PART III HOLISM AND THE PUBLICIST STANDPOINT IN PHILOSOPHY SUMMARY

When the conclusions of physicists are supplemented by the enquiries of the biologist we are led to a schematization of experience which permits us to discuss the nature of matter and life on a neutral ground. This neutral ground is the public world of science. It represents what is significant for the purpose of discourse. Idealistic philosophers have assumed the nature of reality as the goal of philosophy; but the concept of reality is essentially equivocal. For the purpose of discourse we have to assume that the neutral ground is the real thing. In private we are at liberty to reject this view. Temperament decides which of these alternatives we adopt. There is therefore no hope of arriving at universal agreement in discussing the nature of reality. To the introvert reality resides in the domain of mystic experience. To the extrovert the public world is the nearest approach to a complete representation of reality which our limited range of receptor organs permits us to construct. The belief that philosophy can settle the nature of reality, and that it is possible to arrive at universal conclusions independently of the methods of science and mathematics arose in the period of decadence of Greek philosophy. It developed in modern Europe under the influence of ecclesiasticism. Freed from the bondage of clerical control, philosophy must undertake the more modest task of discussing what characteristics of belief determine their communicability or publicity, and indicating how the problems of existence can be resolved into their public and private components. From this standpoint educational theory must be based on a recognition of the respective spheres of publicity and privacy. Organized religious belief and ritual is based on a confusion between the two. The same confusion exists in the pragmatist philosophy.

IX. BIOLOGY AND HUMANISM

“But the mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto authority; and more especially, the establishing of our belief upon the dictates of antiquity. For (as every capacity may observe) most men, of ages present, so superstitiously do look upon ages past, that the authorities of the one exceed the reasons of the other. Whose persons indeed far removed from our times, their works, which seldom with us pass uncontrolled, either by contemporaries, or immediate successors, are now become out of the distance of envies; and, the farther removed from present times, are conceived to approach the nearer unto truth itself. Now hereby methinks we manifestly delude ourselves, and widely walk out of the track of truth.”—Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica

§1

Evolution does not enable us to make any spectacular predictions which can be verified here and now. Its importance lies in satisfying our curiosity about human origins in a manner consistent with the present state of scientific knowledge. It provides a philosophical framework for biological enquiry on the one hand and for our attitude to the problem of human destiny on the other. From a purely technical standpoint Darwin’s specific contribution to the evolutionary doctrine was the hypothesis of natural selection. The hypothesis of natural selection, in the form in which Darwin stated it, has been modified out of all recognition to accommodate later enquiries into the nature of heredity and variation. Such enquiries did not receive their impetus from the Origin of Species. They followed the course prescribed by Mendel’s experiments upon the kitchen pea. How then has it come to pass that Darwin has earned a position of pre-eminence only comparable with that of Newton in modern times? Is not the answer that Darwin is the only great natural philosopher who has emerged, since the time of Aristotle, from the ranks of the biologists? When the fullest allowance is made for the inadequacy of contemporary knowledge to meet all the demands of the evolutionary problem, what still distinguishes Darwin’s contribution from that of his numerous predecessors in the same field is the consistency and thoroughness with which he set out to explore the implications of evolution in every department of biological information available at that time. By so doing he laid the foundations of a new humanism akin to science, and created a philosophical issue whose magnitude has only become apparent since the rise of the behaviourist school in psychology. Evolution took the discussion of human affairs out of the hands of the humanistic philosophers, and brought it within the legitimate domain of scientific method.

From the dawn of philosophical controversy two opposing tendencies have competed for mastery. One is based upon confidence in the testimony of our receptor organs. The other mistrusts the evidence of the senses. One relies on patient observation. The other appeals to axioms which require no proof. One has its impulse in curiosity about Nature. The other is preoccupied with human obligations. Between the two extremes there have been many makeshifts. As one has fallen into discredit, another has taken its place. The only permanent feature of philosophical discussion is the impossibility of effecting a permanent reconciliation between those who have called themselves, at different periods of history, materialists and idealists, nominalists and realists, empiricists and transcendentalists, mechanists and vitalists, to emphasize some new aspect of a fundamental incompatibility. In the distinction between publicity and privacy it has been suggested that this antinomy does not necessarily reside in the system of nature. It arises because our curiosity exceeds our information. Up to a certain point we succeed in pooling our experiences by the method of science. In so doing we construct the public world. The method of science has achieved its most conspicuous success in dealing with inanimate objects and with the brute creation. To the few who are genuinely interested in these things the extent of our knowledge has always seemed of more importance than the magnitude of our ignorance. Hence there have always been philosophers of a type which, for want of a better term, may be called materialistic. The majority of people are not interested in natural objects except in so far as the knowledge which science confers contributes to their personal comfort. Man is pre-eminently interested in himself. So long as science cannot satisfy that curiosity his private and personal values assume a greater importance than the academic hypotheses of science. Philosophers who teach us to distrust the guidance of our sense data flatter our egotism, and soothe our vanity. Science cannot. On the other hand science can supply us with aviation, broadcasting and twilight sleep. Transcendental philosophy can only offer us the good life. The politician distrusts the mechanist, because Science provides no concept of divine right to fortify social privilege. He cannot go all the way with Parmenides and identify the way of the senses with the way of error, because scientists are too useful. The only philosophy for the plain man who wants a plain answer to a plain question is some sort of compromise between the standpoint of transcendental metaphysics and mechanistic science. Since the sixteenth century humanistic philosophy has been dogged by the problem of accommodating man’s interest in the world around him with his interest in his own person. Worldly interests compel civilized man to recognize the claims of science up to a certain point. Egotism prompts him to demand some supernatural sanction for the vagaries of his own social conduct. For three centuries traditional philosophy has been haunted by the possibility that science might in the end succeed in satisfying man’s curiosity about his own nature. Darwin made that possibility the explicit concern of scientific enquiry. From mediæval times all attempts to effect a reconciliation between the empirical standpoint and transcendental values have been concerned with defining separate spheres of influence in which science and metaphysics can operate without mutual interference. On that basis philosophy is still taught in our universities to-day. Darwin’s Descent of Man challenged the complacent dualism which had permitted humanistic philosophy and utilitarian science to pursue an independent course from the Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century.

At every stage in the advance of scientific knowledge a new system has arisen to conserve some fragments from the wreckage of supernatural beliefs. There have been three outstanding attempts to effect a compromise between observation and inspiration. The systems of Aristotle, of Descartes and of Kant each exhibit features characteristic of the state of contemporary scientific knowledge. Each has a peculiarly interesting significance in the history of biological science. The system of Aristotle was the last will and testament of Greek biology. The system of Descartes was finally overthrown by the evolutionary theory. The system of Kant is predestined to a similar doom, when professional philosophers are prepared to face the disquieting consequences of modern research on the “labyrinthine organ” and Sherrington’s work on the “muscular sense.” If it is too early to predict the fate of holism, it is instructive to reflect on that of its predecessors.

§2

Aristotle undertook the task of finding a place for science in a civilization in which scientific enquiry was approaching its decline. His problem was simplified by the circumstance that the conflict between teleology and mechanism had arisen as a conflict of interest rather than interpretation. Burnet insists that the idea of purpose only emerged at a comparatively late date in the history of Hellenic science, and the more recent researches of Cyril Bailey emphasize the same aspect of the incompatibility of natural and moral philosophy in ancient Greece. Greek philosophy had inherited from the Hesiodic cosmogony the belief that Chaos was the beginning of all things, gods and men alike. It was unfettered by the Chaldean Fall and the doctrine of creative providence. Aristotle’s system was therefore an attempt to harmonize two tendencies which had come into being independently of one another. One begins with Thales. It bore fruit in the brilliant speculations of Leucippus and Democritus. It survived after Aristotle’s death in the mechanical discoveries of the Alexandrian school. In the poem of Lucretius it made a final gesture of august rhetoric. To modern civilization it bequeathed the indestructibility of matter, and the atomic concept which was revived by Gassendi in the seventeenth century. Its rival was anti-scientific and mystical. It diverted enquiry from the observation of nature to the duty of man. It was preoccupied with the good life, with the soul and with the hereafter. It began with the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans. It gave birth to the school of Plato; and its influence survived long after the extinction of Hellenic civilization. Through Philo Platonism transmitted the Logos to the Nazarenes, and at a later date the neoplatonists equipped the Church with the apparatus of the Trinitarian controversy. It completed its contribution to Western culture in the Council of Trent, when the mystery of human life, death and duty were placed for all time on a firm foundation of deductive reasoning.

The success of Platonism was assured by the powerlessness of Greek materialism to satisfy the requirements of Greek politics. The plain man wanted to know whether the wise man will obey the laws, if he knows that he will not be found out? With transparent honesty Epicurus could only reply that a simple answer is difficult to find. The benign and tolerant humanism which Epicurus grafted on the soil prepared by the atomists was ill suited to flourish in the stern climate of the military state. Like holism, Aristotle’s system was a shrewd blending of science and statesmanship. It enabled its author to combine a personal predilection for natural history with a political partiality for slavery.

