MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE

I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and absurdity for which the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science furnishes the opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly seize this occasion to pour forth their lamentations concerning the incapacity of "science" and the disappointment which they experience in finding that it does not do what it never professed to do. They deplore that those engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature which we call "science" do not discover things which they never set out to discover or thought it possible to discover, although the glib gentlemen who write, with a false assumption of knowledge, pretend that these things are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are intended to ascertain. We read, at that season of the year, articles upon "What Scientists do not know" and "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it is pretended that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or, as it has been called, the "riddle," of the universe, and it is pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, that, to judge by the proceedings of the congress of scientific investigators just concluded, we are no nearer a solution of that mystery than men were in the days of Aristotle: and it is added that false hopes have been raised, and that matters which were once considered settled have again passed into the melting-pot!

This kind of lamentation is not only (if I may use an expressive term) "twaddle," but is injurious misrepresentation, dangerous to the public welfare. The actual attitude of the investigators and makers of new knowledge of nature is stated in a few words which I wrote ten years ago: "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter—from man to gas—is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be."

So much for those who reproach science with the non-fulfilment of their own unwarranted and perfectly gratuitous expectations.

When, however, having created in their readers' minds an unreasonable sense of failure and a mistrust of science, such writers go on to make use of the want of confidence thus produced, in order to throw doubt upon the real conquests of science—the new knowledge actually made and established by the investigators of the last century—it becomes necessary to say a little more. The public is told by these false witnesses that science has "dogmas," and that men of science are less satisfied than they were with the "dogmas" of the last century. Science has no dogmas; all its conclusions are open to revision by experiment and demonstration, and are continually so revised. But science takes no heed of empty assertion unaccompanied by evidence which can be weighed and measured. "Nullius in verba" is the motto of one of the most famous Societies for the promotion of the knowledge of nature—the Royal Society of London.

It is especially in the area of biology—the knowledge of living things—that the enemies of science make their most audacious attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and reproduction, the peculiarities of sex, the characteristics of habits, instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have advanced very little beyond the standpoint of the first and greatest biologist, Aristotle. This statement is vague and indefinite; the conclusion which it suggests is absolutely untrue. Aristotle knew next to nothing about the mechanism of the processes in living things above cited. At the present day we know an enormous amount about it in detail. But when men of science are told that they do not know the "nature" of this and the "meaning" of that, they frankly admit that they do not know the real "nature" (for the expression is capable of endless variety of significance) of anything nor the real "meaning" not only of life, but of the existence of the universe, and they say, moreover, that they have no intention or expectation of knowing the ultimate "nature" or the ultimate "meaning" (in a philosophical sense) of any such things. These are not problems of science—and it is misleading and injurious to pretend that they are.

I recently read an essay in which the writer is good enough to say that, owing to the work of Darwin, the fact that the differences which we see between organisms have been reached by a gradual evolution, is not now disputed. That, at any rate, seems to be a solid achievement. But he went on to declare that when we inquire by what method this evolution was brought about biologists can return no answer. That appears to me to be a most extraordinary perversion of the truth. The reason why the gradual evolution of the various kinds of organisms is not now disputed is that Darwin showed the method by which that evolution can and must be brought about. So far from "returning no answer," Darwin and succeeding generations of biologists do return a very full answer to the question, "By what method has organic evolution been brought about?" Our misleading writer proceeds as follows: "The Darwinian theory of natural selection acting on minute differences is generally considered nowadays to be inadequate, but no alternative theory has taken its place." This is an entirely erroneous statement. Though Darwin held that natural selection acted most widely and largely on minute differences, he did not suppose that its operation was confined to them, and he considered and gave importance to a number of other characteristics of organisms which have an important part in the process of organic evolution. The assertion that the theory of natural selection as left by Darwin "is now generally held to be inadequate" is fallacious. Darwin's conclusions on this matter are generally held to be essentially true. It is obvious that his argument is capable of further elaboration and development by additional knowledge, and always was regarded as being so by its author and by every other competent person. But that is a very different thing from holding Darwin's theory of natural selection to be "inadequate." It is adequate, because it furnishes the foundation on which we build, and it is so solid, complete and far-reaching that what has been added since Darwin's death is very small by comparison with his original structure.

