Gallio

Part 1

GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE

GALLIO OR The Tyranny of Science

BY J. W. N. SULLIVAN

E. P. DUTTON & CO. :: NEW YORK

GALLIO, OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE COPYRIGHT 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.

GALLIO

GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE

There can be no doubt that the prestige of science has greatly increased of recent times. In the days when Dickens wrote The Mudfog Papers the man of science, to the general reading public, was a purely comic figure. After the man of science had knocked the bottom out of the Victorian universe with his theory of Natural Selection he inspired the respect we accord to whatever is both powerful and sinister. He was observed, warily and acutely, as an enemy. This reaction was perfectly justified, for science, as expounded to the populace by such men as Huxley and Tyndall, deprived life of all that had hitherto made it worth living. The gravamen of their offence was not that they made man an integral part of the animal kingdom, but that they presented him with a universe that was entirely purposeless. Such a doctrine would probably come as a shock even to a disillusioned and emaciated Eastern Sage, but to the men of the Victorian age, almost every one of them brought up in an orthodox Christian household and filled with that belief in a wise Providence that comes of great material prosperity, it was nothing short of an outrage. Even the men of science themselves found their great discovery more than a little disconcerting. Nobody who reads them can fail to detect something strained, something occasionally almost frenzied, in their insistence on the duty of intellectual honesty. These men are, half the time, shouting aloud in order to hearten themselves. They were quite consciously martyrs to the truth. This is true, at any rate, of such men as Huxley and Clifford. There were many men of science, of course, who were not sufficiently alive to live in a universe of any description. Outside, their laboratories they had no perceptible existence. Many of them died simple Christians. But to all interested in such matters it became evident that the goal of science was the detailed explanation of man as the accidental outcome of “matter and motion”. Since the arguments of the man of science could not be met (for only science can cast out science) the only thing left was to abuse him. This was magnificently done by Nietzsche, and rather less magnificently by Dostoevsky and Tolstoi. Nietzsche pointed out that the man of science was not a human being. He was merely an instrument, the most costly, the most exquisite, the most easily tarnished of instruments. He was incapable of love; he was incapable of hate. His one purpose was to “reflect” such things as he was tuned to receive. The philosophy evolved by such a creature would be expressive of nothing but his own limitations. He would be incapable of understanding the problems that concerned a man. This was also the line taken, more or less, by Dostoevsky and Tolstoi, and it became very popular with artists of all kinds. Wordsworth’s scorn for the botanist became the general attitude towards all men of science. It must be admitted that, judging from biographies of scientific men, there is much to be said for this view. Their favourite authors appear to be Shakespeare and Ella Wheeler Wilcox: they are kind fathers and faithful husbands; in their social relations they are simple-minded snobs; and they are really amused by “lecture-room humour”. It seems unlikely that such people know much of the fierce vitality that sent Saints to rot on pillars and in dungeons, that sent martyrs to the stake, or even that weaker form of vitality that causes our Divorce Court judges to be overworked. That they can understand the universe, when it is obvious they do not understand Clapham, does not seem likely. That, briefly, was the case of the artist against the man of science. The artist was conscious of more things in heaven and earth, staring him in the face, than he believed the man of science had ever dreamt of in his philosophy.

It is evident that the position to-day is rather different. It has become different since the War. It is probable, as we shall see later, that the War itself is partly responsible for the increased attention paid by the artist to science. But the influence was not direct. The artist was not transported with admiration for the men who could make poison-gas, although he may have been more inclined to believe their philosophy that existence is meaningless. No, the change was, I believe, due to Einstein: in this respect he must be likened to Newton and Darwin. The fact that his theory is completely unintelligible to the enormous majority of those who take an interest in it is not at all to its disadvantage. Rather the contrary. The artist is attracted by the theory, and respectful to it, not in the least because he understands it, but because he feels it is the result of a most unusual and most powerful imaginative effort. It gives him a new conception of the power of the human consciousness. This theory, he is convinced, has come from the heights. It is probable, as a matter of fact, he thinks this because he believes the theory to be about that mathematical platitude, a fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is a phrase to which imaginative people respond with quite extraordinary intensity. Its popularity is like that of giant telescopes, as was proved when a thousand pounds was recently offered for a simple explanation of it. It seems to be the phrase which, to the non-mathematician, is most pregnant with the vast and liberating unknown. If its meaning is ever generally understood, we may anticipate that interest in Einstein’s theory will decline. This will be a pity, because the popular reaction to Einstein’s theory is perfectly justified. It is the most profound and original scientific theory that has ever been invented, and it displays a kind of imagination almost unprecedented in the history of science. The feeling of the artist about it is right――it is vastly important to him.

He ought to have been. See Callinicus, by J. B. S. Haldane.