Aristotle borrowed from Plato the doctrine which identifies the φυσις, or real nature with the best or most normal condition of a thing. He rejected the respect for mathematics which Plato borrowed from the Pythagoreans, and incorporated Plato’s teleology in his theory of the physical world. One disastrous effect of this may perhaps be seen in the neglect and preservation of more ancient work. Empedocles is known to have made observations on respiration and the movement of the blood. It would seem that he had recourse to experiment of a crude kind. One fragment of his writings contains a hint that he came very near to anticipating Torricelli and Harvey. The details have been lost. Empedocles also put forward a theory of vision. He held that the eye contains fire. Sight is produced when the fire within the eye goes forth to meet the object. A hypothesis so well adapted to the view which interprets life by “correlating the initiation of the activity with its end” was, as might be expected, immortalized by Plato to the calamity of physical and physiological enquiry. Science had a long road to traverse before men learned the truth of Nietzsche’s statement that “the most valuable knowledge is always discovered last, but the most valuable knowledge consists of methods.”

The fundamental incompatibility of the naturalistic and Platonic attitude to the Nature of Life is illustrated by the following passage from the writings of a contemporary philosopher, Professor Wildon Carr:

“It is wholly inadequate to classify natural objects into the inert and the living, into objects which are not responsive and objects which are responsive to external impressions, and then to seek to specify the property or character which differentiates the one class from the other. Life is a perfectly definite and distinctive phenomenon. It is not a thing, neither is it the character of a thing. It is a purposive activity exercised within clearly ascertainable limits and having a definite range. I use the term purposive without any implication of awareness. Living activity is purposive in the meaning that it can only be understood by correlating the initiation of the activity with the end. The nature of the activity is plainly recognizable, however difficult it may be to conceive the agent, agents or agency which the activity implies.... Life is individual: it exists only in living beings, and each living being is indivisible, a whole not constituted of parts.”

The concluding remarks of this passage are somewhat reminiscent of the Athanasian creed, the germs of which were actually derived from the neoplatonists. It displays the sterilizing influence of the Platonic teaching in a peculiarly explicit form. If the words quoted in italics were actually true, experiments carried out daily by medical students in physiological and pharmacological laboratories would be impossible. The physiologist takes the living machine to pieces and studies the properties of its several parts. The experimental embryologist can put it together again. Ross Harrison grafts the head end of a tadpole of one species on to the tail end of a tadpole of another species. The progress of modern biology has been made possible by the implicit rejection of the attitude which Professor Wildon Carr advocates; and this is not merely true of the growth of experimental physiology as a quantitative science. In our generation Bergson has rehabilitated the evolutionary doctrine in teleological language. Its history very clearly shows that the rise of the evolutionary hypothesis in its modern form is traceable to the liberation of biological enquiry from Aristotelean teleology. Two centuries of research, fertilized by the experimental temper which Vesalius reintroduced into the study of medicine, paved the way for a new school of naturalists in the eighteenth century. Ray and Linnæus took up the comparative study of animal life where Aristotle had left it. At a later date Cuvier, Milne Edwardes and Owen founded a school of comparative anatomy which—unlike post-Darwinian morphology—made the issue of experiment the final court of appeal. It was thus that Darwin and Wallace brought to the discussion of Man’s place in Nature a mass of new data, accumulated in the process of displacing the teleological bias under whose influence Greek biology steadily declined. It is futile to blame Aristotle for the influence which his particular form of compromise exerted on the history of biology. In Aristotle’s time it was impossible to say: “Here is a property of living matter, the teleological attitude leads us to make such and such predictions; quantitative analysis leads us to contrary conclusions: let us submit the merits of the two methods to the issue of experiment.” Aristotelian biology was not an experimental science.

When Aristotle infused into Greek biology the teleology of Platonism, natural science had already progressed as far as it was destined to advance without coming into conflict with teleological presumptions; but the inevitability of the conflict was not yet apparent, and does not emerge as a clearly defined issue in Greek philosophy. Greek materialism, like modern science, was the offspring of secular curiosity. For this reason it is easy to trace the germs of modern hypotheses in the speculations of the ancients. It is more difficult to determine how far such analogies are merely verbal. The extent to which the Greeks had recourse to experiment has given rise to lively controversy. We are more familiar with their beliefs about nature than with the evidence on which they relied. To reconstruct the scientific knowledge of Anaximander and Empedocles from the fragments of their writings which remain is a task no less formidable than that of a future historian who has nothing but the torn pages of a Harmsworth encyclopædia to provide evidence of contemporary science. The fact remain that the scientific knowledge of the ancients lacks two features which are highly characteristic of modern enquiry. Greek science was static. Having no means of measuring short intervals of time, the Greek could make little use of dynamical notions. The mathematical technique for dealing conveniently with dynamical calculations was not evolved until Greek geometry was supplemented by the universal arithmetic of the Arabs. Galileo’s dynamics was the death-blow to Aristotelian teleology. To the Greeks time relations were philosophical enigmas. They had not as yet become objects of scientific enquiry. Modern mechanistic biology lays emphasis on process. Greek biology was still dominated by structure. This preoccupation gave rise to the distinction between form and substance which assumes a prominent place in the Aristotle of the schoolmen, and persisted in modern science, until the dynamical concept of electromagnetic mass was put forward. A second characteristic which distinguishes contemporary science from the natural philosophy of the Greeks has been emphasized less by historians of science. This may be because astronomy and mechanics were developed by the school of Alexandria in close association with mathematics. That brilliant but short-lived phase in the science of antiquity was post-Aristotelian. Astronomy was the only branch of natural science which had attained the precision of measurement in Aristotle’s time.

The distinction between Aristotelian vitalism and the modern biological standpoint is most apparent in the attitude which Aristotle adopted to quantitative investigation. “Mathematical accuracy of language,” he declares, “is not to be required in all things, but in those things that do not involve any connexion with matter. Wherefore such is not the natural (alternatively physical) mode of discovering truth, for perhaps the whole of Nature involves matter. Therefore first must we investigate what Nature is. For in this way also will it be evident about what only natural science is conversant, and whether it is the province of one science or many to speculate into causes and first principles.” This passage occurs in the first book of the Metaphysics. There are other passages in which the same point of view is expressed. They show conclusively that Aristotle was not content with ignoring the connexion between mathematics and science. He definitely asserted that the quantitative study of natural phenomena is not the correct one. In this he went further than Plato. While Plato despised the study of physics and biology, he recognized the vital dependence of astronomy on mathematics and valued its pursuit. The standpoint which Aristotle adopted is comprehensible. His interest in nature was mainly that of the naturalist. He did not study living creatures in the belief that by so doing he would be able to predict their behaviour. That possibility only emerged into prominence when Lavoisier and Laplace brought the thermometer and the balance to the study of respiration. By then the spectacular progress of physics had necessitated a new adjustment of the claims of moral and natural philosophy. The philosophy of Descartes liberated biology from developing within the limitations prescribed by the Aristotelian system.

Two events contributed significantly to the situation which Descartes faced at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The period which intervened between Aristotle and Descartes witnessed the rise of Christianity and the origin of a new cultural synthesis within the world of Islam. At Alexandria natural science and mathematics still flourished, when Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire. Five centuries after the death of Aristotle Diophantus made what seems to have been the first definite contribution to the development of algebraical analysis. Alexandrian science came to an end when “on a fatal day in the holy season of Lent,” Hypatia the expositor of Diophantus “was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics.” Two centuries later what was spared by the religion of Cyril was consigned to the flames by the victorious armies of Islam.

While Christianity and Mohammedanism were competing to appease the deeper needs of mankind, the genius of a dark-skinned people was preparing the stage for a rebirth of European culture. Before the destruction of a second library of Alexandria the Greek learning had filtered into the middle East through the hospitality which the Persian court extended in turn to the banished Platonists, the Jews and the heretic Nestorians. In India Brahmagupta and his successors had applied themselves to the same problems which Diophantus had assailed. Half a century before the foundation of the University of Baghdad Hindu astronomical tables and the rhetorical algebra of the far East had been introduced into Persia. By the beginning of the ninth century the works of Ptolemy, Euclid, Hippocrates and Aristotle had been translated into Arabic. At the end of the tenth century the Moorish culture was firmly established in Europe. In the universities of Cordova, Seville and Toledo, the study of medicine and mathematics flourished side by side. The medical schools of Italy and France were outposts of the Moorish culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Moors extended the Alexandrian pharmacopeias; and advanced the study of anatomy. Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture brought the tradition of dissection into Italy. From Arabic manuscripts Italy first made contact with the resources of Greek science. Arabic learning transmitted the texts from which ecclesiasticism imbibed its taste for metaphysics, and at the same time contributed two influences subversive to the Aristotelian system. It gave birth to chemistry as an experimental science, and it developed the beginnings of syncopated algebra. The invention of algebra made possible the efflorescence of physics when Greek geometry had long since completed its task as the midwife of mathematical astronomy.

