail! a salutation,
and, less certainly connected, the root _hal_, to breathe, as in inhale,
exhale--French haleine--Italian and French alma and âme (the soul);
compare the Latin spiritus, spirit or breath, and Sanskrit âtman, breath
or soul.
Wholeness, holiness ... "if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be
full of light." ... "thy faith hath made thee _whole_."
The idea seems to be a positive one--a condition of the body in which it
is an entirety, a unity--a central force maintaining that condition; and
disease being the break-up--or break-down--of that entirety into
multiplicity.
The peculiarity about our modern conception of Health is that it seems
to be a purely negative one. So impressed are we by the myriad presence
of Disease--so numerous its dangers, so sudden and unforetellable its
attacks--that we have come to look upon health as the mere absence of
the same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a hostile camp at
night, sees the enemy sitting round his fires, and trembles at the
crackling of a twig beneath his feet--so the traveller through this
world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle in the other, must pick
his way, fearful lest at any time he disturb the sleeping legions of
death--thrice blessed if by any means, steering now to the right and now
to the left, and thinking only of his personal safety, he pass by
without discovery to the other side.
Health with us is a negative thing. It is a neutralisation of opposing
dangers. It is to be neither rheumatic nor gouty, consumptive nor
bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-ache, heart-ache, or any of
the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." These are the
realities. Health is the mere negation of them.
The modern notion, and which has evidently in a very subtle way
penetrated the whole thought of to-day, is that the essential fact of
life is the existence of innumerable external forces, which, by a very
delicate balance and difficult to maintain, concur to produce Man--who
in consequence may at any moment be destroyed again by the
non-concurrence of those forces. The older notion apparently is that the
essential fact of life _is_ Man himself; and that the external forces,
so-called, are in some way subsidiary to this fact--that they may aid
his expression or manifestation, or that they may hinder it, but that
they can neither create nor annihilate the Man. Probably both ways of
looking at the subject are important; there is a man that can be
destroyed, and there is a man that cannot be destroyed. The old words,
soul and body, indicate this contrast; but like all words they are
subject to the defect that they are an attempt to draw a line where no
line can ultimately be drawn; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there
is only continuity--for between the little mortal man who dwells here
and now, and the divine and universal Man who also forms a part of our
consciousness, is there not a perfect gradation of being, and where (if
anywhere) is there a gulf fixed? Together they form a unit, and each is
necessary to the other: the first cannot do without the second, and the
second cannot get along at all without the first. To use the words of
Angelus Silesius (quoted by Schopenhauer), "Ich weiss dass ohne mich
Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben."
According then to the elder conception, and perhaps according to an
elder experience, man, to be really healthy, must be a unit, an
entirety--his more external and momentary self standing in some kind of
filial relation to his more universal and incorruptible part--so that
not only the remotest and outermost regions of the body, and all the
assimilative, secretive, and other processes belonging thereto, but even
the thoughts and passions of the mind itself, stand in direct and clear
relationship to it, the final and absolute transparency of the mortal
creature. And thus this divinity in each creature, being that which
constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was conceived of as
that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of body and wounds of
heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only possible to know,
but whom to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I
take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as accepted at some
elder time of human history, and by us seen as thro' a glass darkly.
And the condition of disease, and of sin, under the same view, was the
reverse of this. Enfeeblement, obscuration, duplicity--the central
radiation blocked; lesser and insubordinate centres establishing and
asserting themselves as against it; division, discord, possession by
devils.
Thus in the body, the establishment of an insubordinate centre--a boil,
a tumor, the introduction and spread of a germ with innumerable progeny
throughout the system, the enlargement out of all reason of an existing
organ--means disease. In the mind, disease begins when any passion
asserts itself as an independent centre of thought and action. The
condition of health in the mind is loyalty to the divine Man within
it.[10] But if loyalty to money become an independent centre of life, or
greed of knowledge, or of fame, or of drink; jealousy, lust, the love of
approbation; or mere following after any so-called virtue for
itself--purity, humility, consistency, or what not--these may grow to
seriously endanger the other. They are, or should be, subordinates; and
though over a long period their insubordination may be a necessary
condition of human progress, yet during all such time they are at war
with each other and with the central Will; the man is torn and
tormented, and is not happy.
And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it must be
remembered, as already said, that there is no strict line between them;
but probably every affection or passion of the mind has its correlative
in the condition of the body--though this latter may or may not be
easily observable. Gluttony _is_ a fever of the digestive apparatus.
What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human
system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct
threats, menaces made against the central authority--against the Man
himself. For the man must rule or disappear; it is impossible to imagine
a man presided over by a Stomach--a walking Stomach, using hands, feet,
and all other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve
its assimilative mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And thus in the
theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all other animals,
as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why the
true man, and rightly, has authority over all animals, and can alone
give them their place in creation.]
So of the Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in
no organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all
organs, and assigning them their arts to play.
Disease then, in body or mind, is from this point of view the break-up
of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity. It is the abeyance of a
central power, and the growth of insubordinate centres--life in each
creature being conceived of as a continual exercise of energy or
conquest, by which external or antagonistic forces (and organisms) are
brought into subjection and compelled into the service of the creature,
or are thrown off as harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a remarkable
power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites which incline to
infest them; while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the
same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey
to the aphis--though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to
no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in the
fields are weakly from want of water the entire crop is sometimes
destroyed by the turnip fly, which then multiplies enormously; but if a
shower or two of rain come before much damage is done the plant will
then grow vigorously, its tissues become more robust and resist the
attacks of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investigations seem to
show that one of the functions of the white corpuscles in the blood is
to devour disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation--thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of the
body--and that with this object they congregate in numbers toward any
part of the body which is wounded or diseased. Or to take an example
from society, it is clear enough that if our social life were really
vivid and healthy, such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and
the policeman above-mentioned would simply be impossible. The material
on which they prey would not exist, and they would either perish or be
transmuted into useful forms. It seems obvious in fact that life in any
organism can only be maintained by some such processes as these--by
which parasitic or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed
into subjection. To define the nature of the power which thus works
towards and creates the distinctive unity of each organism may be
difficult, is probably at present impossible, but that some such power
exists we can hardly refuse to admit. Probably it is more a subject of
the growth of our consciousness, than an object of external scientific
investigation.
In this view, Death is simply the loosening and termination of the
action of this power--over certain regions of the organism; a process by
which, when these superficial parts become hardened and osseous, as in
old age, or irreparably damaged, as in cases of accident, the inward
being sloughs them off, and passes into other spheres. In the case of
man there may be noble and there may be ignoble death, as there may be
noble and ignoble life. The inward self, unable to maintain authority
over the forces committed to its charge, declining from its high
prerogative, swarmed over by parasites, and fallen partially into the
clutch of obscene foes, may at last with shame and torment be driven
forth from the temple in which it ought to have been supreme. Or, having
fulfilled a holy and wholesome time, having radiated divine life and
love through all the channels of body and mind, and as a perfect workman
uses his tools, so having with perfect mastery and nonchalance used all
the materials committed to it, it may quietly and peacefully lay these
down, and unchanged (absolutely unchanged to all but material eyes) pass
on to other spheres appointed.
And now a few words on the medical aspect of the subject. If we accept
any theory (even remotely similar to that just indicated) to the effect
that Health is a positive thing, and not a mere negation of disease, it
becomes pretty clear that no mere investigation of the latter will
enable us to find out what the former is, or bring us nearer to it. You
might as well try to create the ebb and flow of the tides by an
organised system of mops.
Turn your back upon the Sun and go forth into the wildernesses of space
till you come to those limits where the rays of light, faint with
distance, fall dim upon the confines of eternal darkness--and phantoms
and shadows in the half-light are the product of the wavering conflict
betwixt day and night--investigate these shadows, describe them,
classify them, record the changes which take place in them, erect in
vast libraries these records into a monument of human industry and
research; so shall you be at the end as near to a knowledge and
understanding of the sun itself--which all this time you have left
behind you, and on which you have turned your back--as the investigators
of disease are to a knowledge and understanding of what health is. The
solar rays illumine the outer world and give to it its unity and
entirety; so in the inner world of each individual possibly is there
another Sun, which illumines and gives unity to the man, and whose
warmth and light would permeate his system. Wait upon the shining forth
of this inward sun, give free access and welcome to its rays of love,
and free passage for them into the common world around you, and it may
be you will get to know more about health than all the books of medicine
contain, or can tell you.
Or to take the former simile: it is the central force of the Moon which
acting on the great ocean makes all its waters one, and causes them to
rise and fall in timely consent. But take your moon away; hey! now the
tide is flowing too far down this estuary! Station your thousands with
mops, but it breaks through in channel and runlet! Block it here, but it
overflows in a neighboring bay! Appoint an army of swabs there, but to
what end? The infinitest care along the fringe of this great sea can
never do, with all imaginable dirt and confusion, what the central power
does easily, and with unerring grace and providence.
And so of the great (the vast and wonderful) ocean which ebbs and flows
within a man--take away the central guide--and not 20,000 doctors, each
with 20,000 books to consult and 20,000 phials of different contents to
administer, could meet the myriad cases of disease which would ensue, or
bolster up into "wholeness" the being from whom the single radiant unity
had departed.
Probably there has never been an age, nor any country (except
Yankee-land?) in which disease has been so generally prevalent as in
England to-day; and certainly there has never (with the same exception)
been an age or country in which doctors have so swarmed, or in which
medical science has been so powerful, in apparatus, in learning, in
authority, and in actual organisation and number of adherents. How
reconcile this contradiction--if indeed a contradiction it be?
But the fact is that medical science does not contradict disease--any
more than laws abolish crime. Medical science--and doubtless for very
good reasons--makes a fetish of disease, and dances around it. It is (as
a rule) only seen where disease is; it writes enormous tomes on disease;
it induces disease in animals (and even men) for the purpose of studying
it; it knows, to a marvelous extent, the symptoms of disease, its
nature, its causes, its goings out and its comings in; its eyes are
perpetually fixed on disease, till disease (for it) becomes the main
fact of the world and the main object of its worship. Even what is so
gracefully called Hygiene does not get beyond this negative attitude.
And the world still waits for its Healer, who shall tell us--diseased
and suffering as we are--_what_ health is, where it is to be found,
whence it flows; and who having touched this wonderful power within
himself shall not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men.
No, medical science does not, in the main, contradict disease. The same
cause (infidelity and decay of the central life in men) which creates
disease and makes men liable to it, creates students and a science of
the subject. The Moon[11] having gone from over the waters, the good
people rush forth with their mops; and the untimely inundations, and the
mops and the mess and the pother, are all due to the same cause.
As to the lodgment of disease, it is clear that this would take place
easily in a disorganised system--just as a seditious adventurer would
easily effect a landing, and would find insubordinate materials ready at
hand for his use, in a land where the central government was weak. And
as to the treatment of a disease so introduced there are obviously two
methods: one is to reinforce the central power till it is sufficiently
strong of itself to eject the insubordinate elements and restore order;
the other is to attack the malady from outside and if possible destroy
it--(as by doses and decoctions)--independently of the inner vitality,
and leaving that as it was before. The first method would seem the best,
most durable and effective; but it is difficult and slow. It consists in
the adoption of a healthy life, bodily and mental, and will be spoken
of later on. The second may be characterised as the medical method, and
is valuable, or rather I should be inclined to say, _will_ be valuable,
when it has found its place, which is to be subsidiary to the first. It
is too often, however, regarded as superior in importance, and in this
way, though easy of application, has come perhaps to be productive of
more harm than good. The disease may be broken down for the time being,
but, the roots of it not being destroyed, it soon springs up again in
the same or a new form, and the patient is as badly off as ever.
The great positive force of Health, and the power which it has to
_expel_ disease from its neighborhood is a thing realised, I believe, by
few persons. But it _has_ been realised on earth, and will be realised
again when the more squalid elements of our present-day civilisation
have passed away.
III
The result then of our digression is to show that Health--in body or
mind--means unity, integration as opposed to disintegration. In the
animals we find this physical unity existing to a remarkable degree. An
almost unerring instinct and selective power rules their actions and
organisation. Thus a cat before it has fallen (say before it has become
a very wheezy fireside pussy!) is in a sense perfect. The wonderful
consent of its limbs as it runs or leaps, the adaptation of its
muscles, the exactness and inevitableness of its instincts, physical and
affectional; its senses of sight and smell, its cleanliness, nicety as
to food, motherly tact, the expression of its whole body when enraged,
or when watching for prey--all these things are so to speak absolute and
instantaneous--and fill one with admiration. The creature is "whole" or
in one piece: there is no mentionable conflict or division within
it.[12]
Similarly with the other animals, and even with the early man himself.
And so it would appear returning to our subject--that, if we accept the
doctrine of Evolution, there is a progression of animated beings--which,
though not perfect, possess in the main the attribute of Health--from
the lowest forms up to a healthy and instinctive though certainly
limited man. During all this stage the central law is in the ascendant,
and the physical frame of each creature is the fairly clean vehicle of
its expression--varying of course in complexity and degree according to
the point of unfoldment which has been reached. And when thus in the
long process of development the inner Man (which has lain hidden or
dormant within the animal) at last appears, and the creature
consequently takes on the outer frame and faculties of the human being,
which are only as they are because of the inner man which they
represent; when it has passed through stage after stage of animal life,
throwing out tentative types and likenesses of what is to come, and
going through innumerable preliminary exercises in special forms and
faculties, till at last it begins to be able to wear the full majesty of
manhood itself--_then_ it would seem that that long process of
development is drawing to a close, and that the goal of creation must be
within measurable distance.
But then, at that very moment, and when the goal is, so to speak, in
sight, occurs this failure of "wholeness" of which we have spoken, this
partial break-up of the unity of human nature--and man, instead of going
forward any longer in the same line as before, to all appearance
_falls_.
What is the meaning of this loss of unity? What is the cause and purpose
of this fall and centuries-long exile from the earlier Paradise?
There can be but one answer. It is self-knowledge--(which involves in a
sense the abandonment of self). Man has to become conscious of his
destiny--to lay hold of and realise his own freedom and blessedness--to
transfer his consciousness from the outer and mortal part of him to the
inner and undying.
The cat cannot do this. Though perfect in its degree, its interior
unfoldment is yet incomplete. The human soul within it has not yet come
forward and declared itself; some sheathing leaves have yet to open
before the divine flower-bud can be clearly seen. And when at last
(speaking as a fool) the cat becomes a man--when the human soul within
the creature has climbed itself forward and found expression,
transforming the outer frame in the process into that of
humanity--(which is the meaning I suppose of the evolution theory)--then
the creature, though perfect and radiant in the form of Man, still lacks
one thing. It lacks the knowledge of itself; it lacks its own identity,
and the realisation of the manhood to which as a fact it has attained.
In the animals consciousness has never returned upon itself. It radiates
easily outwards; and the creature obeys without let or hesitation, and
with little if any _self_-consciousness, the law of its being. And when
man first appears on the earth, and even up to the threshold of what we
call civilisation, there is much to show that he should in this respect
still be classed with the animals. Though vastly superior to them in
attainments, physical and mental, in power over nature, capacity of
progress, and adaptability, he still in these earlier stages was like an
animal in the unconscious instinctive nature of his action; and on the
other hand, though his moral and intellectual structures were far less
complete than those of the modern man--as was a necessary result of the
absence of self-knowledge--he actually lived more in harmony with
himself and with nature,[13] than does his descendant; his impulses,
both physical and social, were clearer and more unhesitating; and his
unconsciousness of inner discord and sin a great contrast to our modern
condition of everlasting strife and perplexity.
If then to this stage belongs some degree of human perfection and
felicity, yet there remains a much vaster height to be scaled. The human
soul which has wandered darkling for so many thousands of years, from
its tiny spark-like germ in some low form of life to its full splendor
and dignity in man, has yet to come to the _knowledge_ of its wonderful
heritage, has yet to become finally individualised and free, to know
itself immortal, to resume and interpret all its past lives, and to
enter in triumph into the kingdom which it has won.
