CHAPTER II. The Problems of Science

THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE

It is quite a popular misconception that credits Science with exact methods and certain knowledge on all matters concerning which it has given an opinion. There is, in fact, a slavish reverence for the dicta of Science which is as inconsistent as formerly was the submission of the public mind to religious dogmatic teaching. And if, as some writers assert, there still exists a conflict between Religion and Science it is at least satisfactory to see that to-day Science appears to be getting its own back to a creditable extent. If Science makes appeal to the popular imagination or proves its claim to public recognition and support on the grounds of utility, Religion has only itself to blame if it fails to come into line with the established facts of scientific discovery and lacks the enterprise which is necessary to give it a modern representation. Instead of mumbling orthodoxies about the saving of souls, Religion could very profitably concern itself with the task of proving that man has a soul to save. It could use the argument afforded by modern experimental psychology. It could observe the scientific method, and could without loss of dignity employ the facts of Science in the upbuilding of a scheme of thought which has man’s spiritual welfare as the end in view. When we recognize the fact that it is our conception of God and of our relations with Him that is alone effective in the work of regeneration and reform, and that this altered view-point is largely due to the widening of the mental horizon by scientific discovery and a philosophy adapted thereto, then religiously-disposed people do wrongly to ignore the facts of Science, however much they may appear to conflict with orthodox notions of the relations of God to man. It is little more than three centuries ago that the custodians of religious belief burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for daring to declare that there were more worlds than one. In his Della Causa Principio ed Uno (Of the First and Only Cause) Bruno says: “The divine Omnipotence is more aptly expressed in an infinity of worlds of various dimensions than in the production of a single world of infinite dimensions.... Infinite variability is the eternal juvenescence of God.” That which happened to Bruno in the name of Holy Religion was barely escaped by Copernicus because of his heresy in declaring the Sun to be the centre of the system and the Earth one of its satellites moving about it. It was a pagan doctrine and belonged properly to Pythagoras. The history of Science reveals many such persecutions of its devotees, and yet in modern times it cannot be said that Science is without its prejudices. It nearly killed religious belief in the nineteenth century owing to its recognition of the Materialistic hypothesis.

Yet when we come to examine the claims of modern Science, or what popularly goes by that name, we find that it is largely hypothetical and that sciences which are usually known as “exact” are by no means so.

Science has no certain knowledge of the origin of life and consciousness. Many distinguished men have sought to define life. Dr. Alfred R. Wallace in his World of Life points out how inadequate are all these definitions, and wisely refrains from adding to them. Consciousness as a by-product of organic matter was quite correct science fifty years ago. To-day, in the presence of many well-attested facts which go to prove the possibility of consciousness apart from organism as we know it, the man of science is not at all sure that consciousness is anything of the sort. Modern psychology is a new leaf in the book of Nature which until quite recently had not been deciphered. We are getting our facts sporadically, a few at a time, and each new discovery changes our ideas concerning things which had passed for correct theory. The facts remain; our views of them are changed. We really have no certain scientific knowledge about the wonderful conversion of inorganic to organic matter. The alchemy of Nature baffles us.

Even the cosmic theory is incomplete and full of anomalies. In the vortex theory there is nothing to show why some swirls of cosmic matter became suns and others planets. There are two theories regarding the solar system diametrically opposed to one another. There are similarly two theories regarding the Moon. The most recent theory is that the Moon acts as a brake upon the Earth by causing the tides, which run contrary to the axial rotation of the earth, thereby slowing down its rotation and causing a longer day than formerly. But the same theory requires that the Moon is gradually enlarging its own orbit and getting farther away from the Earth, which is inconsistent with our records of ancient observations of eclipses, etc., for in order to agree our calculations with the observed positions of the Moon at these ancient epochs, we have to augment the present mean motion of the Moon in its orbit by a quantity equal to about 10´´t₂, which means ten seconds for the first century and the same quantity multiplied by the square of the centuries for times anterior. In other words, the Moon was moving quicker in a smaller orbit in former days. But this supplemental theory is wholly destructive of the first regarding the Moon’s tidal action. For if the Moon is getting farther away from us, its tidal influence is also decreasing, and the “brake” power being lessened, the Earth’s axial rotation must be increasing in velocity and the day must be getting shorter than formerly, which is the exact converse of what was argued in the first place. Hence we see how, in their efforts to explain observed facts, scientific men can put up two mutually destructive theories. Only recently, in the Solar eclipse of 17th April, 1912, we had an illustration of an exact science blundering in practice. The Connaissance des Temps, the official organ of the French astronomers, gave this eclipse as total, while the Nautical Almanac gave it correctly as partial, the apparent diameter of the Moon, depending on its anomaly, being some 20´´ less than that of the Sun.