Lastly, we are told by the anonymous writer already quoted that at the present time discussion is chiefly concentrated on the question as to whether life is dependent only on the physical and chemical properties of the living substance, protoplasm, or whether there is at work an independent vital principle which sharply separates living from non-living matter! And the obvious and common-place conclusion is announced that "the ultimate problems of biology are as inscrutable as of old." All ultimate problems are, I admit, inscrutable. It is, on the other hand, the business, and has been the glory and triumph, of science, to examine and solve problems which are scrutable! It is certainly not the case that, at the present time, discussion is concentrated on the question of the existence of a vital principle. There is absolutely no discussion in progress on the subject. No one even knows or attempts to state what is meant by "a vital principle." It is a phrase which belongs to "the dead past," when men of science had not discovered that you get no nearer to understanding a difficult subject by inventing a name to cover your ignorance. Thirty-five years ago the word "vitality" was used as some few philosophising writers are now using the term "vital principle." Huxley at that time attacked the views of Dr. Lionel Beale, who called in the aid of a mystical "principle," which he named "vitality," in order to "account for" some of the remarkable properties of protoplasm. As Huxley pointed out, this supposed principle "accounted for" nothing, since it was merely a name for the phenomena for which it was supposed to account. Huxley pointed out that many chemical compounds have remarkable properties—as assuredly have the chemical compounds which are present in protoplasm—but men of science have not found it to help them in investigating the mechanism of those properties to ascribe them to mystical intangible "principles" differing from the agencies at work in other less exceptional substances.

Thus, for instance, water, though a very common and abundant chemical compound formed by the union of two chemical elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which, at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface, are gaseous, offers many strange properties to our consideration not shared by other compounds of gaseous elements. For instance, hydrogen, when it combines with gaseous elements other than oxygen, does not form a compound which is liquid at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface. Its combinations with nitrogen, with chlorine, with fluorine, and even some with the solid element carbon, are under those conditions gaseous. What a special character, therefore, has water! Moreover, water, though a liquid, yet behaves in a most peculiar way when either cooled below ordinary temperatures or heated above them. It becomes solid when cooled, but expands at the same time, so that it is less dense when solid than when liquid—a most unusual proceeding! And when heated it is converted into vapour, but with a loss or "making latent" of heat, which, like its behaviour when solidifying, indicates that water is endowed with a very peculiar structure or mechanism in the putting together of its molecules. We might call these combined peculiarities of water "aquosity," and as we certainly cannot say why water should possess the lot of them, whilst other compounds of either hydrogen or of oxygen, or, in fact, of any other elements, do not possess this combination, we might say that their presence is due to "the aqueous principle," or "aquosity," which enters into water when it is formed, but does not exist in other natural bodies, and, indeed, "sharply separates aqueous from non-aqueous matter."

Happily, though such a view would have been considered high philosophy 200 years ago, no one is deluded at the present day into the belief that by calling the remarkable properties of water "aquosity" you have added anything to our knowledge of them. Yet those who invoke "a vital principle" or "vitality" in connection with protoplasm should, if they were consistent, apply their method to the mystery of water. Let us see how it would run. Though we may (the "vitalists" or "aquosists" would say) experiment with water, determine exactly the temperature and pressure at which these remarkable phenomena are exhibited, though we may determine its surface tension and its crystalline form, and even though we may weigh exactly the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in its composition, yet when we look at a drop of water, there it is, a wonder of wonders, endowed with "aquosity," the ultimate nature of which is as inscrutable now as it was to Aristotle! It is perfectly true (we concede to the "aquosists") that the properties of water are not accounted for by science; that is to say that, though we can imagine the molecular and atomic mechanism necessary for their exhibition, we cannot offer any suggestion as to how it is that that particular mechanism is present in the chemical compound which the chemist denotes as H₂O, and is not present in other compounds, still less can we say "why" these remarkable properties are present—that is to say, for what purpose, although we know that if they were not present the whole history and economy of our globe would be utterly different from what it is. Nevertheless, in spite of their ignorance about the real nature of water, men of science do not invent an "aqueous principle" or "aquosity" with the notion of "explaining" water. And I have yet to hear of any duly trained and qualified biologist who is prepared at the present moment to maintain the existence of a "vital principle," or of a force to be called "vitality," supposed to be something different in character and quality from the recognised physical forces, and having its existence alongside, yet apart from, the manifestations of those forces.

Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton recently said: "The advance in science takes the workers in science more and more beyond the ken of the ordinary public, and their work grows to be a little understood and much misunderstood; and I have felt that, as in many other cases, the need would come for interpreters between those who are carrying on scientific research and the public, in order to explain and justify their work." Probably everyone will agree with the Lord Justice: but what are we to say of those responsible owners of great journals who not only abstain from providing such interpretation but allow anonymous and incompetent writers to mislead the public? Is the literary critic of a prosperous journal employed to write the City article?