It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of self-consciousness, or
the disentanglement of the true self from the fleeting and perishable
self. The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and free from care, but
unaware of what they are; to attain self-knowledge man must fall; he
must become less than his true self; he must endure imperfection;
division and strife must enter his nature. To realise the perfect Life,
to know what, how wonderful it is--to understand that all blessedness
and freedom consists in its possession--he must for the moment suffer
divorce from it; the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken up,
crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and by contrast he must attain
to knowledge.
Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek and with it the European
civilisation we have the mystic words "Know Thyself" inscribed on the
temple of the Delphic Apollo; and that first among the legends of the
Semitic race stands that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the
Knowledge of good and evil! To the animal there is no such knowledge, to
the early man there was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man of
the future there will be no such knowledge. It is a temporary
perversion, indicating the disunion of the present-day man--the disunion
of the outer self from the inner--the horrible dual
self-consciousness--which is the means ultimately of a more perfect and
conscious union than could ever have been realised without it--the death
that is swallowed up in victory. "For the first man is of the earth,
earthy; but the second man is the Lord from heaven."
In order then, at this point in his Evolution, to advance any farther,
Man must first fall; in order to know, he must lose. In order to realise
what Health is, how splendid and glorious a possession, he must go
through all the long negative experience of Disease; in order to know
the perfect social life, to understand what power and happiness to
mankind are involved in their true relation to each other, he must learn
the misery and suffering which come from mere individualism and greed;
and in order to find his true Manhood, to discover what a wonderful
power it is, he must first lose it--he must become a prey and a slave to
his own passions and desires--whirled away like Phaethon by the horses
which he cannot control.
This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis in human progress, covers
the ground of all History; and the whole of Civilisation, and all crime
and disease, are only the materials of its immense purpose--themselves
destined to pass away as they arose, but to leave their fruits eternal.
Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation--founded
as we have seen on Property--in every way to disintegrate and corrupt
man--literally to corrupt--to _break up_ the unity of his nature. It
begins with the abandonment of the primitive life and the growth of the
sense of shame (as in the myth of Adam and Eve). From this follows the
disownment of the sacredness of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of
religious worship; love and desire--the inner and the outer
love--hitherto undifferentiated, now become two separate things. (This
no doubt a necessary stage in order for the development of the
_consciousness of love_, but in itself only painful and abnormal.) It
culminates and comes to an end, as to-day, in a complete divorce between
the spiritual reality and the bodily fulfilment--in a vast system of
commercial love, bought and sold, in the brothel and in the palace. It
begins with the forsaking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a
society broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human, amid
every form of luxury, poverty and disease. He who had been the free
child of Nature denies his sonship; he disowns the very breasts that
suckled him. He deliberately turns his back upon the light of the sun,
and hides himself away in boxes with breathing holes (which he calls
houses), living ever more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only
coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run
back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of catching
cold! He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the beasts, every
century swathing himself in more and more layers, more and more
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases to be recognisable
as the Man that was once the crown of the animals, and presents a more
ludicrous spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ.
He ceases to a great extent to use his muscles, his feet become
partially degenerate, his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that
he has to cook his food and make pulps of all his victuals, and his
whole system so obviously on the decline that at last in the end of
time a Kay Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid, that he will
before long become wholly toothless, bald and toeless.
And so with this denial of Nature comes every form of disease; first
delicatesse, daintiness, luxury; then unbalance, enervation, huge
susceptibility to pain. With the shutting of himself away from the
all-healing Power, man inevitably weakens his whole manhood; the central
bond is loosened, and he falls a prey to his own organs. He who before
was unaware of the existence of these latter, now becomes only too
conscious of them (and this--is it not the very object of the process?);
the stomach, the liver and the spleen start out into painful
distinctness before him, the heart loses its equable beat, the lungs
their continuity with the universal air, and the brain becomes hot and
fevered; each organ in turn asserts itself abnormally and becomes a seat
of disorder, every corner and cranny of the body becomes the scene and
symbol of disease, and Man gazes aghast at his own kingdom--whose extent
he had never suspected before--now all ablaze in wild revolt against
him. And then--all going with this period of his development--sweep vast
epidemic trains over the face of the earth, plagues and fevers and
lunacies and world-wide festering sores, followed by armies, ever
growing, of doctors--they too with their retinues of books and bottles,
vaccinations and vivisections, and grinning death's-heads in the rear--a
mad crew, knowing not what they do, yet all unconsciously, doubtless,
fulfilling the great age-long destiny of humanity.
In all this the influence of Property is apparent enough. It is evident
that the growth of property through the increase of man's powers of
production reacts on the man in three ways: to draw him away namely, (1)
from Nature, (2) from his true Self, (3) from his Fellows. In the first
place it draws him away from Nature. That is, that as man's power over
materials increases he creates for himself a sphere and an environment
of his own, in some sense apart and different from the great elemental
world of the winds and the waves, the woods and the mountains, in which
he has hitherto lived. He creates what we call the artificial life, of
houses and cities, and, shutting himself up in these, shuts Nature out.
As a growing boy at a certain point, and partly in order to assert his
independence, wrests himself away from the tender care of his mother,
and even displays--just for the time being--a spirit of opposition to
her, so the growing Man finding out his own powers uses them--for the
time--even to do despite to Nature, and to create himself a world in
which she shall have no part. In the second place the growth of property
draws man away from his true Self. This is clear enough. As his power
over materials and his possessions increases, man finds the means of
gratifying his senses at will. Instead of being guided any longer by
that continent and "whole" instinct which characterises the animals,
his chief motive is now to use his powers to gratify this or that sense
or desire. These become abnormally magnified, and the man soon places
his main good in their satisfaction; and abandons his true Self for his
organs, the whole for the parts. Property draws the man outwards,
stimulating the external part of his being, and for a time mastering
him, overpowers the central Will, and brings about his disintegration
and corruption. Lastly, Property by thus stimulating the external and
selfish nature in Man, draws him away from his Fellows. In the anxiety
to possess things for himself, in order to gratify his own bumps, he is
necessarily brought into conflict with his neighbor and comes to regard
him as an enemy. For the true Self of man consists in his organic
relation with the whole body of his fellows; and when the man abandons
his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The
mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and
die. But when the outer man tries to separate himself from the inner,
the unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality
begins--a false and impossible individuality of course, but the only
means of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality. With the
advent of a Civilisation then founded on Property the unity of the old
tribal society is broken up. The ties of blood relationship which were
the foundation of the gentile system and the guarantees of the old
fraternity and equality become dissolved in favor of powers and
authorities founded on mere possession. The growth of Wealth
disintegrates the ancient Society; the temptations of power, of
possession, etc., which accompany it, wrench the individual from his
moorings; personal greed rules; "each man for himself" becomes the
universal motto; the hand of every man is raised against his brother,
and at last society itself becomes an organisation by which the rich
fatten upon the vitals of the poor, the strong upon the murder of the
weak. [It is interesting in this connection to find that Lewis Morgan
makes the invention of a written alphabet and the growth of the
conception of private property the main characteristics of the
civilisation-period as distinguished from the periods of savagery and
barbarism which preceded it; for the invention of writing marks perhaps
better than anything else could do the period when Man becomes
_self-conscious_--when he records his own doings and thoughts, and so
commences History proper; and the growth of private property marks the
period when he begins to sunder himself from his fellows, when therefore
the conception of sin (or separation) first enters in, and with it all
the long period of moral perplexity, and the denial of that community of
life between himself and his fellows which is really of the essence of
man's being.]
And then arises the institution of Government.
Hitherto this had not existed except in a quite rudimentary form. The
early communities troubled themselves little about individual ownership,
and what government they had was for the most part essentially
democratic--as being merely a choice of leaders among blood-relations
and social equals. But when the delusion that man can exist for himself
alone--his outer and, as it were, accidental self apart from the great
inner and cosmical self by which he is one with his fellows--when this
delusion takes possession of him, it is not long before it finds
expression in some system of private property. The old community of life
and enjoyment passes away, and each man tries to grab the utmost he can,
and to retire into his own lair for its consumption. Private
accumulations arise; the natural flow of the bounties of life is dammed
back, and artificial barriers of Law have to be constructed in order to
preserve the unequal levels. Outrage and Fraud follow in the wake of the
desire of possession; force has to be used by the possessors in order to
maintain the law-barriers against the non-possessors; classes are
formed; and finally the formal Government arises, mainly as the
expression of such force; and preserves itself, as best it can, until
such time as the inequalities which it upholds become too glaring, and
the pent social waters gathering head burst through once more and regain
their natural levels.
Thus Morgan in his "Ancient Society" points out over and over again that
the civilised state rests upon territorial and property marks and
qualifications, and not upon a personal basis as did the ancient _gens_,
or the tribe; and that the civilised government correspondingly takes on
quite a different character and function from the simple organisation
of the gens. He says (p. 124), "Monarchy is incompatible with
gentilism." Also with regard to the relation of Property to Civilisation
and Government he makes the following pregnant remarks (p. 505): "It is
impossible to over-estimate the influence of property in the
civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and
Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the
idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in
becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are instituted with
primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It
introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production; and after
the experience of several thousand years it caused the abolition of
slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making
machine." And in another passage on the same subject, "The dissolution
of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which
property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements
of self-destruction. Democracy is the next higher plane. It will be a
revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the
ancient gentes."
The institution of Government is in fact the evidence in social life
that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must
resort to an outward one. Losing touch with the inward Man--who is his
true guide--he declines upon an external law, which must always be
false. If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of
his fellows, no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when this
vital unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved
by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive
and instinctive social life there springs up a form of government which
is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people;
but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a
ruling class or caste.
Perhaps the sincerest, and often though not always the earliest, form of
Government is Monarchy. The sentiment of human unity having been already
partly but not quite lost, the people choose--in order to hold society
together--a man to rule over them who has this sentiment in a high
degree. He represents the true Man and therefore the people. This is
often a time of extensive warfare and the formation of nations. And it
is interesting in this connection to note that the quite early "Kings"
or leaders of each nation just prior to the civilisation period were
generally associated with the highest religious functions, as in the
case of the Roman _rex_, the Greek _basileus_, the early Egyptian Kings,
Moses among the Israelites, and Druid leaders of the Britons, and so on.
Later, and as the central authority gets more and more shadowy in each
man, and the external attraction of Property greater, so it does in
Society. The temporal and spiritual powers part company. The king--who
at first represented the Divine Spirit or soul of society, recedes into
the background, and his nobles of high degree (who may be compared to
the nobler, more generous, qualities of the mind) begin to take his
place. This is the Aristocracy and the Feudal Age--the Timocracy of
Plato; and is marked by the appearance of large private tenures of land,
and the growth of slavery and serfdom--the slavery thus outwardly
appearing in society being the symbol of the inward enslavement of the
man.
Then comes the Commercial Age--the Oligarchy or Plutocracy of Plato.
Honour quite gives place to material wealth; the rulers rule not by
personal or hereditary, but by property qualifications. Parliaments and
Constitutions and general Palaver are the order of the day.
Wage-slavery, usury, mortgages, and other abominations, indicate the
advance of the mortal process. In the individual man gain is the end of
existence; industry and scientific cunning are his topmost virtues.
Last of all the break-up is complete. The individual loses all memory
and tradition of his heavenly guide and counterpart; his nobler passions
fail for want of a leader to whom to dedicate themselves; his industry
and his intellect serve but to minister to his little swarming desires.
This is the era of anarchy--the democracy of Carlyle; the rule of the
rabble, and mob-law; caucuses and cackle, competition and universal
greed, breaking out in cancerous tyrannies and plutocracies--a mere
chaos and confusion of society. For just as we saw in the human body,
when the inner and positive force of Health has departed from it, that
it falls a prey to parasites which overspread and devour it; so, when
the central inspiration departs out of social life, does it writhe with
the mere maggots of individual greed, and at length fall under the
dominion of the most monstrous egotist who has been bred from its
corruption.
Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of the symptoms of the
"disease," which, as said before, runs much (though not quite) the same
course in the various nations which it attacks. And if this last stage
were really the end of all, and the true Democracy, there were indeed
little left to hope for. No words of Carlyle could blast that black
enough. But this is no true Democracy. Here in this "each for himself"
is no rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it. Here
is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and primæval
society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap. The true Democracy has
yet to come. Here in this present stage is only the final denial of all
outward and class government, in preparation for the restoration of the
inner and true authority. Here in this stage the task of civilisation
comes to an end; the purport and object of all these centuries is
fulfilled; the bitter experience that mankind had to pass through is
completed; and out of this Death and all the torture and unrest which
accompanies it, comes at last the Resurrection. Man has sounded the
depths of alienation from his own divine spirit, he has drunk the dregs
of the cup of suffering, he has literally descended into Hell;
henceforth he turns, both in the individual and in society, and mounts
deliberately and consciously back again towards the unity which he has
lost.[14]
And the false democracy parts aside for the disclosure of the true
Democracy which has been formed beneath it--which is not an external
government at all, but an inward rule--the rule of the mass-Man in each
unit-man. For no outward government can be anything but a make-shift--a
temporary hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub together while the new
life is forming inside--a device of the civilisation-period. Farther
than this it cannot go, since no true life can rely upon an external
support, and, when the true life of society comes, all its forms will be
fluid and spontaneous and voluntary.
IV
And now, by way of a glimpse into the future--after this long digression
what is the route that man will take?
This is a subject that I hardly dare tackle. "The morning wind ever
blows," says Thoreau, "the poem of creation is uninterrupted--but few
are the ears that hear it." And how can we, gulfed as we are in this
present whirlpool, conceive rightly the glory which awaits us? No limits
that our present knowledge puts need alarm us; the impossibilities will
yield very easily when the time comes; and the anatomical difficulty as
to how and where the wings are to grow will vanish when they are felt
sprouting!
It can hardly be doubted that the tendency will be--indeed is already
showing itself--towards a return to nature and community of human life.
This is the way back to the lost Eden, or rather forward to the new
Eden, of which the old was only a figure. Man has to undo the wrappings
and the mummydom of centuries, by which he has shut himself from the
light of the sun and lain in seeming death, preparing silently his
glorious resurrection--for all the world like the funny old chrysalis
that he is. He has to emerge from houses and all his other hiding
places wherein so long ago ashamed (as at the voice of God in the
garden) he concealed himself--and Nature must once more become his home,
as it is the home of the animals and the angels.
As it is written in the old magical formula: "Man clothes himself to
descend, unclothes himself to ascend." Over his spiritual or wind-like
body he puts on a material or earthy body; over his earth-body he puts
on the skins of animals and other garments; then he hides this body in a
house behind curtains and stone walls--which become to it as secondary
skins and prolongations of itself. So that between the man and his true
life there grows a dense and impenetrable hedge; and, what with the
cares and anxieties connected with his earth-body and all its skins, he
soon loses the knowledge that he is a Man at all; his true self slumbers
in a deep and agelong swoon.
But the instinct of all who desire to deliver the divine _imago_ within
them, is, in something more than the literal sense, towards unclothing.
And the process of evolution or exfoliation itself is nothing but a
continual unclothing of Nature, by which the perfect human Form which is
at the root of it comes nearer and nearer to its manifestation.
Thus, in order to restore the Health which he has lost, man has in the
future to tend in this direction. Life indoors and in houses has to
become a fraction only, instead of the principal part of existence as it
is now. Garments similarly have to be simplified. How far this process
may go it is not necessary now to enquire. It is sufficiently obvious
that our domestic life and clothing may be at once greatly reduced in
complexity, and with the greatest advantage--made subsidiary instead of
being erected into the fetishes which they are. And everyone may feel
assured that each gain in this direction is a gain in true life--whether
it be the head that goes uncovered to the air of heaven, or the feet
that press bare the magnetic earth, or the elementary raiment that
allows through its meshes the light itself to reach the vital organs.
