Aspects of Science

Part 1

ASPECTS OF SCIENCE

ASPECTS OF SCIENCE

By J. W. N. SULLIVAN

LONDON RICHARD COBDEN-SANDERSON 17 THAVIES INN

Copyright 1923

PREFACE

The papers which make up this volume have been selected because, although they deal with different aspects of various scientific ideas, yet they do illustrate, more or less, one point of view. That point of view may be described, perhaps as æsthetic, but rather better as humanistic. Scientific ideas have a history; they arose to satisfy certain human needs; to see them in their context is to see them as part of the general intellectual and emotional life of man. What they exist to do they do better than does anything else, and the needs they satisfy are not peculiar to scientific specialists. These papers try to show one or two of the many reasons why, for people who are not specialists as well as for those who are, science may be interesting.

J. W. N. SULLIVAN.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE 9

A PHYSICIST ON PHYSICS 23

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 36

JAMES CLERK MAXWELL 41

ASSUMPTIONS 49

ON LEARNING SCIENCE 72

THE ENTENTE CORDIALE 77

POPULAR SCIENCE 82

PATIENT PLODDERS 89

THE AMATEUR ASTRONOMER 95

SCIENTIFIC CITIZENS 100

THE SCEPTIC AND THE SPIRITS 105

THE SCIENTIFIC MIND 112

THE SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION 116

THEORIES AND PERSONALITIES 122

THE IDEAL SCIENTIFIC MAN 128

PARALLEL STRAIGHT LINES 133

THE NEW SCIENTIFIC HORIZON 139

Part 2

THE HOPE OF SCIENCE 145

THE RETURN OF MYSTERY 151

MATHEMATICS AND MUSIC 159

HUMAN TESTIMONY 177

THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE

The conception of science as a body of thought embracing the whole of our rational convictions about reality has hardly yet been generally reached. Man is still so far from being a rational animal that the application of rational methods of inquiry to all branches of his experience is still instinctively resisted--as if reason were an alien and hostile intruder. Beliefs which are held with passion, being the expression of instinctive preferences, are felt not to belong to the “sphere” of science. On all questions where his passions are strongly engaged, man prizes certitude and fears knowledge. Dispassionate inquiry is welcomed only when the result is indifferent. Nearly every great scientific generalisation has incurred the odium theologicum--which is not the exclusive possession of theologians--from the Copernican hypothesis to the theory of herd instinct. That science, although continually wounding men, should nevertheless have progressed, is evidence that it serves impulses deeply rooted in man’s nature. The great scientific innovator, like the great altruist, is treated with ignominy by the society whose deepest instincts he lives to serve.

Science, the child of irrational impulse, has inherited something of the parental character. Its history reveals it as purblind and fumbling, with no clear vision of its aim, no premonition of its imperial state. Unlike philosophy, it did not aspire to universal dominion. It was content to investigate the particular instance, and did not reject a certain incoherence in explanation rather than accept a generalisation which did not spring from its own ground. It refused foreign assistance, but kept its independence. That scientific men did not always understand that science must, from its nature, be autonomous, is evident from the history of every particular science. Even as late as Descartes it was considered quite natural to deduce phenomena from metaphysical principles; and an admixture of mythical elements is not entirely absent from some branches of science, even at the present day. Science has not yet reached full consciousness of its proper ground and aims.

The values served by science, in terms of which its claim to consideration is to be judged, have become more numerous as science has developed. The earliest scientific researches were concerned wholly with the particular event, with, at most, the vaguest inkling of large perspectives. The savage who discovers that the branch lying partly in the stream is not really bent, is prompted by the same localised and detached curiosity which led to most of the early scientific discoveries. Interest in the oddity of an event is undoubtedly the root of scientific observations. The more closely the events concern us, the more pregnant they may be with possible pleasure or pain, the greater the degree of abstraction necessary to see them in their relations. Human beings remain miracles to us long after we have learned to predict the motion of a planet. Psychology is the latest of the sciences, not so much because of the intrinsic difficulty of its subject-matter as because our interest in the subject-matter is so vehement that it is almost impossible to be indifferent to the results. An intelligent fish would probably have found most of the painfully won results of human psychology fairly obvious.