Being convinced that the mathematician, at any rate, might be a poet, the respect of imaginative people for science in general has greatly increased. Many of them have decided that science is worth looking into. Unfortunately mathematical physics, the master science of the present day and the one which has furnished ideals for the other sciences, is hopelessly technical. It is agreed that a modern intelligent man, conscious of his responsibilities as an inhabitant of the twentieth century, should be familiar with “the scientific outlook”. But to acquire this outlook by brooding over the teachings and implications of modern physics is not easy. Thus although it is the recent astonishing development in physics which is responsible for the renewed public interest in science, it is other sciences that reap the benefit. We have poets and painters who study anthropology and literary critics who read books on the nervous system. The result appears to have been disastrous. At a time when the physicists are abandoning materialism the artists are accepting it. They are accepting, as the last word of science, a picture of the world that belongs to the early bad manner of physics. Again we hear, but this time from our literary men, that slightly hysterical insistence on the duty of intellectual honesty. It must be admitted that they have been predisposed to accept this view by the War. It is a curious but indisputable psychological fact, perhaps first noted by Tolstoi, that the sight of a large number of naked human bodies makes it difficult to believe that they are animated by immortal spirits possessing an eternal destiny. The sight of the “wastage” that occurred during the War, for those who saw any of it, produced the same curious effect. Also, a psychological fact that cannot be denied, it was difficult to preserve belief in the essential nobility of man when listening to patriotic non-combatants. There can be no doubt that the War, for a large number of those connected with it, has made the acceptance of materialism easier. Even the creative artists, at one time great champions of the spiritual nature of man, are now sufficiently dubious about his nature to be reduced to impotence.

I say “almost” because there was Bernhard Riemann and his disciple W. K. Clifford.

The notion that we live in a purposeless universe is so opposed to the mental habits we have inherited that it is a matter of the greatest difficulty to bear it constantly in mind. Most of the people who hold this belief to-day would not do so but for three reasons: the disillusionment caused by the War, their respect for science, and their belief that science preaches materialism. As for the War, that is an experience to which we must accommodate ourselves as best we may. It is consistent with the belief that man is a developing spirit, but it is certainly a proof that he is not very far developed. The respect for science is, I believe, on the whole rather overdone. The respect is a little excessive even when it relates to mathematical physics, but it becomes almost absurd when it relates to some other branches of science. I believe, for instance, that Freud’s form of psycho-analysis, some forms of behaviourism, and many of the statements of the eugenists really are as silly as they look. All that they have in common with such first-class mental activities as physics and chemistry is the name “science.” It is this name that secures for them such attention as they get from intelligent people who are not cranks. But even physics is a more provisional and more human thing than some romantic references to it would lead one to suppose. Even the tower of the mathematician, which Mr Bernard Shaw imagines to have been always unshaken, has been seriously disturbed on more than one occasion. The student of the history of science will not be too confident even of the “indubitable certainties” of physics when he reflects on the universal passion of belief that attached to the notion of a mechanical ether, for whose present absence from the universe some men of science are still inconsolable, and when he reflects on the fate that has overtaken that “most perfect and perfectly established law”, Newton’s law of gravitation. There are no indubitable certainties in science, a fact that we who are contemporary with the destruction of the Newtonian system are not likely to forget. There are only provisional hypotheses. It may even be, as Mr J. B. S. Haldane prophesies, that physiology will one day invade and destroy mathematical physics, by which somewhat dark saying I suppose phenomena mathematically may be given up. Whether he means that or not, it is a possibility, as Professor Eddington has hinted. The scientific practitioner usually treats his hypotheses as tools, but to the layman they become dogmas. One is led to believe this by seeing that many of those who accept materialism on what they suppose to be scientific evidence are rendered acutely unhappy by their belief. A truer knowledge of the status of scientific theories would render this agony unnecessary. There are people with a natural leaning towards materialism, and science, preferably somewhat old-fashioned science, will give them quite sufficient grounds to indulge their propensity with complete intellectual honesty. But science does not, and never has, brought forward sufficient evidence to justify a man turning materialist against his will. And perhaps no man has ever done so. Perhaps one can take the agonies of modern poets too seriously. Many artists, not only small ones, have no real indwelling force such as a man like Beethoven obviously possessed. They are merely very impressionable and adopt an attitude towards life, and this attitude is accepted and maintained, not because they really think it is true, but because they derive strength from it. It gives them a centre from which they can work; it gives them a feeling of strength and completeness. The maintenance of their attitude towards life may become the condition that they exist and function as artists at all. Nevertheless, the attitude is maintained only by a constant effort of will, although, since the motive is self-preservation, the artist will nearly always think himself perfectly sincere. But I shall, without going into these refinements, take the unhappiness of our modern literary men at its face-value, those, that is, who believe that the universe is purposeless and think this belief is founded on scientific evidence.

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