The life of the open air, familiarity with the winds and waves, clean
and pure food, the companionship of the animals--the very wrestling with
the great Mother for his food--all these things will tend to restore
that relationship which man has so long disowned; and the consequent
instreaming of energy into his system will carry him to perfections of
health and radiance of being at present unsuspected.
Of course, it will be said that many of these things are difficult to
realise in our country, that an indoor life, with all its concomitants,
is forced upon us by the climate. But if this is to some small--though
very small--extent true, it forms no reason why we should not still take
advantage of every opportunity to push in the direction indicated. It
must be remembered, too, that our climate is greatly of our own
creation. If the atmosphere of many of our great towns and of the lands
for miles in their neighbourhood is devitalised and deadly--so that in
cold weather it grants to the poor mortal no compensating power of
resistance, but compels him at peril of his life to swathe himself in
greatcoats and mufflers--the blame is none but ours. It is we who have
covered the lands with a pall of smoke, and are walking to our own
funerals under it.
That this climate, however, at its best may not be suited to the highest
developments of human life is quite possible. Because Britain has been
the scene of some of the greatest episodes of Civilisation, it does not
follow that she will keep the lead in the period that is to follow; and
the Higher Communities of the future will perhaps take their rise in
warmer lands, where life is richer and fuller, more spontaneous and more
generous, than it can be here.
Another point in this connection is the food question. For the
restoration of the central vigour when lost or degenerate, a diet
consisting mainly of fruits and grains is most adapted. Animal food
often gives for the time being a lot of nervous energy--and may be
useful for special purposes; but the energy is of a spasmodic feverish
kind; the food has a tendency to inflame the subsidiary centres, and so
to diminish the central control. Those who live mainly on animal food
are specially liable to disease--and not only physically; for their
minds also fall more easily a prey to desires and sorrows. In times
therefore of grief or mental trouble of any kind, as well as in times of
bodily sickness, immediate recourse should be had to the more elementary
diet. The body under this diet endures work with less fatigue, is less
susceptible to pain, and to cold; and heals its wounds with
extraordinary celerity; all of which facts point in the same direction.
It may be noted, too, that foods of the seed kind--by which I mean all
manner of fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, eggs, etc. (and I may include
milk in its various forms of butter, cheese, curds, and so forth), not
only contain by their nature the elements of life in their most
condensed forms, but have the additional advantage that they can be
appropriated without injury to any living creature--for even the cabbage
may inaudibly scream when torn up by the roots and boiled, but the
strawberry plant _asks_ us to take of its fruit, and paints it red
expressly that we may see and devour it! Both of which considerations
must convince us that this kind of food is most fitted to develop the
kernel of man's life.
Which all means cleanness. The unity of our nature being restored, the
instinct of bodily cleanness, _both_ within and without, which is such a
marked characteristic of the animals, will again characterise
mankind--only now instead of a blind instinct it will be a conscious,
joyous one; dirt being only disorder and obstruction. And thus the whole
human being, mind and body, becoming clean and radiant from its inmost
centre to its farthest circumference--"transfigured"--the distinction
between the words spiritual and material disappears. In the words of
Whitman, "objects gross and the unseen soul are one."
But this return to Nature, and identification in some sort with the
great cosmos, does not involve a denial or depreciation of human life
and interests. It is not uncommonly supposed that there is some kind of
antagonism between Man and Nature, and that to recommend a life closer
to the latter means mere asceticism and eremitism; and unfortunately
this antagonism does exist to-day, though it certainly will not exist
for ever. To-day it is unfortunately perfectly true that Man is the only
animal who, instead of adorning and beautifying, makes Nature hideous by
his presence. The fox and the squirrel may make their homes in the wood
and add to its beauty in so doing; but when Alderman Smith plants his
villa there, the gods pack up their trunks and depart; they can bear it
no longer. The Bushmen can hide themselves and become indistinguishable
on a slope of bare rock; they twine their naked little yellow bodies
together, and look like a heap of dead sticks; but when the chimney-pot
hat and frock-coat appear, the birds fly screaming from the trees. This
was the great glory of the Greeks that they accepted and perfected
Nature; as the Parthenon sprang out of the limestone terraces of the
Acropolis, carrying the natural lines of the rock by gradations scarce
perceptible into the finished and human beauty of frieze and pediment,
and as, above, it was open for the blue air of heaven to descend into it
for a habitation; so throughout in all their best work and life did they
stand in this close relation to the earth and the sky and to all
instinctive and elemental things, admitting no gulf between themselves
and them, but only perfecting their expressiveness and beauty. And some
day we shall again understand this which, in the very sunrise of true
Art, the Greeks so well understood. Possibly some day we shall again
build our houses or dwelling places so simple and elemental in character
that they will fit in the nooks of the hills or along the banks of the
streams or by the edges of the woods without disturbing the harmony of
the landscape or the songs of the birds. Then the great temples,
beautiful on every height, or by the shores of the rivers and the lakes,
will be the storehouses of all precious and lovely things. There men,
women and children will come to share in the great and wonderful common
life, the gardens around will be sacred to the unharmed and welcome
animals; there all store and all facilities of books and music and art
for every one, there a meeting place for social life and intercourse,
there dances and games and feasts. Every village, every little
settlement, will have such hall or halls. No need for private
accumulations. Gladly will each man, and more gladly still each woman,
take his or her treasures, except what are immediately or necessarily in
use, to the common centre, where their value will be increased a hundred
and a thousand fold by the greater number of those who can enjoy them,
and where far more perfectly and with far less toil they can be tended
than if scattered abroad in private hands. At one stroke half the labour
and all the anxiety of domestic caretaking will be annihilated. The
private dwelling places, no longer costly and labyrinthine in proportion
to the value and number of the treasures they contain, will need no
longer to have doors and windows jealously closed against fellow men or
mother nature. The sun and air will have access to them, the indwellers
will have unfettered egress. Neither man nor woman will be tied in
slavery to the lodge which they inhabit; and in becoming once more a
part of nature, the human habitation will at length cease to be what it
is now for at least half the human race--a prison.
Men often ask about the new Architecture--what, and of what sort, it is
going to be. But to such a question there can be no answer till a new
understanding of life has entered into people's minds, and then the
answer will be clear enough. For as the Greek Temples and the Gothic
Cathedrals were built by people who themselves lived but frugally as we
should think, and were ready to dedicate their best work and chief
treasure to the gods and the common life; and as to-day when we must
needs have for ourselves spacious and luxurious villas, we seem to be
unable to design a decent church or public building; so it will not be
till we once more find our main interest and life in the life of the
community and the gods that a new spirit will inspire our architecture.
Then when our Temples and Common Halls are not designed to glorify an
individual architect or patron, but are built for the use of free men
and women, to front the sky and the sea and the sun, to spring out of
the earth, companionable with the trees and the rocks, not alien in
spirit from the sunlit globe itself or the depth of the starry
night--then I say their form and structure will quickly determine
themselves, and men will have no difficulty in making them beautiful.
And similarly with the homes or dwelling places of the people. Various
as these may be for the various wants of men, whether for a single
individual or for a family, or for groups of individuals or families,
whether to the last degree simple, or whether more or less ornate and
complex, still the new conception, the new needs of life, will
necessarily dominate them and give them form by a law unfolding from
within.
In such new human life then--its fields, its farms, its workshops, its
cities--always the work of man perfecting and beautifying the lands,
aiding the efforts of the sun and soil, giving voice to the desire of
the mute earth--in such new communal life near to nature, so far from
any asceticism or inhospitality, we are fain to see far more humanity
and sociability than ever before: an infinite helpfulness and sympathy,
as between the children of a common mother. Mutual help and combination
will then have become spontaneous and instinctive: each man contributing
to the service of his neighbor as inevitably and naturally as the right
hand goes to help the left in the human body--and for precisely the same
reason. Every man--think of it!--will do the work which he _likes_,
which he desires to do, which is obviously before him to do, and which
he knows will be useful, without thought of wages or reward; and the
reward will come to him as inevitably and naturally as in the human body
the blood flows to the member which is exerting itself. All the endless
burden of the adjustments of labour and wages, of the war of duty and
distaste, of want and weariness, will be thrown aside--all the huge
waste of work done against the grain will be avoided; out of the endless
variety of human nature will spring a perfectly natural and infinite
variety of occupations, all mutually contributive; Society at last will
be free and the human being after long ages will have attained to
deliverance.
This is the Communism which Civilisation has always _hated_, as it hated
Christ. Yet it is inevitable; for the cosmical man, the instinctive
elemental man accepting and crowning nature, necessarily fulfils the
universal law of nature. As to External Government and Law, they will
disappear; for they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes
of Inward Government and Order. Society in its final state is neither a
Monarchy, nor an Aristocracy nor a Democracy, nor an Anarchy, and yet in
another sense it is all of these. It is an Anarchy because there is no
outward rule, but only an inward and invisible spirit of life; it is a
Democracy because it is the rule of the Mass-man, or Demos, in each unit
man; it is an Aristocracy because there are degrees and ranks of such
inward power in all men; and it is a Monarchy because all these ranks
and powers merge in a perfect unity and central control at last. And so
it appears that the outer forms of government which belong to the
Civilisation-period are only the expression in separate external symbols
of the facts of the true inner life of society.
And just as thus the various external forms of government during the
Civilisation-period find their justification and interpretation in the
ensuing period, so will it be with the mechanical and other products of
the present time; they will be taken up, and find their proper place and
use in the time to come. They will not be refused; but they will have to
be brought into subjection. Our locomotives, machinery, telegraphic and
postal systems; our houses, furniture, clothes, books, our fearful and
wonderful cookery, strong drinks, teas, tobaccos; our medical and
surgical appliances; high-faluting sciences and philosophies, and all
other engines hitherto of human bewilderment, have simply to be reduced
to abject subjection to the real man. All these appliances, and a
thousand others such as we hardly dream of, will come in to perfect his
power and increase his freedom; but they will not be the objects of a
mere fetish-worship as now. Man will use them, instead of their using
him. His real life will lie in a region far beyond them. But in thus for
a moment denying and "mastering" the products of Civilisation, will he
for the first time discover their true value, and reap from them an
enjoyment unknown before.
The same with the moral powers. As said before, the knowledge of good
and evil at a certain point passes away, or becomes absorbed into a
higher knowledge. The perception of Sin goes with a certain weakness in
the man. As long as there is conflict and division within him, so long
does he seem to perceive conflicting and opposing principles in the
world without. As long as the objects of the outer world excite emotions
in him which pass beyond his control, so long do those objects stand as
the signals of evil--of disorder and sin. Not that the objects are bad
in themselves, or even the emotions which they excite, but that all
through this period these things serve to the man as indications of
_his_ weakness. But when the central power is restored in man and all
things are reduced to his service, it is impossible for him to see
badness in anything. The bodily is no longer antagonistic to the
spiritual love, but is absorbed into it. All his passions take their
places perfectly naturally, and become, when the occasions arise, the
vehicles of his expression. Vices under existing conditions are vices
simply because of the inordinate and disturbing influence they exercise,
but will cease again to be vices when the man regains his proper
command. Thus Socrates having a clean soul in a clean body could drink
his boon companions under the table and then go out himself to take the
morning air--what was a blemish and defect in them being simply an added
power of enjoyment to himself!
The point of difference throughout (being the transference of the centre
of gravity of life and consciousness from the partial to the universal
man) is symbolised by the gradual resumption of more universal
conditions. That is to say that during the civilisation-period, the body
being systematically wrapped in clothes, the _head_ alone represents
man--the little finnikin, intellectual, _self-conscious_ man in
contra-distinction to the cosmical man represented by the entirety of
the bodily organs. The body has to be delivered from its swathings in
order that the cosmical consciousness may once more reside in the human
breast. We have to become "all face" again--as the savage said of
himself.[15]
Where the cosmic self is, there is no more self-consciousness. The body
and what is ordinarily called the self are felt to be only parts of the
true self, and the ordinary distinctions of inner and outer, egotism and
altruism, etc., lose a good deal of their value. Thought no longer
returns upon the local self as the chief object of regard, but
consciousness is continually radiant from it, filling the body and
overflowing upon external Nature. Thus the Sun in the physical world is
the allegory of the true self. The worshiper must adore the Sun, he must
saturate himself with sunlight, and take the physical Sun into himself.
Those who live by fire and candle-light are filled with phantoms; their
thoughts are Will-o'-th'-wisp-like images of themselves, and they are
tormented by a horrible self-consciousness.
And when the Civilisation-period has passed away, the old
Nature-religion--perhaps greatly grown--will come back. This immense
stream of religious life which, beginning far beyond the horizon of
earliest history, has been deflected into various metaphysical and other
channels--of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the like--during the
historical period, will once more gather itself together to float on its
bosom all the arks and sacred vessels of human progress. Man will once
more _feel_ his unity with his fellows, he will feel his unity with the
animals, with the mountains and the streams, with the earth itself and
the slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract dogma of
Science or Theology, but as a living and ever-present fact. Ages back
this has been understood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial is
saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols; and long before
Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were the main forms of
religion. That is to say, men instinctively felt and worshiped the great
life coming to them through Sex, the great life coming to them from the
deeps of Heaven. They deified both. They placed their gods--their own
human forms--in sex, they placed them in the sky. And not only so, but
wherever they felt this kindred human life--in the animals, in the ibis,
the bull, the lamb, the snake, the crocodile; in the trees and flowers,
the oak, the ash, the laurel, the hyacinth; in the streams and
water-falls, on the mountain-sides or in the depths of the sea--they
placed them. The whole universe was full of a life which, though not
always friendly, was _human_ and kindred to their own, _felt_ by them,
not reasoned about, but simply perceived. To the early man the notion of
his having a separate individuality could only with difficulty occur;
hence he troubled himself not with the suicidal questionings concerning
the whence and whither which now vex the modern mind.[16] For what
causes these questions to be asked is simply the wretched feeling of
isolation, actual or prospective, which man necessarily has when he
contemplates himself as a separate atom in this immense universe--the
gulf which lies below seemingly ready to swallow him, and the anxiety to
find some mode of escape. But when he feels once more that he, that _he_
himself, is absolutely indivisibly and indestructibly a part of this
great whole--why then there is no gulf into which he can possibly fall;
when he is sensible of the fact, why then the _how_ of its realisation,
though losing none of its interest, becomes a matter for whose solution
he can wait and work in faith and contentment of mind. The Sun or Sol,
visible image of his very Soul, closest and most vital to him of all
mortal things, occupying the illimitable heaven, feeding all with its
life; the Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective thought, the
conscious Man, measurer of Time, mirror of the Sun; the planetary
passions wandering to and fro, yet within bounds; the starry destinies;
the changes of the earth, and the seasons; the upward growth and
unfoldment of all organic life; the emergence of the perfect Man,
towards whose birth all creation groans and travails--all these things
will return to become realities, and to be the frame or setting of his
supra-mundane life. The meaning of the old religions will come back to
him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked
dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the
stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a
hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations--all
the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of
mankind--the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin
Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the
delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and
beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will
adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within. The
same sense of vital perfection and exaltation which can be traced in the
early and pre-civilisation peoples--only a thousand times intensified,
defined, illustrated and purified--will return to irradiate the redeemed
and delivered Man.