From the fact-loving temper of Aristotle the naturalist Arabic curiosity had absorbed all that could be used as a basis for scientific enquiry. In the Sorbonne the Platonic ingredients of his system brought fresh grist to the mill of theological controversy. By seeking for “causes and first principles,” Aristotle in his own words had made philosophy the “divine science.” As the divine science it was pressed into the service of orthodox theology and the Protestant revolt against ecclesiastical authority. During the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries the resources of the Eastern Empire were ransacked for the rhetoricians and sophists neglected by the empirical disposition of Arabic scholarship. The political speculations of the ancients became the rationale of Protestant democracy. As the influence of Platonism on science succumbed to the success of the new experimental and quantitative methods which were gaining ground in physics, classical humanism completed the divorce of moral and natural philosophy by elevating the authority of Plato in politics: but before classical humanism had gained ascendancy in the mediæval universities, an ascendancy which became a monopoly in the grammar schools, Arab science had implanted in the oldest seats of European learning a seed destined in the fullness of time to challenge not merely the authority of church councils but the authority of print, to place the authority of experience above the authority of the written word, as Protestantism had placed the authority of the written word above the authority of church councils.

Plato would have had little use for physicists in his Utopia. To outlaw science was the last thing which Protestant rulers were prepared to do. The great navigations had made science a necessity to the mercantile interests. So long as they refrained from making themselves a nuisance, like Servetus whose inability to envisage the Trinity in its correct numerical proportions earned for him a harsher fate than that of Galileo, scientists must be left alone. The world had outgrown the Aristotelian compromise. The time had come to replace it by some new device.

The Cartesian philosophy met the new situation by defining separate spheres of autonomy for the scientist and the metaphysician. It did not attempt to mix metaphysics and science in a uniform system of nature. With his propositions and demonstrations “which establish the existence of God and the distinction between the mind and body of man disposed in geometrical order” Descartes stumbled upon the felicitous notion that God ordained the investigation of nature according to strictly mechanistic principles. “Now that I know him,” he discloses in Meditation V, “I possess the means of acquiring a perfect knowledge respecting innumerable matters, as well relative to God Himself and other intellectual objects as to corporeal nature, in so far as it is the object of pure mathematics.”

So piety prescribes that the scientist, contrary to the admonition of Aristotle, must apply mathematics to the investigation of nature. By the same process of reasoning or inspiration Descartes arrives at the conclusion that teleological hypotheses in natural science are an impious abrogation of the prerogatives of Deity. “Likewise finally,” he asserts in the Principles of Philosophy, “we will not seek reasons of natural things from the end which God or nature proposed to himself in their creation (i.e. final causes), for we ought not to presume so far as to think that we are sharers in the counsels of Deity, but, considering him as the efficient cause of all things, let us endeavour to discover by the natural light which he has planted in us, applied to those of his attributes of which he has been willing we should have some knowledge, what must be concluded regarding those effects we perceive by our senses; bearing in mind however what has been already said, that we must only confide in this natural light so long as nothing contrary to its dictates is revealed by God himself.”

As Descartes was prepared to concede to mechanistic science the entire brute creation, the Cartesian framework provided plenty of latitude for biological investigation. Descartes stimulated experimental physiology by his own ingenious speculations; and his influence on physiology survived after it had been superseded by later philosophical systems. In biology the Cartesian tradition has fallen into discredit through the rise of evolutionary ideas. The evolutionists persisted in following “the natural light;” and their theological contemporaries maintained that it led them to conclusions contrary to what had been “revealed by God Himself.” Since then biologists have been faced with the alternative of pressing forward to a more radically mechanistic conception of life, or abandoning it altogether. I have called the extension of the mechanistic conception the publicist standpoint in contradistinction to holism, the most recent compromise.

In Science and the Modern World Dr. Whitehead calls the period immediately before the Renaissance the Age of Reason. That which followed is the Age of Faith. The Age of Argument and the Age of Confidence might perhaps describe the difference in more significant terms. Confidence in the method of science has grown gradually with the expansion of civilization. What is called modern science has arisen, because innumerable, at first independent, lines of enquiry have coalesced. It has not come into being because the men who have pursued these separate but converging paths have had any general theory about nature as a whole, purposeful or otherwise. Curiosity has always induced some men to speculate without investigating, others to investigate without speculating beyond their terms of reference, and a good many to do both. Aristotle was neither the first nor the last scientist to write a natural history and a volume of Gifford lectures. Newton divided his time between gravitation and the prophecies of Daniel. Faraday elaborated a theory of the ether and advocated the tenets of Sandemanism. Aristotle’s natural history, Newton’s gravitation and Faraday’s ether were not the philosophical complements of their respective ethical, political or devotional beliefs. Aristotle dissected animals, Newton gazed at the stars, Faraday experimented with his electrical machine, because they were interested in living creatures and the heavenly bodies and electrical phenomena.

The pursuit of science has its personal impulse in curiosity and its social impulse in the power which science confers. The Greeks accepted or rejected as illusory the evidence of their senses. In Aristotle’s system science does not beg for a philosophical sanction. It was reserved for the piety of Descartes to introduce the singular idea that the scientist requires a licence to practice signed and stamped by the metaphysician. The idea that science requires a metaphysical justification has been revived by Dr. Whitehead who adopts a novel, and I think incorrect, view of Hume’s contribution to philosophy. When the scientist enters the field of contemporary philosophical controversy, he is confronted with a jargon whose existence has very little historical or logical connexion with the assumptions on which he works. It is not surprising that he remains, in the words of Dr. Whitehead, “blandly indifferent” to the arguments with which Hume refuted those notions of causality and inference which traditional philosophers have chosen to regard as the justification of science. The important fact about Hume’s argument is that he refuted the pretensions of moral philosophy by the same arguments which demolished the irrelevant dogmas which natural philosophy inherited from the age of scholasticism.

Starting from a purely introspective basis Descartes attempts to find a justification for the growing confidence of mankind in the testimony of the senses. The subjective empiricism of Locke is still groping after the same solution. Hume pursues this method to its bitter conclusion; and shows that it led to complete scepticism. He proves to his own satisfaction that the method of introspection cannot be made the basis of socially communicable knowledge. The theory of a public world builds upon that foundation, by examining the characteristics of questions to which a socially communicable answer is possible. The strength of Hume’s position is more apparent in our own generation than it was at the time, when he wrote. Our expectation of living has increased as we have learned to worry less about the good life and more about the good drain. That the questions with which science deals are legitimate objects of enquiry and that the method which science adopts is the most satisfactory way of answering them is tacitly accepted by everybody who avails himself of the amenities of a railway time table, the bioscope, the telegraph office, the diphtheria vaccine, the ocean liner and the air mail. If we do not attempt to answer the questions which perplexed Socrates, it is because we have at our disposal a vastly greater body of material to guide us in determining what characteristics of a question make it suitable for being asked. We cannot say whether the wise man will obey the laws, if he thinks that he will not be found out; but we are less interested in knowing the answer, because we know that it is highly probable that his finger prints will be traced. Detective fiction has familiarized us with other devices which have replaced the deathbed confession of the repentant atheist.

Hume applies the Cartesian method, demonstrates its sterility, and arrives at this attitude which he states with no uncertain sound in a passage which occurs at the conclusion of the essay on “The Sceptical or Academical Philosophy.” “When we run over libraries persuaded of their principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

In Hume’s scepticism natural science is no longer the man with the muck rake, and metaphysics is no longer the divine science. Kant’s critique now appears to salvage supernaturalism by a compromise in which the Cartesian method is reversed, and a greater confidence in scientific method is evident. He invokes science to save the soul of man. Newton’s system had made space and time the basic concepts of science. The physiology of Kant’s generation had not extended its enquiries beyond the range of the five senses with which the Greek empiricists were familiar. Kant seized upon this limitation of eighteenth-century biology to substantiate the contention that science draws upon information which is independent of sensual experience. In Kant’s idealism space and time, the basic concepts of science, appear as purely mental constructions. This was not a new point of view; but the prominence it assumed was new, and resulted from the character of contemporary science and the conclusions which Hume had advanced.

Volumes of speculation on the relation of time and space to sensual experience have been written both by physicists and metaphysicians on the assumption that the human frame possesses no means of recording its own rhythms and its orientation to the earth’s gravitational field. Mach is the only natural philosopher who has hinted at the possibility that the Kantian argument might be re-examined from the modern biological standpoint. Modern physiology is not circumscribed like the physiology of Kant by the five senses. It recognizes ten or eleven distinct types of receptor elements in the human body. Two of these are immensely significant to the attitude which we adopt to Kant’s criticism of Hume’s position. In 1828 the experiments of Flourens first demonstrated that animals are receptive to the influence of gravity. The receptive area in our own bodies is located in that part of the internal ear, sometimes called the labyrinthine organ. Just as removal of the eye prevents a fish from responding to its background by colour change, destruction of the labyrinthine organs abolishes its characteristic orientation in space, when swimming. We do not say that a cat falls on all fours, because it has a priori knowledge of space relations. It falls on all fours, because the orientation of its body as a whole is recorded by its labyrinthine organ, and the appropriate muscles are brought into play by reflex action. The possibility that orientation of individual members with reference to one another might be regulated by a self-recording arrangement is a comparatively recent discovery. Sherrington has shown that the tendons and muscles possess special structures which he calls proprioceptors. They respond to the stretching of the muscles. By virtue of those muscular rhythms which Galileo employed as his standard of reference in devising the first clock, the human body is itself a self-recording timepiece. Pavlov does not appeal to a priori knowledge of time to interpret the interval which elapses between the ringing of a bell and the secretion of saliva in a dog.