The theory of what is called the attraction of gravitation is one of the scientific facts which have recently been abandoned as unsatisfactory. It is found that the theory of “attraction” does not answer to the facts as experimentally determined. Theories that are inelastic are apt to be negatived by the discovery of new facts or modified beyond recognition by extended observations. The Earth itself is a huge magnet whose radial influence extends some fourteen feet beyond its surface, and this fact has to be taken into account in all local magnetic observations.

The permeability of matter was a fact that had been under scrutiny for a long time before the discovery of the Röntgen rays. Sir David Brewster notes the passage of carbon through solid wood by means of electric fluid, and by an electric current an acid may be separated from its sodium base and passed through dilute syrup of violets without changing the colour of the vegetable solution. The question then arises, in what form was the carbon in the one case and the acid in the other when they passed through the respective media? Obviously their atomic vibrations were temporarily raised in such degree by electrical action as to change them from their normal characters. I suggest to psychologists that something of the same or a similar nature may occur in the case of individuals when acting under the influence of hypnotism or spiritual afflatus, ecstasy, etc. The question is whether they can be rendered permanent effects.

But these are not by any means the whole of the problems confronting modern Science, which nevertheless has a tendency to become dogmatic in other matters with which it is not officially concerned, as one may learn from a reading of Häckel’s Riddle of the Universe. In Ernst Häckel we see probably the last of the old school of materialistic philosophers. Another problem is that of atomic arrangement. It has been observed that two chemical bodies composed of exactly the same number of atoms of the same elements assume entirely different characteristics by reason of their respective atomic arrangement. This fact, while wholly unexplained, opens up many interesting psychological issues and serves by analogy to explain why two human beings compounded of exactly similar cosmic elements, manifest different characters and faculties. Science has too long neglected the free use of its own hypothesis of the solidarity of the system, and while astronomy employs interplanetary action in all its calculations, it scouts the idea of astro-meteorology and relegates astrology to the limbo of antiquated superstitions. Yet both these concepts are necessary and logical dependents of the cosmical hypothesis.

Up to the present day Science has ignored psychology and opposed the claims of psycho-therapeutics. Medical science other than that depending on surgery will soon find that the process of readjustment in the human organism rendered necessary by the rapidly changing conditions of modern civilization and the opening-up of new centres of activity in the mind-sphere of the world, will present a new series of pathological conditions to which the prescriptions of the Pharmacopoeia are altogether inadequate. The psychic origin of disease will have to be admitted and provided against. The x-factor in human pathology which defies the action of drugs and evades the scalpel, call it by what name we may, will increasingly assert itself, and medical men will have perforce to take it into their counsels, make friends with it and get to understand its vagaries. The plurality of worlds and the habitability of the other planets in the solar system, taught by Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C., has received a certain speculative recognition by astronomers, notably Camille Flammarion, Richard Proctor, Schiaparelli and Sir Robert Ball, in recent years. It was affirmed as fact by that remarkable man of science and inspiration, Baron Swedenborg. But in a contemporary issue of the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Prof. Aitken, of the Lick Observatory, states, as the result of his researches, that the Moon is a dead world, with the exception perhaps of low forms of vegetable life sustained by water vapour exuding from the Moon’s interior; Mercury gets seven times as much heat as the Earth and keeps the same face towards the Sun, offering the alternative of an eternal night or an equally unending tropical heat and daylight, from which it is not protected by any atmosphere. Venus, having many characteristics similar to the Earth, is admitted to be problematical, since it is not yet decided whether its day and year are equal or not. If they are, then it is uninhabitable. Mars has a rare atmosphere, and there is not enough water on the planet to fill an American lake. It has a low temperature, and there may be vegetable and animal life there, but no beings of intelligence. The “canals” may be natural or artificial canals or merely earthquake markings. Jupiter is a semi-sun, its development is in a state of chaos, and it is probably gaseous throughout with matter distributed as on the Sun, there being no defined surface or crust. Saturn resembles Jupiter, but probably is not so far advanced, and it is even less fitted for human habitation than Jupiter.