In suggesting thus the part which Civilisation has played in history, I
am aware that the word itself is difficult to define--is at best only
one of those phantom-generalisations which the mind is forced to employ;
also that the account I have given of it is sadly imperfect, leaning
perhaps too much to the merely negative and destructive aspect of this
thousand-year long lapse of human evolution. I would also remind the
reader that though it is perfectly true that under the dissolving
influence of civilisation empire after empire has gone under and
disappeared, and the current of human progress time after time has only
been restored again by a fresh influx of savagery, yet its corruptive
tendency has never had a quite unlimited fling; but that all down the
ages of its dominance over the earth we can trace the tradition of a
healing and redeeming power at work in the human breast and an
anticipation of the second advent of the son of man. Certain
institutions, too, such as Art and the Family (though it seems not
unlikely that both of these will greatly change when the special
conditions of their present existence have disappeared), have served to
keep the sacred flame alive; the latter preserving in island-miniatures,
as it were, the ancient communal humanity when the seas of individualism
and greed covered the general face of the earth; the former keeping up,
so to speak, a navel-cord of contact with Nature, and a means of
utterance of primal emotions else unsatisfiable in the world around.
And if it seem extravagant to suppose that Society will ever emerge from
the chaotic condition of strife and perplexity in which we find it all
down the lapse of historical time, or to hope that the
civilisation-process which has terminated fatally so invariably in the
past will ever eventuate in the establishment of a higher and more
perfect health-condition, we may for our consolation remember that
to-day there are features in the problem which have never been present
before. In the first place, to-day Civilisation is no longer isolated,
as in the ancient world, in surrounding floods of savagery and
barbarism, but it practically covers the globe, and the outlying
savagery is so feeble as not possibly to be a menace to it. This may at
first appear a drawback, for (it will be said) if Civilisation be not
renovated by the influx of external Savagery its own inherent flaws will
destroy society all the sooner. And there would be some truth in this if
it were not for the following consideration, namely, that while for the
first time in History Civilisation is now practically continuous over
the globe, now also for the first time can we descry forming in
continuous line _within its very structure_ the forces which are
destined to destroy it and to bring about the new order. While hitherto
isolated communisms, as suggested, have existed here and there and from
time to time, now for the first time in History both the masses and the
thinkers of all the advanced nations of the world are consciously
feeling their way towards the establishment of a socialistic and
communal life on a vast scale. The present competitive society is more
and more rapidly becoming a mere dead formula and husk within which the
outlines of the new and _human_ society are already discernible.
Simultaneously, and as if to match this growth, a move towards Nature
and Savagery is for the first time taking place from within, instead of
being forced upon society from without. The nature movement begun years
ago in literature and art is now, among the more advanced sections of
the civilised world, rapidly realising itself in actual life, going so
far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products
of Civilisation, and developing among others into a gospel of salvation
by sandals and sunbaths! It is in these two movements--towards a complex
human Communism and towards individual freedom and Savagery--in some
sort balancing and correcting each other, and both visibly growing up
within, though utterly foreign to--our present-day Civilisation, that we
have fair grounds, I think, for looking forward to its cure.
NOTES
(See p. 26) The following remarks by Mr. H. B. Cotterill on the
natives around Lake Nyassa, among whom he lived at a time, 1876-8,
when the region was almost unvisited, may be of interest. "In
regard of merely 'animal' development and well-being, that is in
the delicate perfection of bodily faculties (perceptive), the
African savage is as a rule incomparably superior to us. One feels
like a child, utterly dependent on them, when travelling or hunting
with them. It is true that many may be found (especially amongst
the weaker tribes that have been slave-hunted or driven into barren
corners) who are half-starved and wizened, but as a rule they are
splendid animals. In _character_ there is a great want of that
strength which in the educated civilised man is secured by the
roots striking out into the Past and Future--and in spite of their
immense perceptive superiority they feel and acknowledge the
superior force of character in the white man. They are the very
converse of the Stoic self-sufficient sage--like children in their
'admiration' and worship of the Unknown. Hence their absolute want
of _Conceit_, though they possess self-command and dignity. They
are, to those they love and respect, faithful and devoted--their
faithfulness and truthfulness are dictated by no 'categorical
imperative,' but by personal affection. Towards an enemy they can
be, without any conscientious scruples, treacherous and inhumanly
cruel. I should say that there is scarcely any possible idea that
is so foreign to the savage African mind as that of general
philanthropy or enemy-love."
"In _endurance_ the African savage beats us hollow (except trained
athletes). On one occasion my men rowed my boat with 10 foot oars
against the wind in a choppy sea for _25 hours at one go_, across
Kuwirwe Bay, about 60 miles. They never once stopped or left their
seats--just handed round a handful of rice now and then. I was at
the helm all the time--and had enough of it!... They carry 80 lbs.
on their heads for 10 hours through swamps and jungles. Four of my
men carried a sick man weighing 14 stones in a hammock for 200
miles, right across the dreaded Malikata Swamp. But for _sudden_
emergencies, squalls, etc., they are nowhere."
(See p. 27) "So lovely a scene made easily credible the suggestion,
otherwise highly probable, that the Golden Age was no mere fancy of
the poets, but a reminiscence of the facts of social life in its
primitive organisation of village and house-communities." (J. S.
Stuart-Glennie's _Europe and Asia_, ch. i. Servia.)
(See p. 72) "It was only on the up-break of the primitive
socialisms that the passionate desire of, and therefore belief in,
individual Immortality arose. With an intense feeling, not of an
independent individual life, but of a dependent common life, there
is no passionate desire of, though there may be more or less of
belief in, a continuance after death of individual existence."
(_Ibid_, p. 161.)
Following is an extract from a letter from my friend Havelock
Ellis, which he kindly allows me to reprint. The passage is
interesting as indicating _one_ cause, at any rate, of the failure
of the modern civilisations. "Your remark that you are
re-publishing _Civilisation: its Cause and Cure_ has led me to read
it once again, and I see how well adapted it is for reissue just
now when there is so widespread a discontent with 'civilisation.' I
do not see any reason for changing the essay, though, no doubt,
much might be added to supplement it. What has, however, struck me
is that you leave out of account the _reason_ for the greater
health, vigour, and high spirit of savages (when such conditions
exist), and that is _the more stringent natural_ selection among
savages owing to the greater hardness of their life. You doubtless
know ch. xvii of Westermarck's _Moral Ideas_, where he shows how
widespread among savages (when they have got past the first crude
primitive stage), and in the ancient civilisations, was the
practice of infanticide applied to inferior babies and the habit of
allowing sick persons to die. That was evidently the secret of the
natural superiority of the savage and of the men of the old
civilisation, for the Greeks and Romans were very stringent in this
matter. The flabbiness of the civilised and the prevalence of
doctors and hygienists, which you make fun of, is due to the modern
tenderness for human life which is afraid to kill off even the most
worthless specimens and so lowers the whole level of 'civilised'
humanity. Introduce a New Hardness in this matter and we should
return to the high level of savagery, while the doctors would
disappear as if by magic. I don't myself believe we _can_ introduce
this hardness; and that is why I attach so much importance to
_intelligent_ eugenics, working through birth-control, as the only
_now possible_ way of getting towards that high natural level you
aim at."--HAVELOCK ELLIS (1920).
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is interesting to note that the "sense of Sin" seems now (1920)
to have nearly passed away. And this fact probably indicates a
considerable impending change in our Social Order.
[2] For proof I must refer the reader to Engels, or to his own studies
of history.
[3] Say like the Homeric Greeks, or the Spartans of the Lycurgus period.
[4] _Matabele Land and the Victoria Falls_, p. 209.
[5] A similar physical health and power of life are also developed among
Europeans who have lived for long periods in more native conditions. It
is not to our _race_, which is probably superior to any in capacity, but
to the state in which we live that we must ascribe our defect in this
particular matter.
[6] See Col. Dodge's _Our Wild Indians_.
[7] Wood's _Natural History of Man_.
[8] See Appendix.
[9] See Note at end of this chapter.
[10] No words or theory even of morality can express or formulate
this--no enthronement of _any_ virtue can take its place; for all virtue
enthroned before our humanity becomes vice, and worse than vice.
[11] It is curious that this word seems to have the same root as the
word Man, the original idea apparently being Order, or Measure.
[12] And with regard to disease, though it is not maintained that among
the animals there is anything like immunity from it--since diseases of a
more or less parasitic character are common in all tribes of plants and
animals--still they seem to be rarer, and the organic instinct of health
greater, than in the civilised man.
[13] As to the unity of these wild races with Nature, that is a matter
seemingly beyond dispute; their keenness of sense, sensitiveness to
atmospheric changes, knowledge of properties of plants and habits of
animals, etc., have been the subject of frequent remark; but beyond
this, their strong _feeling_ of union with the universal spirit,
probably only dimly self conscious, but expressing itself very markedly
and clearly in their customs, is most strange and pregnant of meaning.
The dances of the Andaman Islanders on the sands at night, the wild
festival of the new moon among the Fans and other African tribes, the
processions through the forests, the chants and dull thudding of drums,
the torture-dances of the young Red Indian bravos in the burning heat of
the sun; the Dionysiac festivals among the early Greeks; and indeed the
sacrificial nature-rites and carnivals and extraordinary powers of
second-sight found among all primitive peoples; all these things
indicate clearly a faculty which, though it had hardly become
self-conscious enough to be what we call religion, was yet in truth the
foundation element of religion, and the germ of some human powers which
wait yet to be developed.
[14] There is another point worth noting as characteristic of the
civilisation-period. This is the abnormal development of the abstract
intellect in comparison with the physical senses on the one hand, and
the moral sense on the other. Such a result might be expected, seeing
that abstraction from reality is naturally the great engine of that
false individuality or apartness, which it is the object of Civilisation
to produce. As it is, during this period man builds himself an
intellectual world apart from the great actual universe around him; the
"ghosts of things" are studied in books; the student lives indoors, he
cannot face the open air--his theories "may prove very well in
lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along
the landscape and flowing currents"; children are "educated" afar from
actual life; huge phantom-temples of philosophy and science are reared
upon the most slender foundations; and in these he lives defended from
actual fact. For as a drop of water, when it comes in contact with
red-hot iron, wraps itself in a cloud of vapor and is saved from
destruction, so the little mind of man, lest it should touch the burning
truth of Nature and God and be consumed, evolves at each point of
contact a veil of insubstantial thought which allows it for a time to
exist apart, and becomes the nurse of its self-consciousness.
[15] See Alonso di Ovalle's _Account of the Kingdom of Chile_ in
Churchill's _Collection of Voyages and Travels_, 1724.
[16] See Notes at end of this chapter.
MODERN SCIENCE: A CRITICISM
[Greek: panti logô logos isos antikeitai.]
It is one of the difficulties which meet anyone who suggests that modern
science is not wholly satisfactory, that it is immediately assumed that
the writer is covertly defending what Ingersoll calls the "rib-story,"
or that he wishes to restore belief in the literal inspiration of the
Bible. But, religious controversy apart, and while admitting that
Science has done a great work in cleaning away the kitchen-middens of
superstition and opening the path to clearer and saner views of the
world, it is possible--and there is already a growing feeling that
way--that her positive contributions to our comprehension of the order
of the universe have in late times been disappointing, and that even her
methods are only of limited applicability. After a glorious burst of
perhaps fifty years, amid great acclamations and good hopes that the
crafty old universe was going to be caught in her careful net, Science,
it must be confessed, now finds herself in almost every direction in
the most hopeless quandaries; and, whether the rib-story be true or not,
has at any rate provided no very satisfactory substitute for it. And the
reason of this failure is very obvious. It goes with a certain defect in
the human mind, which, as we have pointed out (note, p. 57), necessarily
belongs to the Civilisation-period--the tendency, namely, to separate
the logical and intellectual part of man from the emotional and
instinctive, and to give it a _locus standi_ of its own. Science has
failed, because she has attempted to carry out the investigation of
nature from the intellectual side alone--neglecting the other
constituents necessarily involved in the problem. She has failed,
because she has attempted an impossible task; for the discovery of a
permanently valid and purely _intellectual_ representation of the
universe is simply impossible. Such a thing does not exist.
The various theories and views of nature which we hold are merely the
fugitive envelopes of the successive stages of human growth--each set of
theories and views belonging organically to the moral and emotional
stage which has been reached, and being in some sort the expression of
it; so that the attempt at any given time to set up an explanation of
phenomena which shall be valid in itself and without reference to the
mental condition of those who set it up, necessarily ends in failure;
and the present state of confusion and contradiction in which modern
Science finds itself is merely the result of such attempt.
Of course this limitation of the validity of Science has been
recognised by most of those who have thought about the matter;[17] but
it is so commonly overlooked, and latterly the notion has so far gained
ground that the "laws" of science are immutable facts and eternal
statements of verity, that it may be worth while to treat the subject a
little more in detail.
The method of Science is the method of all mundane knowledge; it is that
of limitation or actual ignorance. Placed in face of the great
uncontained unity of Nature we can only deal with it in thought by
selecting certain details and isolating those (either wilfully or
unconsciously) from the rest. That is right enough. But in doing so--in
isolating such and such details--we practically beg the question we are
in search of; and, moreover, in supposing such isolation we suppose what
is false, and therefore vitiate our conclusion. From these two radical
defects of all intellectual inquiry we cannot escape. The views of
Science are like the views of a mountain; each is only possible as long
as you limit yourself to a certain standpoint. Move your position, and
the view is changed.[18]
Perhaps the word "species" will illustrate our meaning as well as any
word; and, in a sense, the word is typical of the method of Science. I
see a dog for the first time. It is a fox-hound. Then I see a second
fox-hound, and a third and a fourth. Presently I form from these few
instances a general conception of "dog." But after a time I see a
grey-hound and a terrier and a mastiff, and my old conception is
destroyed. A new one has to be formed, and then a new one and a new one.
Now I overlook the whole race of civilised dogs and am satisfied with my
wisdom; but presently I come upon some wild dogs, and study the habits
of the wolf and the fox. Geology turns me up some links, and my
conception of dog melts away like a lump of ice into surrounding water.
My species exists no more. As long as I knew a few of the facts I could
talk very wise about them; or if I limited myself arbitrarily, as we
will say, to a study only of animals in England at the present day, I
could classify them; but widen the bounds of my knowledge, the area of
observation, and all my work has to be done over again. My species is
not a valid fact of Nature, but a fiction arising out of my own
ignorance or arbitrary isolation of the objects observed.
Or to take an instance from Astronomy. We are accustomed to say that the
path of the moon is an ellipse. But this is a very loose statement. On
enquiry we find that, owing to perturbations said to be produced by the
sun, the path deviates considerably from an ellipse. In fact in strict
calculations it is taken as being a certain ellipse only for an
instant--the next instant it is supposed to be a portion of another
ellipse. We might then call the path an irregular curve somewhat
resembling an ellipse. This is a new view. But on further enquiry it
appears that, while the moon is going round the earth, the earth itself
is speeding on through space about the sun--in consequence of which the
actual path of the moon does not in the least resemble an ellipse!
Finally the sun itself is in motion with regard to the fixed stars, and
_they_ are in movement too. What then is the path of the moon? No one
knows; we have not the faintest idea--the word itself ceases to have any
assignable meaning. It is true that if we agree to ignore the
perturbations produced by the sun--as in fact we _do_ ignore
perturbations produced by the planets and other bodies--and if we agree
to ignore the motion of the earth, and the flight of the solar system
through space, and even the movement of any centre round which that may
be speeding, we may then _say_ that the moon moves in an ellipse. But
this has obviously nothing to do with actual facts. The moon _does_ not
move in an ellipse--not even "relatively to the earth"--and probably
never has done and never will do so. It may be a convenient view or
fiction to say that it would do so under such and such
circumstances--but it is still only a fiction. To attempt to isolate a
small portion of the phenomena from the rest in a universe of which the
_unity_ is one of Science's most cherished convictions, is obviously
self-stultifying and useless.