The belated discovery of the labyrinthine organ and the proprioceptors is easy to understand. We live in a world in which day and night follow one another. We can close our eyes and darken our vision. The eyes are exposed to view. Their connexion with light calls for no elaborate demonstration. The labyrinthine organ and the proprioceptors are only accessible to dissection or to the microscope. We can never get away from the influence of gravity or the rhythms of our own bodies. What we never miss, we fail to notice. This peculiarity of our corporeal nature gives a peculiar and fallacious plausibility to Kant’s contention that we can take away from a body its colour, weight or smell, all of which can be “referred to mere sensuous experience,” while “the space which it occupied still remains and this is utterly impossible to annihilate in thought.” To annihilate space is not an impossible feat of imagination for the modern biologist. In Rupert Brooke’s poem the heaven of fishes harbours the worm that never dies. If the metaphor had been pushed a little further, it would have transpired that the philosophy of fishes might well contain many axioms that are omitted in the Kantian critique. Fishes in general have no eyelids. They can be kept in a uniformly illuminated aquarium without the experience of darkness. The sharks and their allies possess a small duct by which the internal ear communicates with the exterior. It would not be an impossible operation to remove and replace the contents of their labyrinthine organs, and render them temporarily indifferent to the earth’s gravitational field. A philosophical fish confined from birth to a uniformly illuminated aquarium and subjected from time to time to this simple operation, might conceivably invert the Kantian argument. He would be shocked by the gross materialism of an undulatory theory of light; but he would be willing to be convinced about any quaint views upon space which the piscine physicists propounded.

§3

Kant’s doctrine that space and time are concepts necessarily independent of one another and of sensory experience has only come into conflict with the fruits of scientific enquiry in our own generation. In spite of this the influence of Hume has steadily increased and the influence of Kant has declined during the intervening period. Psychology, brought into existence by Kant’s appeal for a science which would define the characteristics of a priori knowledge, has betrayed its parent. In every department of human enquiry investigators are asking, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or experience? Mr. Bertrand Russell, an impenitent advocate of a priori knowledge in his capacity as a mathematician and an uncompromising empiricist in his capacity as an educationist, tells us that “logic must no more admit a unicorn than can zoology, for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology.” Dr. MacDougall, the most vigorous contemporary critic of the behaviourist standpoint, is devoting his energies to the breeding of genetically pure stocks of Wistar Institute white rats. A professor of political science in London University so far departs from the traditions of his discipline as to collect statistics on the number of hours which members of Parliament actually devote to their democratic activities. It was said by an old Scots balladmonger, “I care not who makes the nation’s laws, while I sing her songs.” When the modern descendant of Democritus is assured that materialism is on the decline, he may well reply in a similar vein. We all behave as if we were behaviourists nowadays.

Between Hume and Darwin, Adam Smith, Malthus, Quételet and Marx sowed the seeds of the behaviourist standpoint in the soil of the humanities. Darwin’s Descent of Man precipitated a new phase in the revolution which was replacing classical humanism by a humanism which draws its inspiration from the success of natural science and looks to the scientist to supply it with the first principles of method. It was no longer possible to challenge the claim of science to the study of the brute creation. The recognition of man as a by-product of the same secular agencies undermined the last defence of the metaphysician. Hegelian philosophy was a forlorn and belated attempt to lock the stable doors after the horses had long since escaped. The piety of Descartes had conceded that animals are automata. The brutal candour of Darwin emphasized in a new light the fact that man is an animal. It was fitting that William James should arise in the fullness of time to proclaim the new gospel that philosophers are also men. If the full force of this devastating sequence was not apparent to the pragmatic apologists of the Pelagian heresy, it has acquired a new, and, I believe, epochal significance through the breakdown of the Cartesian distinction between reflex and voluntary activity in modern physiology.

To-day the influence of Hume’s empiricism and Darwin’s doctrine of descent can be seen in every branch of social enquiry. In history the materialistic bias is evident in the writings of those who would be least willing to commit themselves to economic determinism as a general hypothesis of social development. Economics has completely severed its moorings to moral philosophy, and proudly boasts that it is an ethically neutral science. The genetic aspect of human behaviour is recognized in new endowments to encourage the pursuit of social biology. If social psychology has hitherto remained immune to the influence of modern research on animal behaviour, it borrowed its equipment of instincts from the discredited speculations of the selectionists. The humanities have passed out of the hands of the grammarians in the higher seats of learning. Before another generation has passed the accomplished fact will be officially sanctioned in the earlier stages of education.

In its long apprenticeship to theological dogma classical humanism has created a type of philosophy which is inimical to the temper of scientific enquiry. This tradition has been perpetuated in our educational system by associating the study of history and human affairs in general with an exclusively linguistic rather than with a scientific training in early life. The belief that philosophy lies outside the province of science and that logic is more fundamental than science has been so thoroughly inculcated by the classical tradition that most men of science accept it with servile complacency. It is not surprising that many of them view with alarm the magnitude of the new territories which scientific method has incorporated within its domain. In every period the birth of a new tradition has made the forces of reaction more stubborn. This fact must be accepted. It is unwise to expect results of far-reaching importance in social science in the immediate future. If astronomy is the most exact of the observational sciences, it is also the oldest. It began in Babylon and Egypt about six thousand years ago. Economists and eugenists who hope to outgrow their phlogiston theories in one generation take an unduly hopeful view of the rapidity of scientific progress. New forms of compromise will come to the rescue of custom thought and power thought, before social science is able to replace the wrong way of asking a question by the right way.

It is highly probable that the next century will witness a consolidation of supernaturalistic tendencies in western Europe. It is legitimate to entertain the possibility that the rival attitude, reinvigorated by fresh triumphs of scientific method in the treatment of human affairs, will revive with greater vitality, if not in our own civilization, in that which takes its place. I am in complete agreement with Dr. Haldane, General Smuts, Professor Eddington and Dr. Whitehead, when they assure us that the materialistic tendency in philosophy, which was gaining ground under Darwin’s influence, is less popular to-day. I venture to interpret the reaction in a way with which they would not agree, and to believe that it has retreated pour mieux sauter. The mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain was a period of prosperity and expansion. In Huxley’s generation unbelief was the luxury of a privileged class which was not afraid of the man in the street. The period in which we live is one of ferment and disintegration. In its impetuosity to settle the problems of human conduct, it will not be content to await the slow advance of science. Mechanistic philosophy cannot offer to the privileged a supernatural sanction for the things they value most. It cannot proffer to the unprivileged the shadowy compensation of a world into which the thought of science is unable to penetrate. A mechanistic philosophy might conceivably be popular in a society in which gross inequalities of possession did not exist. To-day it can only flourish among those who have leisure to study, when their privileges are not compromised by social unrest. He who has the temerity to defend the mechanistic position need not expect any laurels from his own generation. He cannot seek sanctuary in the fearless candour of a contemporary Huxley or a contemporary Tyndall. He must extract what comfort he can glean by reflecting that the system of Aristotle triumphed over that of Epicurus, and the thought of the nineteenth century was nearer to Epicurus than to Aristotle. Scanning the new blossoms which have lately been added to the nosegay of philosophic compromise, he will say with Swinburne,

X. PUBLICITY, REALITY, AND RELIGION

“Conscientiousness in small things, the self-control of the religious man, was a preparatory school for the scientific character, as was also, in a very pre-eminent sense, the attitude of mind which makes a man take problems seriously, irrespective of what personal advantage he may derive from them.”—Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