There has been a repetition this year (1912) of the usual misrepresentation on the occasion of the meeting of the British Association. The President, Professor SchÄfer, had let it be known that his address would be concerned with the chemistry of living processes, the gradual passage of chemical combinations into the condition which we call "living," and the possibility of bringing about this passage in the chemical laboratory without the use of materials already elaborated by previously existing "living" material. The announcement was immediately made in some "newspapers" that "startling revelations" were to be made by the President, that he was "to throw a bomb-shell" into the camp, etc. He did nothing of the kind. He gave an admirable and clear statement of the progress during recent years towards the realisation of the construction in the laboratory by chemical methods of the complex chemical combination which exhibits those "activities"—essentially movements, unions, disruptions and re-unions of extremely minute particles—which we call "living." The conclusion that such a gradual building up has taken place in past ages of the history of our earth was formulated more than forty years ago by Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, and others, and has not been seriously attacked in the interval, but, on the contrary, generally accepted as a legitimate inference from the facts ascertained and the theory of the evolution or gradual development of what we call the material universe.

Professor SchÄfer expressed the opinion, anticipated and shared by many other investigators, that the progress of chemical experiment renders it probable that further steps, culminating in the successful construction of "living" matter in the laboratory, are not beset by any insurmountable obstacles and will sooner or later be accomplished. There was no "bomb-shell" in this statement, and no excitement as its result among scientific workers nor amongst those who do not neglect to study the writings of the "interpreters" desired by Lord Justice Moulton. There are still some such interpreters carrying on the work of Huxley and of Tyndall, those great interpreters whose writings should be studied and treasured as classics.

The most interesting result of the attempt to treat the discussions at Dundee as a newspaper "sensation," comparable to the reports relating to motor-car bandits or the pronouncements of political factions, has been its complete failure. Serious thinkers of all schools seem to have adjusted themselves to the more modern way of regarding natural processes even when these relate to matters of such age-long interest to mankind as the inception of "living" organisms and of conscious humanity itself. There are fewer now than there were forty years ago who insist on the older barbaric "explanations" of these marvels. Few indeed venture to assert the existence of "spirits"—ghostly essences of various grades and capacities which enter the bodies of living things and escape from them like so much gas when they die.[10] The vegetable soul, the animal soul and the human soul are no longer imagined and described to us as definite "things" supposed to "explain" the complex processes which go on respectively in plants, animals and men.

Seventy years ago the facts which were known as to that changing state of material substances which we describe by the words "hot" and "cold," were held to be "explained" by the existence of a ghostly thing called "caloric," which was believed to enter various bodies and make them hot and then to escape from them and so make them cold. Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent association with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in their earliest "reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure. The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a vibration of particles—a mode or kind of motion—a "state," and not a mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.

Just as "caloric" no longer serves and is no longer possible as the supposed "explanation" of the behaviour of bodies in the hot or the cold state, so we no longer require the supposition of "spirits" of one kind or another as "explanations" of the living state of those products of our mother earth which are called plants, animals and men. In neither case do such "spirits" really "explain" the state in question; they are only names for the activity which it was imagined that they served to explain. These states or affections of matter remain as wonderful and important to us as they were before. But by giving up the prehistoric notions about them which have been handed on until the present day we can think of them in a more satisfactory way—a way which avoids the multiplication of unnecessary imaginary agencies and the conception of an intermittent and hesitating Creative Power, and substitutes for it the operation of continuous orderly and preordained forces.

It is true that we can neither ascertain nor imagine either the beginning or the end of the orderly process which we discover in operation to-day. We can trace it back by well-established inference into a remote past, but a beginning of it is not within the possibilities of human thought. We can, with reasonable probability of being correct, foretell the changes and developments which time will bring in many combinations and dispositions which are the manifestations of that process at this moment of time, but we cannot even think of a cessation of that process.

Should we ask, "Why does this process exist?" there is no answer. Nature does not reply; an awful silence meets our inquiry. The reproach is often urged against science—the knowledge of the order of nature—that it does not tell us "why we are here." Man inevitably desires to know why he is here; but "science," as that word is now understood, does not profess or even seek to answer that question, although the false hope has been raised in ignorant minds, sometimes by knavery, sometimes by honest delusion, that it could do so. By knowledge of nature mankind can escape much suffering and gain the highest happiness, but that is all that we can hope for from it. We shall never satisfy our curiosity; we shall never know in the same way as we know the order of nature, why—to what end, for what purpose—that order and not another order exists.

It is very generally supposed that it is the business and profession of science "to explain" things—that is to say, to show how this or that must and does come about in consequence of the operation of the great general properties of matter, known as the "laws" of chemistry and physics. This is true enough, but it is equally the work of science to assert that of many things for which mankind demands "an explanation," there is no explanation. It is further the work and the service of science to destroy and to remove from men's minds the baseless and pretended "explanations" which are no explanations but causes of error, blindness, and suffering.

Science, the destroyer of "explanations," is the purifier of the human mind, its cleanser from the crippling infection of prehistoric error and from domination by the terrifying nightmares of our half-animal ancestry.