But you say it can be proved by mathematics that the ellipse would be
the path under these conditions; to which I reply that the mathematical
proof, though no doubt cogent to the human mind (as at present
constituted in most people), is open to the same objection that it does
not deal with actual facts. It deals with a mental supposition, _i.e._,
that there are only two bodies acting on each other--a case which never
has occurred and never can occur--and then, assuming the law of
gravitation (which is just the thing which has to be proved), it arrives
at a mental formula, the ellipse. But to argue from this process that
the ellipse is really a thing in Nature, and that the heavenly bodies do
move or even tend to move in ellipses, is obviously a most unwarrantable
leap in the dark. Finally you argue that the leap is warranted because,
by assuming that the moon and planets move in ellipses, you can actually
foretell things that happen, as for instance the occurrences of
eclipses; and in reply to that I can only say that Tycho Brahé foretold
eclipses almost as well by assuming that the heavenly bodies moved in
epicycles, and that modern astronomers do apply the epicycle theory in
their mathematical formulæ. The epicycles were an assumption made for a
certain purpose, and the ellipses are an assumption made for the same
purpose. In some respects the ellipse is a more convenient fiction than
the epicycle, but it is no less a fiction.
In other words--with regard to this "path of the moon" (as with regard
to any other phenomenon of Nature)--our knowledge of it must be either
absolute or relative. But we cannot know the absolute path; and as to
the relative, why all we can say is that it does not exist (any more
than species exists)--we cannot break up Nature so; it is not a thing in
Nature, but in our own minds--it is a view and a fiction.[19]
Again, let us take an example from Physics--Boyle's law of the
compressibility of gases. This law states that, the temperature
remaining constant, the volume of a given quantity of gas is inversely
proportional to its pressure. It is a law which has been made a good
deal of, and at one time was thought to be true, _i.e._, it was thought
to be a statement of fact. A more extended and careful observation,
however, shows that it is only true under so many limitations, that,
like the ellipse in Astronomy, it must be regarded as a convenient
fiction and nothing more. It appears that air follows the supposed law
pretty well, but not by any means exactly except within very narrow
limits of pressure; other gases, such as carbonic acid and hydrogen,
deviate from it very considerably--some more than others, and some in
one direction and some in the opposite. It was found, among other
things, that the nearer a gas was to its liquefying point, the greater
was the deviation from the supposed law, and the conclusion was jumped
at that the law was true for _perfect_ gases only. This idea of a
perfect gas of course involved the assumption that gases, as they get
farther and farther removed from their liquifying point, reach at last a
fixed and stable condition, when no further change in their qualities
takes place--at any rate for a very long time--and Boyle's law was
supposed to apply to this condition. Since then, however, it has been
discovered that there is an ultra-gaseous state of matter, and on all
sides it is becoming abundantly clear that the change in the condition
of matter from the liquid state to the ultra-gaseous state is perfectly
continuous--through all modifications of liquidity and condensation and
every degree of perfection and imperfection of gasiness to the utmost
rarity of the fourth state. At what point, then, does Boyle's law really
apply? Obviously it applies _exactly_ at only one point in this long
ascending scale--at one metaphysical point--and at every other point it
is incorrect. But no gas in Nature remains or can be maintained just at
one point in the scale of its innumerable changes. Consequently, all we
can say is that out of the innumerable different states that gases are
capable of, and the innumerable different laws of compressibility which
they therefore follow, we could theoretically find one state to which
would correspond the law of compressibility called Boyle's law; and
that, _if_ we could preserve a gas in that state (which we can't),
Boyle's law really _would_ be true just for that case. In other words,
the law is metaphysical. It has no real existence. It is a convenient
view or fiction, arising in the first place out of ignorance, and only
tenable as long as further observation is limited or wilfully ignored.
This then is the Method of Science. It consists in forming a law or
statement by only looking at a small portion of the facts; then, when
the other facts come in, the law or statement gradually fades away
again. Conrad Gessner and other early zoologists began by classifying
animals according to the number of their horns! Political Economy begins
by classifying social action under a law of Supply and Demand. When
people believed that the earth was flat, they generalised the facts
connected with the fall of heavy bodies into a conception of "up and
down." These were two opposite directions in space. Heavy bodies took
the "downward"; it was their nature. But in time, and as fresh facts
came in, it became impossible to group animals any longer by their
horns; "up and down" ceased to have a meaning when it was known that the
earth was round. Then fresh laws and statements had to be formed. In the
last-mentioned case--it being conceived that the earth was the centre of
the universe--the new law supposed was that all heavy bodies tended to
the centre of the earth as such. This was all right and satisfactory for
a while; but presently it appeared that the earth was _not_ the centre
of the universe, and that some heavy bodies--such as the satellites of
Jupiter--did not in fact tend to the centre of the earth at all. Another
lump of ignorance (which had enabled the old generalisation to exist)
was removed, and a new generalisation, that of universal gravitation,
was after a time formed. But it is probable that this law is only
conceived of as true through our ignorance; nay it is certain that
belief in its truth presents the gravest difficulties.
In fact here we come upon an important point. It is sometimes said that,
granting the above arguments and the partiality and defectiveness of the
laws of Science, still they are approximations to the truth, and as each
fresh fact is introduced the consequent modification of the old law
brings us _nearer and nearer_ to a limit of rigorous exactness which we
shall reach at last if we only have patience enough. But is this so?
What kind of rigorous statement shall we reach when we have got _all_
the facts in? Remembering that Nature is _one_, and that if we try to
get a rigorous statement for one set of phenomena (as say the lunar
theory) by isolating them from the rest, we are thereby condemning
ourselves beforehand to a false conclusion, is it not evident that our
limit is at all times infinitely far off? If one knew all the facts
relating to a given inquiry except two or three, one might reasonably
suppose that one was near a limit of exactness in one's knowledge; but
seeing that in our investigation of Nature we only know two or three, so
to speak, out of a million, it is obvious that at any moment the fresh
law arising from increased experience may completely upset our former
calculations. There is a difference between approximating to a wall and
approximating to the North Star. In the one case you are tending to a
speedy conclusion of your labours, in the other case you are only _going
in a certain direction_. The theories of Science generally belong under
the second head. They mark the direction which the human mind is taking
at the moment in question, but they mark no limits. At each point the
_appearance_ of a limit is introduced--which becomes, like a mirage in
the desert, an object of keen pursuit; but the limit is not really
there--it is only an effect of the standpoint, and disappears again
after a time as the observer moves. In the case of gravitation there is
for the moment an appearance of finality in the law of the inverse
square of the distance, but this arises probably from the fact that the
law is derived from a limited area of observation only, namely the
movements (at great distances from each other) of some of the heavenly
bodies.[20] The Cavendish and Schehallien experiments do not show more
than that the law at ordinary distances on the earth's surface does not
vary _very_ much from the above; while the so-called molecular forces
compel us (unless we make the very artificial assumption that a variety
of attractions and repulsions co-exist in matter alongside of, and yet
totally distinct from, the attraction of gravitation) to suppose very
_great_ modifications of the law for small distances. In fact, as we saw
of Boyle's law before--the Newtonian law is probably metaphysical--true
under certain limited conditions--and the appearance of finality has
been given to it by the fact that our observations have been made under
such or similar conditions. When we extend our observation into quite
other regions of space, the law of the inverse square ceases to appear
as even an approximation to the truth--as, for instance, the law of the
inverse _fifth_ power has been thought to be nearer the mark for small
molecular distances.
And indeed the state of the great theories of Science in the present
day--the confusion in which the Atomic theory of physics finds itself,
the dismal insufficiency of the Darwin theory of the survival of the
fittest; the collapse in late times of one of the fundamental theories
of Astronomy, namely that of the stability of the lunar and planetary
orbits; the cataclysms and convulsions which Geology seems just now to
be undergoing; the appalling and indeed insurmountable difficulties
which attach to the Undulatory theory of Light; the final wreck and
abandonment of the Value-theory, the foundation-theory of Political
Economy--all these things do not seem to point to very near limits of
rigorous exactness! An impregnable theory, or one nearing the limit of
impregnability, is in fact as great an absurdity as an impregnable
armour-plate. Certainly, given the cannon-balls, you can generally find
an armour-plate which will be proof against them; but given the
armour-plate, you can always find cannon-balls which will smash it up.
The method of Science, as being a method of artificial limitation or
actual ignorance, is curiously illustrated by a consideration of its
various branches. I have taken some examples from Astronomy, which is
considered the most exact of the physical sciences. Now does it not seem
curious that _Astronomy_--the study of the heavenly bodies, which are
the most distant from us of all bodies, and most difficult to
observe--should yet be the most perfect of the sciences? Yet the reason
is obvious. Astronomy is the most perfect science _because we know least
about it_--because our ignorance of the actual phenomena is most
profound. Situated in fact as we are, on a speck in space, with our
observations limited to periods of time which, compared with the
stupendous flights of the stars, are merely momentary and evanescent, we
are in somewhat the position of a mole surveying a railway track and the
flight of locomotives. And as a man seeing a very small arc of a very
vast circle easily mistakes it for a straight line, so we are easily
satisfied with cheap deductions and solutions in Astronomy which a more
extensive experience would cause us to reject. The man may have a long
way to go along his "straight line" before he discovers that it is a
curve; he may have much farther to go along his curve before he
discovers that it is not a circle; and much farther still to go before
he finds out whether it is an ellipse or a spiral or a parabola, or none
of these; yet _what_ curve it is will make an enormous difference in his
ultimate destination. So with the astronomer; and yet Astronomy is
allowed to pass as an exact science![21]
Well then, as in Astronomy we get an "exact science," because the facts
and phenomena are on such a tremendous scale that we only see a minute
portion of them--just a few details so to speak--and our ignorance
therefore allows us to dogmatise; so at the other end of the scale in
Chemistry and Physics we get quasi-exact sciences, because the facts and
phenomena are on such a _minute_ scale that we overlook _all the
details_ and see only certain general effects here and there. When a
solution of cupric sulphate is treated with ammonia, a mass of
flocculent green precipitate is formed. No one has the faintest notion
of all the various movements and combinations of the molecules of these
two fluids which accompany the appearance of the precipitate. They are
no doubt very complex. But among all the changes that are taking place,
one change has the advantage of being visible to the eye, and the
chemist singles that out as the main phenomenon. So chemistry at large
consists in a few, very few, facts taken at random as it were (or
because they happen to be of such a nature as to be observable) out of
the enormous mass of facts really concerned: and because of their
fewness the chemist is able to arrange them, as he thinks, in some
order, that is, to generalise about them. But it is certain as can be
that he only has to extend the number of his facts, or his powers of
observation, to get all his generalisations upset. The same may be said
of magnetism, light, heat, and the other physical sciences; but it is
not necessary to prove in detail what is sufficiently obvious.
But now, roughly speaking, there is a third region of human
observation--a region which does not, like Astronomy (and Geology), lie
so far beyond and above us that we only see a very small portion of it;
nor, like Chemistry and Physics, so far below us and under such minute
conditions of space and time that we can only catch its general effects;
but which lies more on a level with man himself--the so-called organic
world--the study of man, as an individual and in society, his history,
his development, the study of the animals, the plants even, and the laws
of life--the sciences of Biology, Sociology, History, Psychology, and
the rest. Now this region is obviously that which man knows most of. I
don't say that he generalises most about it, but he knows the facts
best. For one observation that he makes of the habits and behaviour of
the stars, or of chemical solutions--for one observation in the remote
regions of Astronomy or Chemistry--he makes thousands and millions of
the habits and behaviour of his fellowmen, and hundreds and thousands of
those of the animals and plants. Is it not curious then that in this
region he is least sure, least dogmatic, most doubtful whether there be
a law or no? Or, rather, is it not quite in accord with our contention,
namely that Science, like an uninformed boy, is most definite and
dogmatic just where actual knowledge is least.
It will however be replied that the phenomena of living beings are far
more complex than the phenomena of Astronomy or Physics--and that is
the reason why exact science makes so little way with them. Though man
knows many million times more about the habits of his fellow-men than
about the habits of the stars, yet the former subject is so many million
times more complicated than the latter that all his additional knowledge
does not avail him. This is the plea. Yet it does not hold water. It is
an entire assumption to say that the phenomena of Astronomy are less
complicated than the phenomena of vitality. A moment's thought will show
that the phenomena of Astronomy are in reality infinitely complex. Take
the movement of the moon: even with our present acquaintance with that
subject we know that it has some relation to the position and mass of
the earth, including its ocean tides; also to the position and mass of
the sun; also to the position and mass of every one of the planets; also
of the comets, numerous and unknown as they are; also the meteoric
rings; and finally of all the stars! The problem, as everyone knows, is
absolutely insoluble even for the shortest period; but when the element
of Time enters in, and we consider that to do anything like justice to
the problem in an astronomical sense we should have to solve it for at
least a million years--during which interval the earth, sun, and other
bodies concerned would themselves have been changing their relative
positions, it becomes obvious that the whole question is infinitely
complex--and yet this is only a small fragment of Astronomy. To debate,
therefore, whether the infinite complexity of the movements of the
stars is greater or less than the infinite complexity of the phenomena
of life, is like debating the precedence of the three persons of the
Trinity, or whether the Holy Ghost was begotten or proceeding: we are
talking about things which we do not understand.
Nature is one; she is not, we may guess, less profound and wonderful in
one department than another; but from the fact that we live under
certain conditions and limitations we see most deeply into that portion
which is, as it were, on the same level with us. In humanity we look her
in the face; there our glance pierces, and we see that she is profound
and wonderful beyond all imagination; what we learn there is the most
valuable that we can learn. In the regions where Science rejoices to
disport itself we see only the skirts of her garments, so to speak, and
though we measure them never so precisely, we still see them and nothing
more.
There is another point, however, of which much is often made as a plea
for the substantial accuracy of the scientific laws and generalisations,
namely that they enable us to _predict_ events. But this need not detain
us long. J. S. Mill in his "Logic" has pointed out--and a little thought
makes it obvious--that the success of a prediction does not prove the
truth of the theory on which it is founded. It only proves the theory
was good enough for that prediction.
There was a time when the sun was a god going forth in his chariot every
morning, and there was a time when the earth was the centre of the
universe, and the sun a ball of fire revolving round it. In those times
men could predict with certainty that the sun would rise next morning,
and could even name the hour of its appearance; but we do not therefore
think that their theories were true. When Adams and Leverrier foretold
the appearance of Neptune in a certain part of the sky, they made a
brief prediction to an unknown planet from the observed relations of the
movements of the known planets; that does not show, however, that the
grand generalisation of these movements, called the "law of
gravitation," is correct. It merely shows that it did well enough for
this very brief step--brief indeed compared with the real problems of
Astronomy, for which latter it is probably quite inadequate.
Tycho Brahé, excellent astronomer as he was, kept as we saw to the
epicycle theory. He imagined that the moon's path round the earth was a
fixed combination of cycle and epicycle. Kepler introduced the
conception of the ellipse. Later on the motion of the perigee and other
deviations compelled the abandonment of the ellipse and the supposition
of an endless curve, similar to an ellipse at any one point, and
maintaining a fixed mean distance from the earth, but never returning on
itself or making a definite closed figure of any kind. Finally the
researches of Mr. George Darwin have destroyed the conception of the
fixed mean distance, and introduced that of a continually enlarging
spiral. Certainly no four theories could well be more distinct from
each other than these; yet if an eclipse had to be calculated for next
year it would scarcely matter which theory was used. The truth is that
the actual problem is so vast that a prediction of a few years in
advance only touches the fringe of it so to speak; yet if the fulfilment
of the prediction were taken as a proof of the theory in each of these
different cases, it would lead in the end to the most hopelessly
contradictory results.
The success of a prediction therefore only shows that the theory on
which it is founded has had practical value so far as a working
hypothesis. As working hypotheses, and as long as they are kept down to
brief steps _which can be verified_, the scientific theories are very
valuable--indeed we could not do without them; but when they are treated
as objective facts--when, for instance, the "law of
gravitation"--derived as it is from a brief study of the heavenly
bodies--has a universal truth ascribed to it, and is made to apply to
phenomena extending over millions of years, and to warrant unverifiable
prophecies about the planetary orbits, or statements about the age of
the earth and the duration of the solar system--all one can say is that
those who argue so are flying off at a tangent from actual facts. For as
the tangent represents the direction of a curve over a small arc, so
these theories represent the bearing of facts well enough over a small
region of observation; but as following the tangent we soon lose the
curve, so following these theories for any distance beyond the region
of actual observation we speedily part company with facts.[22]
To proceed with a few more words about the general method of Science.