§1

Whatever may be said against pragmatism, it served a useful purpose in calling attention to the connexion between people’s temperaments and their philosophies. William James classified philosophers in two genera, the tender-minded and the tough-minded. I believe that there exists a more fundamental distinction between two types which correspond to the introvert and the extrovert of the psychiatrist. Our attitude to the scope of philosophy is determined by whether we take an individualistic or a social view of what constitutes truth. In the one case our canons of logic will be inferred from an examination of the properties of propositions which carry conviction to ourselves individually, in the other by an examination of the properties of propositions which are best equipped to obtain general assent. For this reason I am not convinced that Bertrand Russell is right in thinking that modern logic brings the most devastating criticism to bear on traditional philosophy. Modern logic has not been devised with the aim of achieving the same results as those which constitute the goal of traditional philosophers. It is not surprising that traditional philosophers, finding its conclusions unpalatable, remain unconverted. Modern logic is the offspring of mathematics, and mathematics has developed in intimate association with science. For the last seven hundred years traditional logic and introspective philosophy have been no less intimately associated with theology. Hence has arisen the arrogant assumption that on account of its subject matter introspective philosophy is more fundamental than science. There is no reason why we should regard it in this light. If philosophy is knowledge, it is presumably something transmissible by discourse. Otherwise it is difficult to formulate any distinction between knowledge and mere opinion or superstition. We cannot therefore discuss knowledge without taking into account the people who share it. The most important characteristic of scientific beliefs is their communicability. Those who take the social as opposed to the individualistic attitude to truth will embark on their adventures by examining the characteristics of scientific judgment. To any one who is not an incorrigible individualist the results of scientific enquiry must establish the anatomy of philosophy. Whether I am by temperament an individualist or otherwise I am forced to submit to the discipline of discourse in practice. Let us suppose that two individuals N and M are engaged in public discourse concerning the Nature of Life. N states the proposition “I (N) am a conscious being.” M states “I (M) am a conscious being.” The only neutral ground for the discussion of the two statements is the more general statement “N and M are conscious beings.” In the nomenclature suggested elsewhere in these essays this neutral ground is the resultant of the public components of the two original statements which N and M make. Personal statements may be looked upon as complex variables. Philosophy is the technique of operating with the real (public) part of such statements and separating them from the imaginary (i.e. private) part. This distinction is not abolished by the fact that the temperaments of some philosophers lead them to apply the term real to the private and imaginary to the public component. The fact remains that in public discourse we have to operate with the public component. The public statement “N and M are conscious beings” implies our ability to define characteristics of behaviour which are denoted by the adjective conscious. This task which now lies within the scope of biological investigation refines the publicity in the concept of consciousness. For the performance of public discussion the term “I” is a member of the class denoted by “Man.” Anything implied in public discussion by the statement “I am conscious, etc.,” is included in the statement “Man is a conscious animal.” The significance of anything which cannot be subjected to this limitation is a purely private matter. From this it follows that a discussion of the Nature of Life is complete, when we have taken into account the characteristics of conscious behaviour. On the contrary view the propositions of philosophy are not necessarily communicable.

The theory of a public world suggested in a previous essay on the Nature of Life corresponds very closely with the attitude adopted by Poincaré in the following passage which occurs in his Foundations of Science:

“Sensations are therefore intransmissible or rather all that is pure quality in them is intransmissible and forever impenetrable. But it is not the same with relations between these sensations. From this point of view all that is objective is devoid of all quality and is pure relation.... Nothing therefore will have objective value except what is transmissible by discourse...”

So far as it goes there is nothing essentially new in this statement. It represents an attitude common among thoughtful people with a scientific training. Professor Eddington is in agreement with it when he writes:

“For reasons which are generally admitted, though I should not like to have to prove that they are conclusive, I grant your consciousness equal status with my own; and I use this second-hand part of my consciousness to ‘put myself in your place.’ Accordingly my subject of study becomes differentiated into the contents of many consciousnesses, each constituting a view-point. There then arises the problem of combining the view-points, and it is through this that the external world of physics arises. Much that is in any one consciousness is individual, much is apparently alterable by volition; but there is a stable element which is common to other consciousness. That common element we desire to study to describe as fully and accurately as possible, and to discover the laws by which it combines now with one view point, now with another. This common element cannot be placed in one man’s consciousness rather than in another’s; it must be in neutral ground—an external world... The external world of physics is thus a symposium of the worlds presented to different view-points...” (p. 283, The Nature of the Physical World).

How then does it come about that “a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory”? (p. 338). Or again, how are we to draw the conclusion “from those arguments from modern science that religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927”? I think that we may possibly find an answer to these questions by bearing in mind that Professor Eddington’s external world is the external world of physics rather than the public world of physics plus biology. Throughout his exposition he assumes that biologists are still committed to the dualistic standpoint of the Cartesian tradition. Thus he states: “a mental decision to turn right or turn left starts one of two alternative sets of impulses along the nerves to the feet. At some brain centre the cause of behaviour of certain atoms or elements of the physical world is directly determined for them by the mental decision...” (p. 312). It is not clear why there is in what Professor Eddington calls the “mystical experiences” of different people sufficient “neutral ground” to provide the basis of a symposium with as universal a sanction as that of the external world of physics. That after all is implicit in our notion of religion. It is not difficult to see why he finds no objection to placing his external world under the direction of a universal mind, since he assumes that the teleology, which has been abandoned in dealing with non-living matter, is quite indispensable in dealing with living matter.

It must be admitted that Professor Eddington could claim the support of at least one eminent biologist who holds that the method of the biologist is different from the method of the physicist, and the method of the physicist can never be applied to the analysis of “conscious behaviour.” However stoutly Dr. Haldane may advocate the first proposition his many distinguished contributions to biological science are little calculated to illustrate its truth. He has made important additions to our knowledge of the physical chemistry of the blood by adopting the method of the physicist. When, if ever, he has departed from that method he has done so without the assent of his fellow physiologists. The practice of even the most exemplary persons not infrequently falls short of the loftiness of their professions, and it is perhaps unfair to criticize Dr. Haldane on this account. The weakness of Dr. Haldane’s philosophical position resides in the fact that he gives no consideration to the new issues raised by the physiology of the conditioned reflex. Pavlov’s work has shown us that even when he is dealing with “conscious behaviour,” the biologist can still approach the subject matter of his enquiries with the same attitude which the physicist adopts.

On the whole people are more interested in conscious behaviour than in anything else. Before science could attempt to tell us something about conscious behaviour, Poincaré’s outlook could never have a far-reaching appeal. The history of human thought again and again proves that people will always fall back on the language of magic, when the language of science provides them with no vocabulary in which to discuss the things that interest them most. Magical views of the world have declined not because science disproves them, but because science provides better ways of discussing the same issues. If we can usefully treat the characteristics of conscious behaviour without invoking a holistic or animistic concept of consciousness, the scope of introspective philosophy must in time dwindle to a vanishing point. Philosophy will then confine itself to examining the logical structure of scientific theories. It may seem more natural, more in keeping with common sense, to think of a wholeness defined by the term consciousness than to face the tremendous intellectual effort of envisaging the behaviour of an organism from an atomistic standpoint. If the latter contains within it the capacity of growth and of yielding verifiable conclusions which cannot be derived from the traditional point of view, consciousness must go as gravitation and action at a distance must go, however much Kant and common sense may urge the a priori necessity of a Euclidean space and a measure of time that is independent of it. As scientific investigation invades the domain of conscious behaviour the way will be open for developing a new outlook in philosophy, one that is neither intrinsically monistic nor intrinsically pluralistic, since it makes no such claims to finality as the academic philosophies of the past have usually done.

§2

Professor Eddington, like Professor Whitehead, entertains the hope that science may eventually lead us to conclusions about the universe involving something more than practical utility on the one hand and mere intellectual satisfaction on the other. The reasons which they give are not sufficiently definite to criticize, as they would perhaps themselves admit. It is more easy to understand the point of view of Mr. Sullivan, an impenitent individualist, who is frankly resentful towards science, because science cannot serve the needs of theology or provide sanctions for his æsthetic predilections.

“The greater importance that men attach to art and religion,” he maintains, “is not due simply to their ignorance of science. Art and Religion satisfy deeper needs; the problems they deal with are intrinsically more important.... Our æsthetic and religious experiences need not lose the significance they appear to have merely because they are not taken into account in the scientific scheme....”⁠[8]

The real significance of these remarks would be much clearer, if Mr. Sullivan had substituted the word personally for intrinsically. Mr. Sullivan is by temperament an individualist philosopher. For him what is true has a specially personal value. Scientific beliefs are only convenient. Thus in discussing the system of Copernicus he makes the comment, “it was convenient; the question of whether it was true or untrue was not explicitly discussed.”⁠[9] Consistently with the individualistic standpoint in philosophy Mr. Sullivan does not divulge the inward revelation which empowers him to distinguish with such nicety between propositions that are “true” and propositions that are merely “convenient.”

It sounds very impressive to state that science leaves out of account man’s religious and artistic experiences, that religion and art satisfy deeper cravings and so forth; but religion and art are two words which are rarely used by any two people in the same sense or by any one person in the same sense on two successive occasions. Which religion does Mr. Sullivan mean? Is he a Buddhist, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Shintoist, or a Bahai? Is his religion an ethic or a cosmogony, or both? Until he has defined his position more explicitly, it is difficult to be quite sure what he is talking about. The terms art and religion are used in very different senses. That being so, to say that everybody has religious or æsthetic experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of any common plane of thoughtful intercourse other than the conceptual world of science. An expert social hostess recognizes this when she wisely refrains from asking Mr. A who is interested in Art to meet Mr. B who is interested in Art.

In seeking to transcendentalize his private world, Mr. Sullivan has not been altogether felicitous in coupling together Art and Religion. Although many people become very irritable in the course of a discussion on the merits of vorticism or free verse, most educated persons admit on reflection that such discussions owe their interest to the light they shed on differences of temperament in the disputants. It is true that professors of literature in Universities and rather youthful reviewers sometimes take a more pontifical view of their own powers of divination, but even our schools have got beyond the stage, when it was thought proper that children should be whipped into believing that Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy is a great poem. Whether Mr. Sullivan chooses to say that Van der Waal’s equation is true or merely convenient, it may be suggested that he would embark on a discussion of its truth or convenience with some hope of final agreement. I believe that Mr. Sullivan would embark upon an argument about a question of æsthetics with much less hope of changing his opponent’s attitude than if he were discussing Van der Waal’s equation. Mr. Sullivan has no need to appeal for a transcendental sanction for æsthetic experience. Æsthetics are questions about which sophisticated people agree to differ.