We see therefore that as between the teaching of Pythagoras and that of Prof. Aitken there is a great gulf fixed. It will probably be bridged by a little freer use of the scientific imagination that Prof. Huxley extolled. The great American astronomer has argued humanity out of existence in a manner so complete as to warrant the instant dismantling of the statue of Bruno by the Vatican. But alas for the shortcomings of dogmatic science, we have not yet been told how or why the Earth alone is favoured by the presence of humanity. We are left to speculate upon the question as to what has become of the Moon’s humanity, supposing this dead orb was once alive and afforded habitable conditions. We are left wondering why conservative Nature evolved the planets Neptune and Uranus—which “are so far away from the Sun that its light and heat can hardly be effective in protecting life upon them, even should life in any way originate there”—if they are never to come within the life-belt limit of the solar rays! These vapourings are altogether unworthy of the name of Science, and are, in their way, as fanciful and speculative as any of the superstitions of a primitive religion. Who gave the astronomer to know that man as we see him is the only sort of humanity or intelligent being that can exist? It is open to him to remark that even should there be forms of intelligent life on other planets we should not recognize them as human. That is beside the mark; we do not recognize the human by its form, we do not confound the man with the animal part of him; and we may even speak of discarnate humanity. In every possible way we protest that articulate language, which infers articulate thought and intelligence, is the criterion of the human, and in this category we include for sociological reasons all that are of human generation, whether intelligent and articulate or not. Of the “infinite variability” of God as expressed in Nature, the astronomer takes no count. Here on this globe of ours we find the human persisting in temperatures varying from over + 150° to - 30°, and we have no reason for suggesting that the power of adaptation to environment is at the maximum in this world. Violent ophthalmia and even madness would result in us if “the earth’s green livery” were suddenly and permanently changed to red. But a very little alteration in the chemical constitution of the vitreous fluid in the eye would render us immune from these evils, and we have every reason for thinking that were such a colour-change to take place, Nature would not be long in adapting herself to the new conditions. But she would first be sure that they were likely to be permanent, for although very amicable, the old lady is extremely cautious and prudent! What we know as solar light and heat have no existence outside the earth’s atmosphere, and even within it they only have the values that our sensation-consciousness gives to them; so that all we can scientifically assume in regard to those planets that have no atmosphere is that their humanities, if they have any, must be physiologically different from man as we know him. We cannot argue that he does not exist or that he cannot exist on them.

The sum of the matter is this, we have need of a Religion that is scientific, and equally of a Science that is religious. What we do not positively know we may logically infer, but we have to guard ourselves against the tendency to take the inference for fact and to dogmatize about things which are wholly unrelated to our personal experience. The many curious observations I shall have occasion to make in the course of these pages are so remote from general experience and so far removed from scientific scrutiny as to belong to the category of things called “occult,” and it was therefore expedient that the reader should have a fairly clear idea that all the statements of orthodox science do not rest upon the immovable rock of observed fact, and for this reason are not so well founded as many of the conclusions of occult science. It is advisable also that the reader should discern between the theoretical value of a statement and its experimental value. Many things which appear reasonable will not respond to test, and others that seem unreasonable are found nevertheless to be true.