Science passes from phenomena to laws, from individual details which can
be seen and felt to large generalisations of an intangible and
phantom-like character. That is to say, that for convenience of thought
we classify objects. How is this classification effected? It is effected
through the perception of identity amid difference. Among a lot of
objects I perceive certain attributes in common; this group of common
attributes serves, so to speak, as a band to tie these objects together
with--into a bundle convenient for thought. I give a name to the band,
and that serves to denote any unit of the bundle by. Thus perceiving
common attributes among a lot of dogs--as in an example already given--I
give the name foxhound to this group of attributes, and thenceforth use
the name foxhound to connect these objects by in my mind; again
perceiving other common attributes among other similar objects, I
invent the word greyhound to denote these latter by. The concept
foxhound differs from the objects which it denotes, in this respect that
these latter are (as we say) _real_ dogs with thousands and thousands of
attributes each: one of them has a broken tooth, another is nearly all
white, another answers to the name "Sally," and so on; while the concept
is only an imaginary form in my mind, with only a few attributes and no
individual peculiarities--a kind of tiny G.C.M. arising from the
contemplation of a long row of big figures.
Now having created these concepts "foxhound," "greyhound," and a lot of
other similar ones, I find that they in their turn have a few attributes
in common and thus give rise to a new concept "dog." Of course this
"dog" is more of an abstraction than ever, the concept of a concept. In
fact the peculiarity of this whole process is that, as sometimes stated,
the broader the generalisation becomes the less is its depth; or in
other words and obviously, that as the number of objects compared
increases, the number of attributes common to them all decreases.
Ultimately as we saw at the beginning, when a sufficient number of
objects are taken in, the concept ("dog" or whatever it may be) fades
away and ceases to have any meaning. This therefore is the dilemma of
Science and indeed of all human knowledge, that in carrying out the
process which is peculiar to it, it necessarily leaves the dry ground of
reality for the watery region of abstractions, which abstractions
become ever more tenuous and ungraspable the farther it goes, and
ultimately fade into mere ghosts. Nevertheless the process is a quite
necessary one, for only by it can the mind deal with things.
To dwell for a moment over this last point: it is clear that every
object has relation to every other object in the world--exists in fact
only in virtue of such relation to other objects; it has therefore an
infinite number of attributes. The mind consequently is powerless to
deal with such object--it cannot by any possibility think it. In order
to deal with it, the mind is forced to single out a _few_ of its
attributes (the _method of ignorance_ or abstraction already alluded
to)--that is a few of its relations to other objects, and to think them
first. The others it will think afterwards--all in good time. In thus
stripping or abstracting the great mass of its attributes from our
object, and leaving only a few, which it combines into a concept, the
mind practically abandons the real article and takes up with a shadow;
but in return for this it gets something which it can handle, which is
light to carry about, and which, like paper-money, _for the time and
under certain conditions_ does really represent value. The only danger
is lest it--the mind--carried away by the extensive applicability of the
partial concept which it has thus formed, should credit it with an
actual value--should project it on the background of the external world
and ascribe to it that reality which belongs only to objects
themselves, _i.e._, to things embodying an _infinite_ range of
attributes.
The peculiar method of Science is now clear to us, and can be abundantly
illustrated from modern results. Our experience consists in sensations,
we feel the weight of heavy bodies, we see them fall when let go, we
have sensations of heat and cold, light and darkness, and so forth. But
these sensations are more or less local and variable from man to man,
and we naturally seek to find some common measure of them, by which we
can talk about and describe them _exactly_, and independently of the
peculiarities of individual observers. Thus we seek to find some common
phenomenon which underlies (as we say) the sensations of heat and cold,
or of light and darkness, or something which explains (_i.e._, is always
present in) the case of falling bodies--and to do this we adopt the
method of generalisation above described, _i.e._, we observe a great
number of individual cases and then see what qualities or attributes
they have in common. So far good. But it is just here that the fallacy
of the ordinary scientific procedure comes in; for, forgetting that
these common qualities are mere abstractions from the real phenomena we
credit _them_ with a real existence, and regard the actual phenomena as
secondary results, "effects" or what-not of these "causes." This in
plain language is putting the cart before the horse--or rather the
shadow before the man. Thus finding that a vast number of variously
shaped and coloured bodies tend to fall towards the earth, we erect
this common attribute of falling into an independent existence which we
call "attraction" or "gravitation"--and ultimately posit a universal
gravitation _acting_ on all bodies in Nature!--or finding that a number
of different substances, such as water, air, wood, etc., convey to us
the sensation we call sound, and that in all these cases the common
element is vibration, we detach the attribute vibration, credit it with
a separate existence, and speak of it as the cause of sound. But though
we may thus _think_ of the shadow as separate from the man, the shadow
cannot _be_ separate from the man; and though we may try to think of the
falling or the vibration as separate from the wood or the stone, such
falling and vibration cannot exist apart from these and other such
materials, and the effort to speak of it as so existing ends in mere
nonsense. More strange still is the fatuity, when, as in the case of the
undulatory Theory of light or the Atomic theory of physics, the concepts
thus erected into actualities are composed of purely imaginary
attributes--of which no one has had any experience--an undulatory ether
in the one case, a hard and perfectly elastic atom in the other. The
total result is of course--just what we see--Science landing itself in
pure absurdities in every direction. Beginning by detaching the
attribute of falling from the bodies that fall--beginning that is by an
abstraction, which of course is also a falsity--it generalises and
generalises this abstraction till at last it reaches a perfectly
generalised absurdity and thing without any meaning--the law of
gravitation.[23] The statement that "every particle in the universe
attracts every other particle with a force proportional to the mass of
the attracting particle and inversely proportional to the square of the
distance between the two" is devoid of meaning--the human mind can give
no definite meanings to the words "mass," "attract," and "force," which
do not overlap and stultify each other. The law in every way baffles
intelligence. Newton, who invented it, declared that no philosophic mind
would suppose that bodies could thus act on one another "without the
mediation of anything else by and through which their action might be
conveyed;" scientific men to-day are fain to see that a material
mediation of this kind would only make the law still more remote from
our comprehension than it already is, while, on the other hand, an
immaterial mediation or a fourth-dimensional mediation, such as some
propose, would simply remove the problem out of the regions of
scientific analysis.[24] Again, the form of the law is declared to be
the inverse square of the distance; but this is the law by the nature of
space itself of any perfect radiation, and if true of gravitation
involves the conclusion that that radiation of force (whatever its
nature may be) takes place without loss or dissipation of any kind. This
would make gravitation absolutely unique among phenomena. More than
this, its propagation is supposed to be _instantaneous_ over the most
enormous distances of space, and to take place always unhindered and
unretarded, whatever be the number or the nature of the bodies between!
What can be more clear than that the law is simply metaphysical--a
projection into a monstrous universality and abstraction, of partially
understood phenomena in a particular region of observation--a
Brocken-shadow on the background of Nature of the observer's own
momentary attitude of thought?
Again, the undulatory theory of Light. Studying the phenomena of a vast
number of coloured and bright bodies, Science finds that it can think
about these phenomena--can generalise and tie them into bundles best by
_assuming_ that the bodies are all in a state of vibration; a vibration
so minute that (unlike the vibrations connected with Sound) it cannot be
directly perceived. So far good. There is no harm in the assumption of
vibration, as long as it is understood to be a mere assumption for a
temporary convenience of thought. But now Science goes farther than
this, and not only supposes a common attribute to all visible bodies,
but credits this common attribute with a real existence independent of
the visible bodies in which it was supposed to inhere--and makes this
the _cause_ of their visibility! Obviously now a common and universal
medium is required for this common and universal assumed vibration (just
as Newton required a medium for his universal "falling")--and so, hey
presto! we have the Undulatory Ether. And having got it we find that to
fulfil our requirements it must have a pressure of 17 million million
pounds on the square inch, and yet be so rare and tenuous as not to
hinder the lightest breath of air; that while it is thus rare enough to
surpass all our powers of direct scrutiny, its vibrations must yet be
capable of agitating and breaking up the solidest bodies; that it must
pass freely through some dense and close structures like glass, and yet
be excluded by some light and porous, like cork, and so on and on! In
fact we find that it is unthinkable. Against this adamantine, impalpable
Ether, as against this instantaneous, untranslatable gravitation,
Science bangs its devoted head in vain. Having created these absurdities
by the method of "personification of abstractions"[25] or the
"reification of concepts,"[26] it seriously and in all good faith tries
to understand them; having dressed up its own Mumbo Jumbo (which it once
jeered at religion for doing) it piously shuts its eyes and endeavours
to believe in it.
The Atomic Theory affords a good example of the "method of ignorance."
When we try to think about material objects generally--to generalise
about them--that is, to find some attribute or attributes common to
them, we are at first puzzled. They present such an immense variety. But
after a time, by dint of stripping off or abstracting all such
attributes or qualities as we think we perceive in one body and not in
another--as for example, redness, blueness, warmth, saltness, life,
intelligence, or what not--we find an attribute left, namely resistance
to touch, which is common to _all_ material bodies. This quality in the
body we call "mass," and since it is only known by motion, mass and
motion become correlative attributes which we find useful to class
bodies by, not because they represent the various bodies particularly
well, but because they are found in all bodies; just as you might class
people by their boots--not because boots are a very valuable method of
classification, but simply because every one wears boots of one kind or
another. So far there is no great harm done. But now having by the
method of ignorance _thought away_ all the qualities of bodies, except
the two correlatives of mass and motion, we set about to _explain_ the
phenomena of Nature generally by these two "thinks" that are left. We
credit these "thinks" (mass and motion) with an independent existence
and proceed to derive the rest of phenomena from them. The proceeding of
course is absurd, and ends by exposing its own absurdity. Thinking of
mass and motion as existing in the various bodies _apart_ from colour,
smell, and so forth--which of course is not the case--we combine the two
attributes into one concept, the atom, which we thus assume to exist in
all bodies. The atom has neither colour, smell, warmth, taste, life or
intelligence; it has only mass and motion; for it came by the method of
divesting our thought of everything _but_ mass and motion. It is a
projection of a "think" upon the background of nature. And it is an
absurdity. No such thing exists in all the wide universe as mass and
motion divested from colour, smell, warmth, life and intelligence. The
atom is unthinkable. It is perfectly hard and it is perfectly
elastic--which is the same as saying that it bends and it doesn't bend
at the same time; it has form, and it hasn't form; it has affinities and
yet is perfectly indifferent. To justify to men the ways of their Mumbo
Jumbo has sorely exercised the votaries of the Atom. One philosopher
says that it is mere matter, passive, exercising no force but
resistance; another says that it is a centre of force, without matter; a
third suggests that it is not itself matter, but only a vortex in other
matter! All agree that it is not an object of sense, and there remains
no conclusion but that it is nonsense![27]
And so on in all directions. Human thought flying off at its tangents
from Nature lands itself in infinite nothings afar off, poor ghostly
skeletons and abstractions from Nature--which indeed is all right, for
human thought as yet can only see ghosts and not realities; but let
there be no mistake, let these ghosts not be mistaken for realities--for
they are not even compatible with each other. The Atom that suits the
physicist does not suit the chemist. The Ether that does for the vehicle
of Light will not do for the vehicle of universal Gravitation.
It would be hardly worth while entering into these criticisms, were it
not evident that Science in modern times, either tacitly or explicitly,
has been seeking, as I said at the beginning, to enounce facts
independent of Man, the observer. Seeing that the ordinary statements of
daily life are obviously inexact and relative to the observer--charged
with human sensation in fact--Science has naturally tried to produce
something which should be exact and independent of human sensation; but
here it has of course condemned itself beforehand to failure; for no
statement of isolated phenomena or groups of phenomena _can_ be exact
except by the method of ignorance aforesaid, and no statement obviously
can be really independent of human sensation. When a man says _It is
cold_, his statement, it must be confessed, is deplorably human and
vague. _It_--what is that? _Is_--do you mean _is_? or do you mean
_feels_, _appears_? _Cold_--in what sense? Cold to yourself, or to
other people, or to polar bears, or by the thermometer? And so on.
Science therefore steps in with an air of authority and sets him right.
It says _the temperature is_ 30° _Fahrenheit_, as if to settle the
matter. But does this really settle the matter? _Temperature_--who knows
what that is? What is the scientific definition of it? I find
(Clerk-Maxwell's Theory of Heat, p. 2.) "the temperature of a body is a
quantity which indicates how hot or how cold the body is." This sounds
very much like saying, "the colour of a body is a quantity which
indicates how blue, red, or yellow the body is." It does not bring us
much farther on our way. But in the next paragraph Maxwell shows the
object of his definition (which of course is only preliminary) by
saying, "By the use, therefore, of the word temperature, we fix in our
minds the conviction that it is possible not only to feel, but to
_measure_, how hot a body is." That is to say he clearly maintains that
it is possible to find an absolute standard of hotness or coldness--or
rather of the unknown thing called temperature--outside of ourselves and
independent of human sensation. When the man said he was cold he was
probably just describing his own sensations, but here Science indicates
that it is in search of something which has an independent existence of
its own, and which therefore when found we can measure exactly and once
for all. What then is that thing? _What_ is temperature? say, what is
it?
We cudgel our brains in vain. Perhaps the remainder of the sentence
will help us. "The temperature is 30° Fahrenheit." "The unknown thing is
thirty degrees." What then is a degree? That is the next question. When
the Theory of Heat went out from sensation and left it behind, one of
its first landing places was in the expansion of liquids--as in
thermometer tubes. Here for some time was thought to be a satisfactory
register of "temperature." But before long it became apparent that the
degree--Fahrenheit, Réaumur, or what-not--was an entirely arbitrary
thing, also that it was not the _same_[28] thing at one end of the scale
as the other, and finally that the scale itself had no starting point!
This was awkward, so a move was made to the air thermometer, and there
was some talk about an absolute zero and absolute temperatures; it was
thought that the Unknown thing showed itself most clearly and simply in
the expansion of air and other gases, and that the "degree" might fairly
be measured in terms of this expansion. But in a little time this kind
of thermometer--chiefly because no gas turned out to be "theoretically
perfect"--broke down, absolute zero and all, and another step had to be
made--namely, to the dynamical theory. It was announced that the Unknown
thing might be measured in terms of mechanical energy, and Joule at
Manchester proclaimed that the work done by any quantity of water
falling there a distance of 772 feet is capable of raising that water
one degree Fahrenheit.[29] Here seemed something definite. To measure
temperature by mass and velocity, to measure a degree by the flight of a
stone, or the heat in the human body by the fall of a factory
chimney--if rather roundabout and elusive of the main question--seemed
at any rate promising of exact results! Unfortunately the difficulty was
to pass from the theory to its application. The complicated nature of
the problem, the "imperfection" of the gases and other bodies under
consideration, the latent and specific heats to be allowed for, the
elusive nature of heat in experiment, and the variable value of the
degree itself--all render the conclusions on this subject most
precarious; and the general equations connecting the Fahrenheit or other
temperatures with a thermo-dynamic scale--while they become so unwieldy
as to be practically useless--are themselves after all only approximate.