With religion it is different. Whereas a person can have very genuine artistic interests without claiming a universal, transcendental or public sanction for his own preferences, religion ceases to be religion and becomes æsthetics or ethics, when it does not put forward such claims. A consideration of the following illustration will make this clear. A derives satisfaction from reciting Mr. Yeats’ poem, “The faeries dance in a place apart...” etc. B derives satisfaction from singing the evangelical hymn that contains the lines “Bright crowns there are, bright crowns laid up on high...” Inasmuch as the first form of satisfaction involves neither belief nor unbelief, it is properly described as artistic or æsthetic. Inasmuch as the second implies in addition the conviction that a certain ponderable object exists at a certain height from the earth’s surface, as in the cruder forms of evangelism it does, the satisfaction derived from singing it is religious.

The word religious is used in so many different senses that it is dangerous to employ it at all without examining it more closely. Cynical paradox-mongers not infrequently complain that materialists are “religious.” When so used, the term merely implies a sense of the importance of belief. In an unscientific age persons of this type would probably gravitate towards some form of religious organization. Looking at religious organizations as a whole one sees two sharply contrasted components in the majority: views about human conduct or the ethical aspect of religion and views about the nature of the universe or cosmogony. To-day, most educated people regard the latter as the proper sphere of science. We are told by modernists that the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis are to be cherished for the sublime ethical teaching they impart. What sublime ethical teaching is implied in the prohibition to eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge or in the story that woman was manufactured from a man’s rib as an afterthought of creation need not detain us. It is only partly true to say that liberal theologians have surrendered the sphere of cosmogony to science. They have surrendered the details, but they have not surrendered the prerogative of imposing upon whatever cosmogony the scientists supply a teleology of their own. This teleology is, it is true, so attenuated as to embarrass the advance of science far less than those more crude revivals of animism sometimes inappropriately classified under the generic heading New Thought. Its justification becomes less and less calculated to carry conviction, as the domain of scientific method is officially sanctioned by the Churches. The advance of scientific knowledge reinforces the suspicion that an attitude to experience which leads to misleading or sterile conclusions about the details of our cosmogony can hardly be expected to prove essential to the finished picture.

Just as the cosmological aspect of religion has become resolved into a public component which has passed over into the province of science and a personal component for which the mystic seeks to formulate some ulterior transcendental sanction, the ethical side of religion consists of values which must be taken or left and prohibitions or admonitions which can be rationally discussed as instruments for promoting the acceptance of these values, if the latter are taken for granted. Here again the claims of liberal theologians become more modest with the advance of more complex methods of social organization. Sunday observance, fasting, prohibitions against dancing, smoking and theatricals become less and less fashionable. Even in the domain of sex, where animistic views of human conduct are more obtrusive, we find that Anglican deans are making the entertaining discovery that birth control is fully compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Most Christians will agree that war is contrary to the “spirit of Christ’s teachings.” When a war happens to be in progress, they give no objective evidence that this conviction differentiates their conduct in any way from that of people who are not in the least interested in the spirit of Christ’s teaching. An exception might here be made in favour of the Quakers. The Society of Friends, the only religious body which engaged the respect of Voltaire, have shown so little disposition to proselytize that they are hardly to be looked on as a religious body. They might with equal propriety be called an organization of persons interested in the art of living. Significantly enough they do not call themselves a Church.

In practice the hard and fast ethical claims of religious leaders tend with the advancement of civilization to become less pretentious. The details of regulating human conduct have been conceded to the politician and the educationist, just as cosmogony has been surrendered to the scientist. Religious organizations cling tenaciously to some obscure transcendental sanction for the fundamental assumptions on which the politician or educationist is expected to work, assumptions which, as earlier remarked, seem in actual practice curiously irrelevant to the behaviour of their devotees. The increasing vagueness which surrounds the nature of “revelation” in the teachings of Liberal Churchmen renders the task of making this sanction communicable one of overwhelming difficulty. In relation to human conduct there is obviously a large domain of questions on which rational discourse is possible, in so far as the fundamental assumptions are agreed upon by all parties. In this sense ethics belongs to the public world and ethics and politics are the same thing. There still remain private differences with regard to the premises. The Roundheads realized that transcendental ethics cannot be made the subject of argument. They acted intelligibly on the assumption that the only answer to the Divine Right of Kings was to make a spectacle of the head of Charles Stuart to Gods and men.

When Professor Eddington employs the term mystical experience indifferently for æsthetic and religious sentiments, he is perfectly justified in so far as the ultimate constituents of religion, those residues of religious belief which have survived the secularization of social life and the advancement of scientific knowledge, belong to the private worlds. From a purely individualistic standpoint the “religious” satisfaction that the Liberal theologian derives from the crude teleology of the Chaldæan mythos is difficult to distinguish from the artistic satisfaction sought by others in the vague teleology of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. Regarded from a social angle there is a profound difference between the religious and the artistic experience. Because of that difference Professor Eddington’s conclusion that there is nothing in the outcome of scientific enquiry to prevent a reasonable man from entertaining religious beliefs is a profoundly misleading one. When Professor Eddington speaks of religious experience he clearly means something which belongs to himself privately. When the vast majority of people speak of religion, they mean a body of beliefs which can be transmitted through the medium of discourse like scientific beliefs. Far from being regarded like artistic preferences as a private affair of the individual, such beliefs are promoted by exceedingly powerful organizations which still exercise an immense effect on social behaviour. This influence takes the form of interference on the part of the Churches in every attempt to encourage birth control, to promote true information about sex among the young or to humanize the divorce laws. The scientific philosopher is entitled to his own private mythos with which no sensible people would wish to interfere, provided that he does not pester his fellows with it. It is still permissible to ask whether he is justified in employing language in such an equivocal manner that his words will be used, when he must know they will be used, to give all the weight of a distinguished reputation to those forces of social organization which in the past have exercised a constant restraint on the freedom of scientific enquiry and do at present exert a tremendous influence upon the shaping of human conduct.

That the distinction we have drawn above between the religious and the æsthetic is the significant one for the purpose of ordinary usage is easily seen by considering the dislike that some people entertain for pork. In a Gentile this is an æsthetic attitude. In the Jew it is a religious one. The thesis that artistic values, or more generally what Professor Eddington calls the mystical experience, belong to the private world requires an important qualification. It does not imply that Art cannot be made the subject of discussion. A mechanistic philosophical outlook is often stigmatized on account of its supposed dullness, and shunned because it seems to leave no place for after-dinner conversation. This is not so. The mechanistic outlook does not imply the end of æsthetic criticism. It merely insists that such criticism shall conform to the standards of the public world. There is abundance of fascinating problems dealing with the orientation of human interest to particular objects which come within the scope of æsthetic criticism. The theory of a public world which has been developed elsewhere leaves open the possibility that we may one day have genuinely scientific knowledge about these things. If that day comes, we shall be able to argue about art and ethics without losing our tempers. As the behaviouristic standpoint encroaches on the field of art criticism, it is probable that the nice distinction between those matters of taste which we call æsthetic values and those which we call ethical sanctions will seem more arbitrary than the advocates of Art for Art’s sake postulate.

The conflict between religion and science tends to be obscured by the circumstance that the official apologists of the former, if they are well-educated persons, state their case in such a way as to convey the impression that they only claim that their view of human destiny is a permissible one. This does not alter the fact that religious leaders both of the right and left wing behave on the assumption that their views have a universal sanction. In very few parts of the English-speaking world is it possible for a child to go to school without being taught the tenets of some religious body. One does not notice that Liberal theologians who state their case on the frankly private basis of mystical experience are much more sympathetic than Fundamentalists to the legitimate claims of the agnostic parent who wishes his child to have a secular education. The term religion cannot be detached in its objective, or in the terminology of these essays its public, aspect from organization. Professor Eddington has justified his right to a “mystical experience.” He has not proved his claim to have a religion as the average parent understands that term. If the scientist uses the term religion for something different, knowing that his words will be used by religious leaders to reinforce their claims to a universal sanction for their own “mystical experiences,” the secularist parent may legitimately feel that the scientist is not giving him a square deal as a fellow citizen.

§3

We must attribute to its long association with theology the idea that philosophy deals with something mysteriously called Reality, lying outside the secular province of science. The term Reality has acquired the value of magical gesture in academic philosophy. Its everyday use as a measure of the intensity of one’s conviction throws a good deal of light on what is meant when it is used to define the goal of philosophy. To the introvert the private world is most real. To those who have a more socialized attitude to experience the public world of science is most real. The fundamental difference that exists between the introvert and the extrovert type of philosophy is not abolished by introducing the word reality into the language. It is partly because the term “external world” has been used with more emphasis on its “reality” than on its communicability that I have preferred to speak of a public world. The classification of different experiences as external or internal is less important than the recognition that some are communicable and others less so. In this nomenclature scientific beliefs are distinguished especially by their publicity. The fundamental distinction between the domain of intellectual public enterprise and intellectual private enterprise is just as valid, whether we approach the question from the frankly solipsistic standpoint adopted by Professor Eddington on p. 268 of his Gifford Lectures or the equally explicit objective idealism of p. 272 of the same work.