From the accumulation of facts and the attempt to see them in relation springs the scientific theory. With the construction of theories science enters on a new phase in its development, and serves a different set of human values. Its facts, the products of local curiosities, now take on an order, and serve the desire for comprehension. The apparently dissimilar becomes related; law supervenes on chaos. The desire for knowledge becomes transformed into the desire for significant knowledge--significant primarily for contemplation, and secondarily for practice. It is the scientific theory alone that gives to science its true being and makes it worthy of a deep concern. The desire for comprehension is deeply rooted in human nature. Religious myths and philosophical systems arose in obedience to this impulse. Science also exists to satisfy this craving, and the terms on which it does so are altogether to its advantage. The fact that it is an extension of common knowledge, and infers nothing that cannot be verified, differentiates it from myth, and is the secret of the grave and serious satisfaction it affords. Those accustomed to this homely, invigorating atmosphere find the rarer air of much traditional philosophy quite insupportable. A certain indifference to other methods of describing reality becomes more evident as the years advance and the domain of science becomes more and more extended. Peaceful penetration takes the place of open warfare, and in face of rival systems men of science feel less inclined to disprove what they feel more at liberty to ignore.

Science still falls far short of affording complete comprehension or of providing so finished a picture of reality that we feel no need of other speculations. The different sciences do not yet conspire to form one single coherent body of truth. The interstices between them are still sufficiently large to admit foreign interpretations. But the impulse to comprehension, which created science, will be justified by it: we may have so much faith. Even that moiety of mankind who care for little beyond pure immediacy will find that science alone can give them much of what they desire. Scientific theories possess a value even to those who are strangers to the pleasures of contemplation, for science has powerful reactions in the world of practice. To those who have lost their birthright it can offer a mess of pottage.

Besides serving curiosity, comprehension and practice, science offers richly satisfying objects to the æsthetic impulse. The language of æsthetics is not far to seek in the writings of men of science, and were it not that the word arouses such a proprietary fury, we should agree, reviewing their motives and the kind of their satisfactions, to call them artists. The matter of the highest art, like that of true science, is reality, and the measure in which science falls short as art is the measure in which it is incomplete as science. All good philosophy, art or science partakes of the nature of the other two. When these three are regarded as one, each will have reached its apotheosis.

It is unfortunately true that as a science advances it grows more complex. Not only does its language depart more and more from ordinary speech by the accumulation of technical terms, but the terms in current use at any time are defined in terms of others which are defined in terms of others--something after the manner of the description of the house that Jack built. The most obvious case of this Chinese box kind of language is, of course, that of mathematics. A mathematical theorem occupying one line of type might very well occupy a volume if written out in ordinary prose in which no terms were used which were not common property. For this reason modern mathematical discoveries, except in very special instances, cannot be made intelligible except to mathematicians. To learn the language of a highly developed science like mathematics takes about as long as to learn Chinese, but the task of translation into English is very much harder. For this reason mathematicians cannot hope for intelligent popular recognition; they must be content to be regarded either as vaguely impressive figures or else as mild lunatics busied with incomprehensible and probably trifling abstractions. Compared with writers, musicians or painters, they are, for social purposes, mental outlaws. It is apparent, however, that mathematics was not always so remote. It was possible for Voltaire to take an interest which was, at any rate, enthusiastic, in the work of Newton. This was doubtless due, in some degree, to the obviously dramatic quality of Newton’s discoveries, but it was also due to the fact that his discoveries could be expressed in comparatively simple language. Again, physics and chemistry at that time, and for some years later, were not only intelligible to men without special training, but such men could actually make valuable discoveries in these sciences. As these sciences progressed their language became more and more forbidding and their fundamental notions more and more abstract. Men without special training, but with scientific curiosity, turned their attention to the biological sciences. They collected birds’ eggs and butterflies; they bought microscopes and wrote little papers on the sea-shells they discovered in a morning’s walk. But biology has now developed a technical language, and the days of the untrained observer are almost over. The one science which is still, to some extent, accessible to these amiable people is psychology. It is growing more technical, it is true, but the majority of the books dealing with psychology may still be read almost as easily as a treatise on the history of the Balkans. And the “psychological” novelist can still regard himself as being, from one point of view, a scientific man. Psycho-analysis is, as yet, a favourite subject of discussion in advanced drawing-rooms where discussions of the principle of relativity are comparatively rare.

Continue reading Aspects of Science free in the Wunder reader →