Finally, to give a last form to the mechanical theory of heat, the
conception of flying atoms or molecules was introduced, and a number of
neat generalisations were deduced from dynamical considerations. Of
course it was inevitable, having once started with a mechanical theory,
that one should arrive at the Atom some time or other--and (from what
has already been said) it was also inevitable that the result should be
unsatisfactory. It is sufficient to say that the molecular theory of
heat is _not_ in accordance with facts. Such things as the law of
Charles and the law of Boyle, which according to it should be strictly
accurate and of general application, are known to be true only over a
most limited range. This failure of the theory may be said to arise
partly from its being pursued by the statistical method; but if, on the
other hand, we were to try and follow out the individual movement of
each molecule we should be landed in a problem far exceeding in
complexity the wildest flights of Astronomy, and should have exchanged
for the original difficulty about "temperature" a difficulty far
greater.
The result of all this has been that notwithstanding the talk about
energy and atoms, Science has sadly to confess that it can still give no
valid meaning to the word temperature: the unknown thing is still
unknown, the independent existence round the corner still escapes us. By
the very effort to arrive at something independent of human sensation,
Science has, in a roundabout way, arrived at an absurdity. When the man
said he was cold, his statement--deplorably vague as it certainly
was--had some meaning; he was describing his feelings, or possibly he
had seen some snow or some ice on the road; but when, in the endeavour
to leave out the human and to say something absolute, Science declared
that the temperature was thirty degrees, it committed itself to a remark
which possibly was exact in form, but to which it has never given and
never can give any definite meaning.[30]
Similarly with other generalities of Science: the "law" of the
Conservation of Energy, the "law" of the Survival of the Fittest--the
more you think about them the less possible is it to give any really
intelligible sense to them. The very word Fittest really begs the
question which is under consideration, and the whole Conservation law is
merely an attenuation of the already much attenuated "law" of
Gravitation. The Chemical Elements themselves are nothing but the
projection on the external world of concepts consisting of three or four
attributes each: they are not more real, but very much less real than
the individual objects which they are supposed to account for; and their
"elementary" character is merely fictional. It probably is in fact as
absurd to speak of pure carbon or pure gold, as of a pure monkey or a
pure dog. There are no such things, except as they may be arrived at by
arbitrary definition and the method of ignorance.
In the search for exactness, then, Science has been continually led on
to discard the human and personal elements in phenomena, in the hope of
finding some residuum as it were behind them which should not be
personal and human but absolute and invariable. And the tendency has
been (hitherto) in all the sciences to get rid of such terms as blue,
red, light, heavy, hot, cold, concord, discord, health, vitality, right,
wrong, etc., and to rely on any less human elements discoverable in each
case; as for instance in Sound, to deal less and less with the judgments
and sensations of the ear, and to rely more and more on measurements of
lengths of strings, numbers of vibrations, etc. Each science has been
(as far as possible) reduced to its lowest terms. Ethics has been made a
question of utility and inherited experience. Political Economy has been
exhausted of all conceptions of justice between man and man, of charity,
affection, and the instinct of solidarity; and has been founded on its
lowest discoverable factor, namely self-interest. Biology has been
denuded of the force of personality in plants, animals, and men; the
"self" here has been set aside, and the attempt made to reduce the
science to a question of chemical and cellular affinities, protoplasm,
and the laws of osmose. Chemical affinities, again, and all the
wonderful phenomena of Physics are emptied down into a flight of atoms;
and the flight of atoms (and of astronomic orbs as well) is reduced to
the laws of dynamics--which the student sitting in his chamber may write
down on a piece of paper. Thus the idea, formulated by Comte, of a great
scale of sciences arising from the simplest to the most complex, has
tacitly underlain modern scientific work. It--Science--has sought to
"explain" each stage by reference to a lower stage--"blueness" by
vibrations, and vibrations by flying atoms--the human always by the
sub-human. Going out from humanity dissatisfied, it has wandered through
the animal and vegetable kingdoms, through the regions of Chemistry and
Physics, into that of Mechanics. "Here at last, in Mechanics, is
something outside humanity, something exact in itself, something
substantial," it has said. "Let us build again on this as on a
foundation, and in time we shall find out what humanity is." This I say
has been the dream of Modern Science; yet the fallacy of it is obvious.
We have not got outside the human, but only to the outermost verge of
it. Mass and motion, which in this process are taken to be real entities
and the first progenitors of all phenomena, are simply the last
abstractions of sensible experience, and our emptiest concepts. The
_material_ explanation of the universe is simply an attempt to account
for phenomena by those attributes which appear to us to be common to
them all--which is, as said before, like accounting for men by their
boots:--it may be possible to get an exact formula this way, but its
contents have little or no meaning.
The whole process of Science and the Comtian classification of its
branches--regarded thus as an attempt to explain Man by Mechanics--is a
huge vicious circle. It professes to start with something simple, exact,
and invariable, and from this point to mount step by step till it comes
to Man himself; but indeed it starts with Man. It plants itself on
sensations low down (mass, motion, etc.), and endeavours by means of
them to explain sensations high up, which reminds one of nothing so much
as that process vulgarly described as "climbing up a ladder to comb your
hair." In truth Science has never left the great world, or cosmos, of
Man, nor ever really found a _locus standi_ without it; but during the
last two or three centuries it has gone in this _direction_, outwards,
continually. Leaving the central basis and facts of humanity as too vast
and unmanageable, and also as apparently variable from man to man and
therefore affording no certain consent to work upon, it has wandered
gradually outwards, seeking something of more definite and universal
application Discarding thus one by one the interior phases of
sensation--as the sense of personal relationship, the sense of justice,
duty, fitness in things or what-not (as too uncertain, or perhaps
developed to an unequal degree in different persons, embryonic in one
and matured in another), drifting past the more specialised bodily
senses, of colour, sound, taste, smell, etc., as for similar reasons
unavailable--Science at last in the primitive consciousness of muscular
contraction and its abstraction "mass" or "matter" comes to a pause.
Here in this last sense, common probably to man and the lowest animals,
it finds its widest, most universal ground--its farthest limit from the
Centre. It has reached the outermost shell, as it were, of the great
Man-cosmos.
Even this shell is partially human; it is not entirely osseous, and so
far not entirely exact and invariable; but Science can go no
farther--and there, for the present, it may remain!
Some day perhaps, when all this showy vesture of scientific theory
(which has this peculiarity that only the learned can see it) has been
quasi-completed, and Humanity is expected to walk solemnly forth in its
new garment for all the world to admire--as in Anderssen's story of the
Emperor's New Clothes--some little child standing on a door-step will
cry out: "But he has got nothing on at all," and amid some confusion it
will be seen that the child is right.
NOTE
"I fear I have very imperfectly succeeded in expressing my strong
conviction that, before a rigorous logical scrutiny, the Reign of
Law will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity of
Nature an ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific
inferences to a great extent a delusion." (Stanley Jevons,
_Principles of Science_, p. ix.)
FOOTNOTES:
[17] See note, p. 119.
[18] Since the above was written there has certainly been a great
change, and the dogmatic confidence in the verity of the scientific
"laws" has now (1920) almost disappeared.
[19] Such fictions, however, are (I need not say) quite necessary as our
only means of thinking out, however imperfectly, the problems before us
(1920).
[20] It is not generally realised how feeble a force gravitation is. It
is calculated (Encycl. Brit., Art. Gravitation) that two masses, each
weighing 415,000 tons, and placed a mile apart, would exert on each
other an attractive force of only one pound. If one, therefore, was as
far from the other as the moon is from the earth, their attraction would
only amount to 1/57,600,000,000th of a pound. This is a small force to
govern the movement of a body weighing 415,000 tons! and it is easy to
see that a slight variation in the law of the force might for a long
period pass undetected, though in the course of hundreds of centuries it
might become of the greatest importance.
[21] As another instance of the same thing, let me quote a passage from
Maxwell's _Theory of Heat_, p. 31; the italics are mine: "In our
description of the physical properties of bodies as related to heat we
have begun with solid bodies, as those which we can _most easily
handle_, and have gone on to liquids, which we can keep in open vessels,
and have now come to gases, which will escape from open vessels, and
which are generally _invisible_. This is the order which is most natural
in our first study of these different states. But as soon as we have
been made familiar with the most prominent features of these different
conditions of matter the most _scientific_ course of study is in the
_reverse_ order, beginning with gases, on account of the greater
simplicity of their laws, then advancing to liquids, the more complex
laws of which are much more imperfectly known, and concluding with the
little that has been hitherto discovered about the constitution of solid
bodies." That is to say that Science finds it easier to work among
gases--which are invisible and which we can know little about--than
among solids, which we are familiar with and which we can easily handle!
This seems a strange conclusion, but it will be found to represent a
common procedure of Science--the truth probably being that the laws of
gases are not one whit _simpler_ than the laws of liquids and solids,
but that on account of our knowing so much less about gases it is easier
for us to _feign_ laws in their case than in the case of solids, and
less easy for our errors to be detected.
[22] All our thoughts, theories, "laws," etc., may perhaps be said to
_touch_ Nature--as the tangent touches the curve--at a point. They give
a direction--and are true--at that point. But make the slightest move,
and they all have to be reconstructed. The tangents are infinite in
number, but the curve is one. This may not only illustrate the relation
of Nature to Science, but also of Art to the materials it uses. The poet
radiates thoughts: but he sets no store by them. He knows his thoughts
are not true in themselves, but they _touch_ the Truth. His lines are
the envelope of the curve which is his poem.
[23] See the report of the joint meeting of the Royal Society and the
Royal Astronomical Society, November 6, 1919, when Einstein's theory was
discussed.
[24] It is obvious that the Einstein theory, in which Time enters as a
kind of fourth dimension in relation to Space, removes us at once out of
the whole field of ordinary scientific reasoning and lands us, so to
speak, in a new world. The nature of Space (or of the universal medium,
whatever it is) in any region--its possible fundamental accelerations
there, its "curvature" or non-Euclidean character, and so forth--is
supposed, according to this theory, to vary with the amount of matter
in, or density of, that region; and the movements of bodies are
consequently supposed to take on the characters (accelerations, etc.,)
which we ascribe to the action of Gravitation. Gravitation in fact in
any region is the manifestation in Time of the attributes of the
universal Medium in that region--which latter again is dependent on the
degree of Matter present. Thus, Matter, Time, and Space are _one
phenomenon_.
The whole Einstein theory, in fact, is a device to present these three
Protean and variable elements of all material existence (Matter, Time
and Space) as so far involved and interlaced in each other that they
form always an absolute and complete unity. As such the theory is no
doubt suggestive, and along the line of future speculation: but it
awaits corroboration. If corroborated it will point the way to a new
conception of the Universe.
[25] J. S. Mill.
[26] See Stallo's excellent _Concepts of Modern Physics_.
[27] See, for instance, the last new thing in this style--the Helmholtz
molecule as improved upon by Sir William Thomson; it is described as
follows: "A heavy mass connected by massless springs with a massless
enclosing shell; or there may be several shells enclosing each other
connected by springs with a dense mass in the centre (far more dense
than the ether)." It is not, of course, seriously maintained that this
nonsensical creation exists--but that if it did exist it would account
for certain unexplained phenomena in the dispersion of light, etc.
Later still (1920) we have the following delightful verdict on the
Structure of the Atom, given by Sir Ernest Rutherford--and which I
commend to all lovers of clear thinking:--
"The Bakerian Lecture was delivered yesterday before the Royal Society
by Sir Ernest Rutherford, whose subject was 'The Nuclear Construction of
the Atom.' He said that during recent years much attention had been paid
to the nature and structure of atoms. The atomic theory of matter had
been definitely proved. The mass of the individual atoms, and the number
in any given weight of matter, were now known with considerable
accuracy. Not only was matter known to be made up of atoms, but
electricity was also atomic in nature, and there was a definite unit of
electrical charge which could not further be subdivided. The negative
electron, which was a constituent of all atoms of matter, was probably
nothing more than an isolated unit of negative electricity, and its
small mass was electrical in origin. It had long been considered
probable that the atom is an electrical structure, consisting of
positive and negative particles, held in equilibrium by electric or
magnetic forces. In recent years evidence had accumulated that an atom
consists of a positively charged nucleus surrounded at a distance by a
distribution of electrons to make it electrically neutral." (From _The
Morning Post_ of June 4, 1920.)
[28] The very fact alone that the degrees on a thermometer are _equal_
space divisions shows that they must bear a _varying_ relation to the
total volume of liquid as that expands from one end of the tube to the
other.
[29] A statement obviously applying--from what has been already said--at
only one point in the scale.
[30] I am not, of course, here arguing against the use of thermometers
or other instruments for practical purposes. This is certainly the
legitimate field of Science. But (as in the case of _prediction_ before
mentioned) the exactness of results obtained is a very different matter
from the truth of the generalities which are supposed to underlie these
results. In using a thermometer you need not even mention the word
"temperature."
THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE: A FORECAST
Once let that [the human ideal] slip out of the thought, and science is
of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian papiri.--RICHARD
JEFFERIES.
It would appear then, from the preceding paper, that in some sense a
mistake has been made in the method of modern scientific work; not that
the vast amount of labour expended in it has been altogether wasted, for
in return for this there is a mass of practical results and detailed
observations to show; but that in attempting to solve the problem of
science by the intellect alone, a radical mistake has been made which
_could_ only land us in absurdity, and that this mistake has for the
time being also vitiated the results that have been attained. For--in
reference to this last point--the divorce of the intellectual from the
emotional has caused a great portion of our scientific observations to
become merely pedantic and trifling; while it has turned the practical
results--as industrial and military machinery, etc.--into engines of
evil as often as into engines of good.
Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely intellectual
representation of the universe has, as already said, been searching for
a thing which does not exist. The very facts of Nature, as we call them,
are at least half feeling. If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact
and to produce a statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense
element, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out; and though our
resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no value. We
might as well try to take the clay out of a brick. It must never be
forgotten that the logical processes--important as they are--cannot
stand by themselves, have no standing ground of their own. They
presuppose assumptions and are the expression of things that are
unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest logic is a mere hooking
together of links in a chain, and the last link is of no use--you can
put no stress on it--unless the first is secured somewhere. The strength
of the intellectual chain is no greater than that of the staple from
which it hangs--and that is a human feeling The strength of Euclid is no
greater than that of the axioms--and _they_ are feelings; they are
unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, "I _feel_ like
that." In fact all the propositions of Geometry are nothing but the
analysis and elaborate expression, so to speak, of these primary
convictions--and the Geometry-structure stands and falls with them.
There is no such thing as intellectual truth--that is, I mean, a truth
which can be stated as existing apart from feeling. If, for instance, a
proposition in Geometry can be really shown to be based on the axioms,
it is true, not intellectually or absolutely, but as an expression of my
primary Geometrical sense; and if my giving a few pence to a crossing
sweeper is based not on a mere impression of duty, or an anxiety to
appear charitable, or wish to escape his importunity, but on genuine
regard for the man, then it is true, not in any absolute signification,
but just as an expression of what it professes to represent--namely my
primary sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is the
expression of the deepest feeling, and if there is an absolute truth it
can only be known and expressed by him who has the absolute feeling or
Being within himself.
This being so--and the nature of the intellectual processes being, like
the links in a chain, transitional--it becomes obvious that the
intellectual results may figure as a _means_ but never as an end in
themselves. To hang any weight of reliance on them in the latter sense
is like the Chinese Trick--described by Marco Polo--of throwing a rope's
end up in the air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that
our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are
formed as a means towards _practical_ applications. In that sense they
are transitional; they are formed, not as substantial truths, but merely
as links in a chain towards some definite practical result. For this
purpose we may form whatever theories are convenient: if we are
calculating the strength of bridges, we may adopt what generalisations
we like concerning mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual
and practical results; if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use of
any theory that will do. The theory does not matter, as long as it hauls
the practical result after it, just as it does not matter whether your
cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as you can get your ship into
dock with it. In this sense our Modern Science is, I conceive,
admirable. For practical results and brief predictions it affords a
quantity of useful generalisations--shorthand notes and conventional
symbols and pocket summaries of phenomena--which bear about the same
relation to the actual world that a map does to the country it is
supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have any resemblance to the
real thing--but, when you understand the principle on which it is
formed, it is exceedingly useful for finding your way about. As long as
Science therefore keeps the practical end in view, and starting from
sense seeks to return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is
perfectly legitimate; but the moment it credits its theory with a
positive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of
facts--and endeavours to pass by means of it into unverifiable and
abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of
space, or the remote past or future--it is simply throwing its rope's
end into the sky and trying to climb up! That "the wish is father to the
thought" is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the individual,
feeling precedes thinking--as the body precedes the clothes. In history,
the Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physiological
parallel; for behind the brain and determining its action stands the
great sympathetic nerve--the organ of the emotions. In fact here the
brain appears as distinctly transitional. It stands between the nerves
of sense on the one hand and the great sympathetic on the other.
Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole method of thinking
will be revolutionised; change the axiom or primary sensation in a
science, and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current
Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed; but let a
new axiomatic emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play instead of
unlimited grab), and the base of the science will be altered, and will
necessitate a new construction.
So when people argue (on politics, morality, art, etc.) it will
generally be found that they differ at the _base_; they go out, perhaps
quite unconsciously, from different axioms and hence they _cannot_
agree. Occasionally of course a strict examination will show that, while
agreeing at the base, one of them has made a false step in deduction; in
that case his thought does _not_ represent his primary feeling, and when
this is pointed out he is forced to alter it. But more often it is found
that the difference lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of
reason; and they disagree to the end. In this case neither is right and
neither is wrong. They simply feel differently; they are different
persons.
The Thought then is the expression, the outgrowth, the covering of
underlying Feeling. And in the great life of Man as a whole, as in the
lesser life of the individual, his continual new birth and inward growth
causes his thought-systems also continually to change and be replaced by
new ones. Like the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing plant or tree they
give form for a time to the life within; then they fall off and are
replaced. The husk prepares the bud underneath, which is to throw it
off. The thought prepares and protects the feeling underneath, which
growing will inevitably reject it; and when a thought has been formed it
is already _false_, _i.e._, ready to fall.
We are now, then, in a position to come back to the question of a
genuine Science, truly so-called.
As there is no invariable and absolute datum on the fringe of
Humanity--no definable flying atom on which we can found our
reasonings--and as Modern Science, considered as an actual
representation of the universe, falls miserably to pieces in
consequence--is it possible that we have made a mistake in the
_direction_ in which we have sought for our datum; and may it be that we
should look for that in the very Centre of Humanity instead of in its
remotest circumference? In that direction evidently, if we could
penetrate, we should expect to find, not a shadowy intellectual
generalisation, but the very opposite of that--an intense immutable
_feeling_ or state, an axiomatic condition of Being. Is it possible that
here, blazing like a sun (if we could only see it--and the sun is its
allegory in the physical world), there exists within us absolutely such
a thing--the one _fact_ in the universe, of which all else are shadows,
_to_ which everything has relation, and round which, itself
unanalysable, all thought circles and all phenomena stand as indirect
modes of expression?
Is it possible? That is the question--the question which each one of us
has to solve. At any rate, let us throw this out as a suggestion. Let us
suggest that as we have got nothing satisfactory by cleaning the
sense-element out of phenomena, we should take the opposite course and
put as much sense into them as we can!
"Facts" are, at least, half feelings. Let us acknowledge this and not
empty the feeling out of them, but deepen and enlarge that which we
already have in them. Who knows whether we have ever _seen_ the blue
sky? Who knows whether we have ever seen each other? Is it not a
commonplace to say that one man sees in the common objects of Nature
what another is wholly unconscious of? "The primrose on the river's brim
a yellow primrose is to him--and nothing more." To what extent may the
facts of Nature thus be deepened and made more substantial to us--and
whither will this process lead us?
Do we not want to feel _more_, not less, in the presence of
phenomena--to enter into a living relation with the blue sky, and the
incense-laden air, and the plants and the animals--nay, even with
poisonous and hurtful things to have a keener _sense_ of their
hurtfulness? Is it not a strange kind of science, that which wakes the
mind to pursue the shadows of things, but dulls the senses to the
reality of them--which causes a man to try to bottle the pure atmosphere
of heaven and then to shut himself in a gas-reeking, ill-ventilated
laboratory while he analyses it; or allows him to vivisect a dog,
unconscious that he is blaspheming the pure and holy relation between
man and the animals in doing so? Surely the man of Science (in its
higher sense, that is) should be lynx-eyed as an Indian, keen-scented as
a hound--with all senses and feelings trained by constant use and a pure
and healthy life in close contact with Nature, and with a heart beating
in sympathy with every creature. Such a man would have at command, so to
speak, the keyboard of the universe; but the mechanical, unhealthy,
indoor-living student--is he not really _ignorant of the
facts_?--Certainly, since he has not felt them, he is.
The process of the true Science consists first in the naming and
defining of phenomena (_i.e._, the facts of human consciousness), and
secondly, in the discovery of the true relation of these phenomena to
each other; and since the definitions of phenomena and their relations
keep varying with the standpoint of the observer, the process evidently
involves all experience, and ultimately the discovery of that last fact
of experience to which and through which all the other facts are
related. It is therefore an age-long process, and has to do with the
emotional and moral part of man as well as with the logical and
intellectual. It is, in fact, the discovery of the nature of Man
himself, and of the true order of his being.
Modern Science--though seeking for a unity in Nature--fails to find it,
because, from the nature of the case, any large body of knowledge in
which all people will agree is limited to certain small regions of human
experience--regions in which very likely no unity is discoverable. It
takes the emerald, and breaks it up; treats of its colour and
light-refracting qualities on the one hand; of its crystalline structure
and hardness on the other; of its weight and density; and of its
chemical properties; all separately, and producing long strings of
generalisation from each aspect of the subject. But how all these
qualities are conjoined together, what their relation is which
_constitutes_ the emerald--yea, even the smallest bit of emerald
dust--it (wisely) does not attempt to say. It takes the man and dissects
him; treats of his blood, his nerves, his bones, his brain; of his
senses of sight, of touch, of hearing; but of that which binds these
together into a unity, of their true relation to each other in the man,
it is silent.
Yet the man knows of himself that he _is_ a unity; he knows that all
parts of his body have relation to _him_, and to each other; he knows
that his senses of sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell are
conjoined in the focus of his individual life, in his "I am;" he knows
that all his faculties and powers, however much they may belong to
different planes, spiritual or material, or may come under the
inquisition of different Sciences, have an order of their own among each
other--that there _is_ an ultimate Science of them--even though he be
not yet wholly versed in it. And he knows, moreover, that in a grain of
dust, or in an emerald, or in an orange, or in any object of Nature, the
different attributes of the object--which the Sciences thus treat of
separately--are only the reflexion of his different senses; so that the
problem of the conjunction of different attributes in a body comes back
to the same problem of the union of various senses and powers in
himself--each individual object being only a case, externalised as it
were, and made a matter of consciousness, of the general relation to
each other of his own sensations and feelings. Knowing all his--I
say--he sees that the understanding of Nature in general and of the laws
or relations which he thinks he perceives among external things must
always depend on the relations and laws which he tacitly assumes, or
which he is directly conscious of, as existing between the various parts
of his own being; and that the ultimate truth which Science--the divine
Science--is really in search of is a moral or psychologic Truth--an
understanding of what man is, and the discovery of the true relation to
each other of all his faculties--involving all experience, and an
exercise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emotional and
spiritual, instead of one set of faculties only.
Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, shall we know the law of
the emerald and the orange, or of Nature generally; and the law of
ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately, by intellectual
investigation; it is mainly learnt by life. The relation of gravity to
vitality is learnt not so much by outer experiment in a laboratory as by
long experience within ourselves from the day when as infants we cannot
lift ourselves above the floor, through the years of the proud strength
of manhood scaling the loftiest mountains, to the hour when our
disengaged spirits finally overcome and pass beyond the attraction of
the earth; and just as the sense of weight--which first appears as a
quite external sensation--is thus at last found to stand in most
pregnant relation with our deepest selves, so of the other senses which
feed the individual life--the senses of light, of warmth, of taste, of
sound, of smell. Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the
tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed, a sense which
identifies itself with the health and well-being of the whole body; the
pleasure of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface pleasure, and
its discrimination of food more than a mere regard for the nutrition of
the ordinary corporeal functions. The sense of Light, which begins in
the material eye, grows and deepens inwardly till the consciousness of
it pervades the whole body and mind with a kind of inward illumination
or divine Reason, showing the places of all things and enfolding the
sense of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in the same manner is
related to and leads up to Love; and Sound, in the voices of our friends
or the divine chords of music, has passed away from being an external
phenomenon and has established itself as the language of our most tender
and intimate emotions.
All the senses thus, as they develop and deepen, are found to unite in
the very focus of individual life. Slowly, and through long experience,
their relation to each other, _their very meaning_ unfolds, or will
unfold; and as this process takes place the man knows himself _one_, a
unity, of which the various faculties are the different manifestations.
Then further through his less localised feelings or more glorified
senses the individual finds his relation to other individuals. Through
his loves and hatreds, through his senses of attraction, repulsion,
cohesion, solidarity, order, justice, charity, right, wrong and the
rest--these feelings, each like the others deepening back more and more
as time goes on--he gradually discovers his true and abiding
relationship to other individuals, and to the divine society of which
they all form a part--and so at last, if we may venture to say so, his
relationship to the absolute and universal. At present, since our most
important relation to each other is conceived of as one of rivalry and
Competition, we of course think of the objects of Nature as being
chiefly engaged in a Struggle for Existence with each other; but when we
become aware of all our senses and feelings, and of ourselves as
individuals, as having relation to the Absolute and universal,
proceeding from it, as the branches and twigs of a tree from the
trunk--then we shall become aware of a Divine or absolute science in
Nature; we shall at last understand that all objects have a permanent
and indissoluble relation to each other, and shall see their true
meaning--though not till then.
Is it possible then that Science, having hitherto--and we shall see in
time that this process has been really most valuable and important--gone
outwards from the centre towards the very fringe of Humanity--emptying
facts as far as possible as it went of all feeling, and reducing itself
at last to the most shadowy generalisations on the very verge of sense
and nonsense--is it possible, I say, that it will now return, and
_first_ filling up facts with feeling as far as practicable (that is, by
direct and the most living contact with Nature in every form, learning
to enter into direct personal sense-relationship with every phenomenon
and phase), will so gradually ascend to the great central fact and
feeling, and then at last and for the first time become fully conscious
of a vast organisation--absolutely perfect and intimately knit from its
centre to its utmost circumference--(the true cosmos of Man--the
conceptions of man and god combined)--existing inchoate or embryonic in
every individual man, animal, plant, or other creature--the object of
all life, experience, suffering, and toil--the ground of all sensation,
and the hidden, yet proper, theme of all thought and study?
For this is it possible that Science will, speaking broadly, have to
leave the laboratory and become one with Life; or that the great
currents of human life will have to be turned on into these often Augean
stables of intellectual pruriency?--the investigation of Nature no
longer a matter of the intellect alone, but of patient listening and the
quiet eye, and of love and faith, and of all deep human experience,
bearing not superciliously its weight towards the interpretation of the
least phenomenon--every "fact" thus deepened to its utmost--all
experience (rather than experiment) courted, and filial walking with
Nature, rather than tearing of veils aside--the life of the open air,
and on the land and the waters, the companionship of the animals and the
trees and the stars, the knowledge of their habits at first hand and
through individual relationship to them, the recognition of their voices
and languages, and listening well what they themselves have to say; the
keenest education of the senses towards the physical powers and
elements, and the acceptance of _all_ human experience, without
exception--till Science become a reality.
Is it possible that in some sense, instead of reducing each branch of
Science to its lowest terms, we shall have to read it in the light of
its _highest_ factors, and "take it up" into the Science above--that we
shall have to take up the mechanical sciences into the physical, the
physical into the vital, the vital into the social and ethical, and so
forth, before we can understand them? Is it possible that the phenomena
of Chemistry only find their due place and importance in their relation
to living beings and processes; that the phenomena of vitality and the
laws of Biology and Zoology--Evolution included--can only be "explained"
by their dependence on self-hood--both in plants and animals; that
Political Economy and the Social Sciences (which deal with men as
individual selves) must, to be understood aright, be studied in the
light of those great ethical principles and enthusiasms, which to a
certain extent override the individual self; and that, finally, Ethics
or the study of moral problems is only comprehensible when the student
has become aware of a region beyond Ethics, into which questions of
morality and immorality, of right and wrong, do not and cannot enter?
Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method Ruskin has given a
great and signal instance in his treatment of Political Economy; it
remains, perhaps, for others to follow his example in the other branches
of Science.[31]
With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen that Science
has two alternatives before it--either to be merely intellectual and to
seek for its start-point in some quite external (and imaginary) thing
like the Atom, or to be divine and to seek for its absolute in the
innermost recesses of humanity. We have two similar alternatives in the
doctrine of Evolution, which looks either to one end of the scale or the
other for its interpretation--either to the amoeba or to the man--to
something it knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows most
of. Goethe, when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived the idea of
leaf-metamorphosis, which he afterwards enunciated in the now accepted
doctrine that all parts of a plant--seed-vessel, pistil, stamens,
petals, sepals, stalk, etc.--may be regarded as modifications of a leaf
or leaves. In this view the distinctions between the parts are effaced,
and we have only one part instead of many--but the question is "what is
that part?" It is of course arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is
continually varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a stalk,
and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. What then is it? For the
moment we are baffled.
So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole organic
kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it
obliterates distinctions. Geoffroy St. Hilaire proposed to show the
French Academy that a Cephalopod could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by
supposing the latter bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet.
There is a continuous variation from the mollusc to the man--all the
lines of distinction run and waver--classes and species cease to
exist--and Science, instead of many, sees only _one_ thing. What then is
that one thing? Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or what is it? Are we
to say that man may be looked upon as a variation of a mollusc or an
amoeba, or that the amoeba may be looked on as a variation of man? Here
are two directions of thought; which shall we choose? But the plain
truth is, the Intellect can give no satisfactory answer. Whichever, or
whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite arbitrary--just as much so as
the choice of the "leaf" in the other case. There is no answer to be
given. And thus it is that _the appearance of the doctrine of Evolution
is the signal of the destruction of Science_ (in the ordinary
acceptation of the word). For Evolution is the successive obliteration
of the arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by their existence
_constitute_ Science, and as soon as Evolution covers the whole ground
of Nature inorganic and organic (as before long it will do)--the whole
of Nature runs and wavers before the eye of Science, the latter
recognises that its distinctions _are_ arbitrary, and turns upon and
destroys itself. This has happened before, I believe--ages back in the
history of the human race--and probably will happen again.
The only conceivable answer to the question, "What is that which is now
a mollusc and now a man and now an inorganic atom?"[32] is given by man
himself--and his answer is, I fear, not "scientific." It is "I Am." "I
am that which varies." And the force of his answer depends on what he
means by the word "I." And so also the only conceivable answer to the
absolute datum question is to be found in the meaning of the word
"I"--in the deepening back of consciousness itself. Man is the measure
of all things. If we are to use Science as a minister to the most
external part of man--to provide him with cheap boots and shoes,
etc.--then we do right to seek our absolute datum in his external part,
and to take his _foot_ as our first measure. We found a science on feet
and pounds, and it serves its purpose well enough. But if we want to
find a garment for his inner being--or, rather, one that shall fit the
_whole_ man--to wear which will be a delight to him and, as it were, a
very interpretation of himself--it seems obvious that we must not take
our measure from outside, but from his very most central principle. The
whole question is, whether there _is_ any absolute datum in this
direction or not. There have been men through all ages of history (and
from before) who have declared that there is. They have perhaps been
conscious of it in themselves. On the other hand there have been men
who, starting from their feet, declare
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