In my undergraduate days there was a legend of an eminent philosopher and a Fellow of Trinity. Returning to his room in the early hours of the morning after a liberal potation of audit ale, he lay down upon the hearth-rug, covering himself with one of the large shallow footbaths which were still used by all classes of academic society. When his bedmaker arrived a little later, he explained that he was an oyster, and raised objections to any one tampering with his shell. I do not know whether the story is true, or whether the philosopher was a solipsist. I presume that in the course of the same day, he realized that his experience of the footbath had a more extended significance than his experience of the oyster shell. If he were a solipsist and decided to remain such after the incident in question, he was presumably forced to recognize from Audit eve onwards, that certain ingredients of his consciousness had a more permanent status than others. If human beings exist only in my own individual “consciousness,” they constitute necessary points of reference in classifying other types of experience. The distinction between the public world and my private world does not uniquely owe its usefulness or significance to any assumption concerning the existence of a reality external to my own consciousness. The important feature about the world construction of science is not its externality but its communicability. Communicability remains a perfectly definite basis for the classification of beliefs, even if I choose to deny that other human beings have an independent existence.

In secret the individualist is entitled to cherish the belief that his own private world is more “real” than the public world of science. One suspects that Mr. Sullivan does so. Professor Eddington is evidently worried because he finds himself doing so. Under the influence of love or alcohol we have all been solipsists at some time or other. As Professor Eddington has lucidly stated in a passage quoted earlier in this essay, so soon as we engage in public discourse we are compelled to seek for a neutral ground. We agree to leave our private world behind. To make discourse possible we accept the neutral ground as the real thing. This neutral ground is the public world of science. The idea that philosophy is more fundamental than science has arisen through the absent-mindedness of philosophers. This permits them to overlook the fact that there cannot be philosophy unless there are philosophers. As soon as more than one individual begins to philosophize the search for a neutral ground becomes a necessity of social intercourse. From a social point of view the neutral ground is the only thing which can be spoken of as real. Although philosophers often try to give the impression that human beings exist in virtue of the fact that there is such a thing as philosophy, it is more sensible to hold that philosophy exists in virtue of the fact that there are human beings. Because philosophers are themselves members of human society, the proper goal of philosophy must be the search for propositions that have the property of publicity or socialized reality.

The recognition of this restores to philosophy an intelligible objective. From the point of view of the average person the philosopher is “a blind man in a dark room chasing a black cat that isn’t there.” The contempt of the plain man is partly justifiable, not because the plain man is entitled to a plain answer to every question he propounds, not because philosophers are blind, but because it is waste of time to chase the cat, if there is really no cat to chase. Traditional philosophy wedded to dogmatic theology has always assumed that the cat is there to chase. Of late years the cat of traditional philosophy, like the cat of Alice in Wonderland, has been gradually disappearing. For the purpose of apologetics there is little left of it but its smile. There have been philosophers who have been content to admit their blindness and refrain from putting forward any project to bell the cat. Of such was David Hume. It is now a hundred and fifty years since Hume was buried. This may be why he is recognized as an authentic philosopher. Those whose studies lead them to entertain views somewhat similar to those of Hume are more usually called anthropologists, physicists, physiologists, economists or generically experts, while they remain alive. The grudging benediction accorded to Hume’s remains by traditional philosophers is not wholly due to a conventional respect for those who have departed. Hume divested natural philosophy of some of the pretensions which it had imbibed from its association with scholasticism. Philosophers with an anti-scientific bias have chosen to regard this as an affront to science. The scientist looking back over a century and a half of unparalleled progress has no need to regard it as such. On the other hand the scope of “moral” philosophy has dwindled since Hume’s time. Psychology, until our own generation a branch of moral philosophy, is clamouring to be recognized as a science. Anthropology has undertaken the task of elucidating by painstaking observation those aspects of human behaviour which are publicly connected with what Professor Eddington privately speaks of as the “mystical experiences.” It may be true that scientists in our generation are less outspoken than Huxley and Tyndall in their criticism of traditional philosophy. It may be true that those scientists who enter the field of philosophical discussion often do so with the aim of reinforcing the beleaguered battalions of the apologists of dogma. It is doubtful whether there was ever a time in the history of western Europe when a secular outlook was more widespread, and when the hope of finding a rational basis for a universal religion was less forlorn.

When philosophers speak of a rational basis for scientific belief, they seem to imply that the word rational can only signify that which is evident independently of experience. It is profoundly doubtful whether we can form any judgment about such a question. If it is possible to arrive at a decision of this kind, I suspect that the solution will come from those who study the behaviour of infants and the history of science. There seems to be little hope of obtaining a solution from introspective philosophers. In the meantime science will continue to progress, whether the belief that relations between experience can be ascertained is a rational one or is itself an outcome of experience, whether the public world is the actual world or a shadow world, whether the conclusions of science appeal to common sense or seem more incredible than fairy tales. In a machine-made civilization however unpalatable to common sense the conclusions of science may prove, the future of science is assured.

In the philosophy of Hume we find the pragmatic justification of science first stated explicitly. “To philosophize,” according to Hume, “is nothing essentially different from reasoning on common life.” Kant’s anxiety to give scientific enquiry a “rational” sanction was based on the frank recognition that Hume’s scepticism threatened the future of moral philosophy more than the future of science. Yet Kant himself could not escape from the pragmatic criterion of publicity, in asserting the superiority of his own system to that of Plato, who “abandoning the world of sense, because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding... did not reflect that he made no real progress by all his efforts, for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support, as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers.”

In accepting Hume’s critique of traditional rationalism and attempting to reinstate moral philosophy on the same footing of social convenience as natural science, the modern pragmatists have proved more than they intended. By insisting on the temperamental basis of philosophical belief, pragmatism has robbed moral philosophy of all claim to universality; and implicitly relegated it to the status of an art. James believed that the doctrine of immortality is a physiological necessity for some people. For others it is evidently not. Some people anticipate with gratification an eternity of hymn singing. Others shudder at the fate of the Struldbrugs. Both those who do find it necessary to believe in immortality, and those who do not, live to-day as citizens of a society whose amenities are the fruit of scientific knowledge. In a machine-made civilization the amenities provided by science are a necessity to every one. It is necessary to live in order to philosophize. When the philosopher has finished all that he has to say about the Nature of Life, it is the biologist who is called in by his relatives to certify that he is legally dead. The universality of science transcends in a very practical sense those differences of temperament which determine the predilections of moral philosophers. Scientific hypothesis makes social activity possible.

XI. PRIVACY, PUBLICITY, AND EDUCATION

“Nothing does more harm in unnerving men for their duties in the present, than the attention devoted to the points of excellence in the past as compared with the average failure of the present day.”—Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

§1

Two conclusions, it seems to me, can now be drawn from the progress of science. One is that, since we can never know everything we should like to know, every individual has a right to his own private world. The other is that there is no excuse for the sophisticated person refusing to recognize where his private world ends and the domain of social knowledge or the public world begins. From the first it follows that there is no necessary antagonism between the claims of science and art in a modern theory of education. From the second it follows that true education is necessarily secular. It is generally agreed that education includes something more than vocational training. Modern industry offers to the majority of people the prospect of more opportunities for cultivated leisure. It is arguable on the other hand that as time goes on work may become more rather than less monotonous for most people. Training of the individual to use his leisure in ways which will not bring him into conflict with his neighbours provides a possible basis for the public discussion of cultural education in what may be called its æsthetic aspect. The Theory of the Public World does not necessarily imply that such discussion is valueless. It does not lead to the conclusion that the æsthetic side of education is unimportant. It does necessitate a reconsideration of the attitude which the teacher should be encouraged to adopt. A modern theory of education should begin by defining the respective spheres of privacy and publicity.

I shall illustrate what I mean by privacy with special reference to the teaching of poetry in the school. I can see no good reason why a child should be expected to like Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. I can see excellent reasons why he should know that it was written, and where to find it. One of the characters in a play by Eugene O’Neill is made to say: “I love dynamos. I love to hear them sing. They’re singing all the time about everything in the world.” Mrs. Fife was an American. She had almost certainly never heard a nightingale sing. In England, where the nightingale is an indigenous species, its overrated vocal performances are hardly less familiar to the average child. To the majority of people brought up from childhood in urban surroundings dynamos are closer to Nature. They are things that they can see and hear. Churchyard owls and beds of asphodel belong to books rather than to life. For the average citizen it may be valuable to know that the word Hippocrene does not mean the same thing as hippopotamus. From every point of view enlarging the vocabulary is an important part of education. Enlarging the vocabulary and developing an interest in literature as a means to cultivated leisure in adult life are entirely separate issues.