Finally, in reference to the very ancient attempt to "explain" life and consciousness by the assertion that they are due to "spirits" which enter the bodies of animals and men, I must caution the reader against supposing that—for those who do not accept the belief that such spirits exist—the gravity and mystery of the manifestations of life and consciousness are in any way lessened. Those who reject the belief in "spirits" do not in consequence reject the ethical and moral doctrines which have too long been rendered "suspect" by the shadow cast over them by ancient superstition. The disappearance of that shadow will reveal friends where enemies were supposed to be entrenched.

At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 I delivered an address on "Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism." In the printed version of that address, published in the same year, there are some statements bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce here, since I can still make them with conviction.

"Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man's dignity if we have to regard him as 'the flower of all the ages' bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals and from that gracious nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother."

"A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man's body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something called 'a conscious soul' in virtue of which he became an ape-like man."

"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being grows from the egg in utero, just as a dog or a monkey does; the facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms into indubitable man, 'How do you propose to divide the series presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the foetus of this month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This, it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series exists—that the egg becomes the foetus, the foetus the child, and the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical series—the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in the present case at what point in the historical series there is a break or division? At what step are we to be asked to suppose that the order of nature was stopped, and a non-natural soul introduced?... The theologian is content in the case of individual development of the egg to admit the fact of individual evolution, and to make assumptions which lie altogether outside the region of scientific inquiry. So, too, it would seem only reasonable that he should deal with the historical series, and frankly accept the natural evolution of man from lower animals, declaring dogmatically, if he so please, but not as an inference of the same order as are the inferences of science, that something called the soul arrived at any point in the series which he may think suitable. At the same time, it would appear to be sufficient even for the purposes of the theologian, to hold that whatever the two above-mentioned series of living thing contain or imply, they do so as the result of a natural and uniform process of development, that there has been one 'miracle' once and for all time....

"The difficulties which the theologian has to meet when he is called upon to give some account of the origin and nature of the soul certainly cannot be said to have been increased by the establishment of the Darwinian theory. For from the earliest days of the Church, ingenious speculation has been lavished on the subject.

"St. Augustine says (I give a translation of the Latin original): 'With regard to the four following opinions concerning the soul—viz. (1) whether souls are handed on from parent to child by propagation; or (2) are suddenly created in individuals at birth; or (3) existing already elsewhere are divinely sent into the bodies of the new-born; or (4) slip into them of their own motion—it is undesirable for anyone to make a rash pronouncement, since up to the present time the question has never been discussed and decided by catholic writers of holy books on account of its obscurity and perplexity—or, if it has been dealt with, no such treatises have hitherto come into my hands.'"

There must be many who will be glad to shake off the illusion of explanation which is no explanation, and to escape from the futile discussion of the possible behaviour of spirits and ghosts born in the dreams of primÆval savages. They will gladly accept the conclusion that the marvellous qualities and activities of living things and that inscrutable wonder, the mind of man, are outcomes of the orderly process of Nature no less than are the miracles which we call a buttercup, a rock crystal, a glacier, the noon-day sun! We can trace, by observation and inference, the orderly growth and development of these things from simpler things; we can discover continuity and common properties determining their diverse existence. But we find no explanation of them; we cannot account for the properties of matter which determine them, nor for the existence of anything—whether it be a drop of water, or human thought and consciousness. There are no special and exceptional "incomprehensibles" requiring us to assume that special "principles" or "spirits" are concerned with them whilst the rest are to be accounted for and explained in a more general way. Wherever we push our inquiries we come equally and inevitably, as did primÆval man, to that of which there is no explanation—the perpetual miracle, the miracle of the nature of things, of existence itself. The man of science bows his head in the presence of this all-pervading mystery. He is called arrogant by those who arrogate to themselves the right to "explain" things and to deal in vital spirits and metaphysical nostrums for that purpose. From time to time they fill with their proclamations the great silence which he has learnt to accept with reverence and humility. As the years roll on their hollow phrases are less frequent, and acquire the pathetic interest which belongs to all such decaying remnants of the thought and effort of the childhood of man.

It seems still to be necessary to insist that it is not reasonable to assume as an indisputable fact that man can arrive at an "explanation" of existence and the nature of things. This assumption has been made in the past, and, by a well-known trick of advocacy, it has been argued that since science fails to "explain" these things, the old prehistoric fancies as to spirits—even though they "explain" nothing and have themselves to be "explained"—hold the field and must be accepted as true. There is an alternative, and that is to admit our ignorance. No man has ever seen or knows what is on the other side of the moon, that which does not face our earth. There are few amongst us who, in this admitted and complete state of ignorance, would persist in declaring that we must accept as true the suppositions of ancient races of men as to the existence there of men-like creatures, or would be deluded by the argument that since we do not know what is there the suppositions in question must be accepted as true. We cannot, as a matter of observation, assert that these supposed beings are not there, but we can find no reason to make it appear even probable, nor any means of proving by experiment, that they are. We refuse to entertain such suppositions.

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