I once asked a friend who is a biologist whether he was interested in modern poetry. He hesitated and replied that he quite liked Evangeline. I am almost certain that he had not opened Longfellow’s works since he was a schoolboy, unless he had received from an aunt one of those editions which are bound in mauve suède and sold for Christmas and birthday gifts. He was no less truthful than most of us. He displayed a motor reaction which can be evoked from many people who have been educated on the assumption that the teacher’s business is to cultivate “good taste.” If one of our leading dailies were to make favourite English poets the subject of a prize competition, it is safe to predict that Wordsworth would receive many more votes than William Blake. It would be interesting to ascertain the number of hours devoted after school age to the perusal of the works of Wordsworth and Blake by those who would vote for one or the other. I know of no one who has undertaken this task as a thesis for the Ph.D. degree; but I would hazard the surmise that the aggregate would favour Blake rather than Wordsworth. The modern teacher has abandoned the exegetical method in favour of the “play way.” But the advocate of the play way is no less certain that if he likes Shakespeare, his pupils ought also to like Shakespeare. If he is really interested in Shakespeare, and has an engaging personality, he may succeed so long as they remain under his influence. It does not follow that the pupil will carry into adult life the means of enjoying his leisure in a way that will not be a nuisance to his neighbours.

In discussing the æsthetic aspect of education, it is difficult to exclude the intrusion of one’s private values. I am aware of this difficulty. Anything which I proffer to the discussion is of a very tentative nature. The cultivation of taste involves two separate issues. Conventionally it signifies the existence of some fixed standard of correct enjoyment. The cultivation of good taste in this sense is only justifiable if we have satisfied ourselves that philosophy can provide a rational sanction for the affirmations of æsthetic experience. If we have reached the conviction that the affirmations of æsthetic experience have no status in the Public World, we have no justification for interfering with another person who reads John Oxenham’s Bees in Amber in preference to Conrad Aiken’s Punch the Immortal Liar, or the works of Miss Ella Wheeler Willcocks in preference to the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think experience would sustain the statement that people who habitually read Coventry Patmore or Francis Thompson are temperamentally different from people who prefer to read Osbert Sitwell or Carl Sandburg. I suspect too that such temperamental differences exist even in early childhood. They are therefore outside the realm of argument or education. On the other hand, experience convinces me that many would read poetry in adult life, if they had not been repelled in childhood by the sickly romanticism or pedantic archaicism of those writers who are usually exhibited as models of good taste. Possibly a number of people who read Mr. Kipling would not do so if they had access to more sophisticated forms of entertainment. Many others do not read poetry and rather despise those who do, because they have never realized that the subject matter of poetry is not necessarily circumscribed by a holistic view of sex or confined to the domestic affairs of the minor Greek deities. There is a legitimate sense in which taste can be cultivated. We may go through life impoverished, because we have never been introduced to sources of satisfaction which might enrich our experience. It is the proper function of the educationist to acquaint us in early life with a great variety of opportunities of socially agreeable behaviour. Having done this, he or she must leave us to select what is most appropriate to our temperamental peculiarities.

The technique of education in its æsthetic aspect has received less thoughtful attention than its more practical problems. After a succession of ludicrous experiments, educationists now realize that the attendance of art galleries is not increased by forcing children to draw one white cone, a pyramid and two cubes piled up on a drawing-board. It is also recognized that a weekly period devoted to the tonic sol-fa notation does not make a nation musical. I would suggest that the disappointing results of æsthetic education are pre-eminently due to the fact that educationists have never recognized that æsthetic values do not belong to the public world. I would go further and suggest that more positive results might be achieved, if our educational practice were founded on a recognition that æsthetic preferences come within the proper domain of what I have called privacy. Education has too long been dominated by the æsthete who regards his own values as having some final and transcendental sanction. Because temperaments differ, æsthetic education can never leave a permanent impress on the majority of people, so long as it is dominated by a school of private opinion, whether that school is Shakespearian or Shavian, Realist or Vorticist. The rising influence of science, if it checks the influence of pontifical æstheticism is calculated to reinforce rather than curtail the æsthetic aspect of modern education.

In Science and the Modern World, Dr. Whitehead has maintained the contrary view. He affirms that “in regard to the æsthetic needs of civilized society the reactions of science have so far been unfortunate.” I do not think that there is any historical justification for this assertion. During the Renaissance there was a very intimate connexion between the progress of biological science and the development of painting and engraving. Human beings and horses had been represented with some measure of biological fidelity in Greek plastic art. But realistic treatment of animals and plants in general was a late development of the Art of the Renaissance. Most of the descriptive biology of Aristotle, of Theophrastus, and of the Arabs was a dead letter when it filtered into modern Europe. The descriptions in the Greek and Arabic herbals were too indefinite to be adequate for purposes of identifying species without the aid of good illustrations. Anyone who will take the trouble to refer to the originals of Conrad Gesner’s Natural History or Gerrard’s Herbal will appreciate the statement that Dürer initiated a new epoch in biology by depicting a recognizable rabbit. It was no fortuitous circumstance that Leonardo da Vinci was both a distinguished anatomist and a distinguished painter. The naturalist of the Renaissance had to be an artist. There were no cameras. The tradition of Realism in Art developed side by side with the progress of medicine to meet a need which no longer exists.

To-day we have cameras, and Realism in Art is declining. I venture to suggest that the invention of cinematography, though still in its infancy, is unfolding new artistic horizons. It is still common to find that educated people disregard its latent possibilities as Puritan England despised the stage. It is unwise to assume that Victorian ideas of Art have more finality than future generations will in all probability ascribe to them. Silas Marner, who had never seen a skyscraper or a dynamo, could not be expected to like the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Capek’s R.U.R. For the same reason we should not expect Whitechapel school-children to enjoy Landseer and the Lake poets. To the Victorian æsthete a machine and a factory were necessarily ugly. The Immortal Stagyrite had settled the criteria of beauty two thousand years before. It is worthy of note that American industrialism rarely impresses the visitor with that drab monotony which is so characteristic of the English town. This may be partly because American education has been less dominated by the æsthetic predilections of a pre-scientific era in human history. The increasing importance of science in education need not react unfavourably on its artistic function. If it has done so, it is not because science has at any time dominated our conception of a cultural education. The cultural value of science has hardly been recognized as yet.

§2

However defined, education includes fitting the individual for some kind of productive activity. On this account the place of science as a part of vocational training is now securely entrenched in our educational system. The hard logic of economic necessity has forced us to make more and more concessions to natural science. It is doubtful if more than a handful of educationists see clearly that those changes in the structure of civilization which have necessitated such concessions have made scientific study of paramount importance in cultural education. The terms cultural and vocational are, by many people, still used coextensively with literary and scientific. It is true that science is not directly concerned with the æsthetic side of education. If in addition our definition of culture includes an intelligent orientation to human society, ignorance of science is incompatible with a cultured outlook in the present age. The special features of modern civilization depend on the extent to which scientific knowledge has been applied to the conquest of Nature by mankind. The picture of the physical universe which science offers for our contemplation is therefore the nucleus of what is socially most vital in our time.

The task of giving science a place in our conception of cultural education presupposes a good deal more than the addition of obligatory science subjects to the curriculum. Chemistry is usually taught in universities so as to ensure that the student will be able to discharge with competence the work of an analyst in the public service. It is also possible to teach the same subject in such a way that the student gets some glimpse of the adventure of scientific knowledge, some insight into the method of science as a way of dealing with human experience, some apprehension of the challenge which throughout the ages science has issued to comfortable beliefs and established traditions. This attitude to the study of science is still rare among those who have been educated on exclusively scientific lines. The classically educated person can at least be said to have something which was once a culture. He has a more or less consistent attitude to the world around him. In spite of all that is said about the menace of scientific materialism, a consistent mental attitude is very rare in scientific men. They usually have two attitudes, one for the laboratory, one for Sundays and the domestic circle. This is partly because scientific education has been almost entirely vocational in its emphasis.

That it is still necessary to emphasize the place of science in cultural education is a heritage of the humanistic revival. Until comparatively recent times the leading educationists of western Europe were agreed that the cultural side of education is satisfactorily accommodated by a study of two dead languages. The founders of the Grammar Schools were men who after a life-long devotion to Latin and Greek had found in the classical authors a link with the living past and a real source of æsthetic delight. Their pupils rarely progressed sufficiently far with the rules of accidence and syntax to acquire any genuine knowledge of classical literature or ancient history. The number of modern Englishmen who enjoy Scandinavian drama or Russian fiction through the medium of translated works is certainly greater than the number who deliberately read the classical tragedians in the original. Leaving out of account professional historians, the number of people who have been inspired to learn more about ancient history through dipping into Mr. Wells’ Outline is probably greater than the number of those who as schoolboys acquired a taste for history from construing Xenophon, Thucydides, Cæsar and Quintus Curtius Rufus. The grammarians, in the words of Mr. Wells, were fumbling with the keys of the past to open the doors of a ransacked treasure chamber. It is now widely recognized that the results of classical education have been disappointing. In relation to the æsthetic side of education, it cannot be said to have promoted the growth of what Dr. Whitehead calls “a living art which moves on and yet leaves its permanent mark.” Socially it started at the wrong end. An intelligent orientation towards society presupposes a knowledge of the history of human society. It also presupposes on the part of the individual a vital appreciation of his own surroundings. Unfortunately, the obsolescence of classical education is not the result of a reasoned conviction of its cultural inadequacy. The influence of the grammarians declined because they could not meet the practical requirements of our age.