Sibylla

Part 1

SIBYLLA OR THE REVIVAL OF PROPHECY

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SIBYLLA or THE REVIVAL OF PROPHECY

BY C. A. MACE, M.A.

Lecturer in Logic and Psychology at the University of St. Andrews

New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue

Published, 1927

By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

Can Prophecy be a science? Science at any rate, appears to aim at prophecy. We are often told that the test of an hypothesis lies in the events that it predicts; but it is a test that is much too rarely applied. We are surprised when Biologists apply it in a systematic way to the theory of evolution. Historians also tell us that the study of the past will help us to foresee the future, but in their practice they hardly succeed in catching up to the present.

The organum of human knowledge, in fact, presents a curious spectacle――a vast system of foundations but no sign of the edifice these foundations are to bear. At least such was the case until recently. In the little prophetic volumes recently published we can see, perhaps, the preliminary sketch of its imposing elevation.

And so another question occurs. What is the future of prophecy? Psychical research may even yet surprise us. Latent powers of divination may lurk in the human mind, but it is premature no doubt to look for enlightenment here. Less sensational but more significant is the emergence of the prophetic function in the work of science itself, and in the pedestrian progress of our general intellectual life in the twentieth century.

It was this prophetic function of scientific thought which the author set out in this little book to investigate, but like other writers in the series he was tempted to “try out” some tentative principles which seemed to promise well. Perhaps the future will reveal some inaccuracies in his forecast, but the digression has been worth while. One thing, at least, is certain. Large scale organization extends to the work of science. In our past experiments we have been too much concerned with events of short duration, with the kind of results we could obtain for rapid publication, and with cycles that fall within the span of an individual life. Even now we have insufficient data to decide whether cold winters come in periods of seventy or eighty years, a ridiculously easy problem which a little organization would have solved. But every year will add to the fund of carefully recorded data. Men are learning to co-operate through time. Experiments initiated by the father are continued by the son, and succeeding generations will record the results.

Organization provides a workable alternative to the invention of Methuselahs; though it would simplify things considerably if Nature could see her way to adopt the suggestion of Mr Shaw. More than anywhere else perhaps this kind of organization is needed for sociological and biological experiment. By that way we shall obtain the knowledge upon which scientific prophecy may be based. In the meantime, let us speculate. Speculation is not a deadly sin, but an aid to true perspective, and it is suggestive of good hypotheses. Nor need our speculations, even now, be wholly in the air. We have the broad tendencies of the past on which to base our forecast. The danger lies in a premature attempt to elucidate the details. The older prophets tried to foresee particular events, the newer are content with the general tendencies. Knowledge grows not like a crystal by minute accretions, but like a work of art, from outline down to detail guided by inspiration――which, in science, is speculation.

C. A. M.

SIBYLLA OR THE REVIVAL OF PROPHECY

Experience enables us to defend in age the prejudices of our youth, and belatedly to realize ambitions forsaken in earlier years. This would seem to be true not only of individuals but of institutions also.

Modern science, adolescent in the nineteenth century, shows signs of middle age; and with it that mellowed and urbane tolerance which fosters idealism and optimistic projects, projects which the realism and studied pessimism of youth declare to be beyond all powers of attainment.

The researches of Rutherford and his fellow-workers have disposed the serious physicist to dally once more with the Philosopher’s Stone. Again we hope to transmute the baser metals into gold. Indeed, the Philosopher’s Stone is found. Japanese physicists claim that a magnification 2,500 times of the produce of their experiments enables us actually to photograph the world’s augmented gold-supply. Furthermore, the progress of knowledge concerning atomic structure and radiant energy promises to endow man with the powers and range of influence for which the magicians of old had such a notable though undeserved reputation.

Since Freud, the interpretation of dreams has become a serious pre-occupation of the grave and a further relaxation for the gay. I need not, however, multiply examples. Let us turn forthwith to the latest phase in this development――the revival of prophecy.

Prophecy, of course, has never wholly died. Though the soothsayer fell into disrepute and was banished from the temple precincts to earn a precarious livelihood on Margate Sands, his mantle has fallen on Mr Wells. Mr Wells, however, is merely a prophet of the transition, the journalese precursor of a new and hardier race whose influence in the world I suspect will prove much greater. Like the modern prophets generally, he has substituted for revelation and intuition a thorough-going reliance upon the mundane intellect, fed upon scientific generalizations and historical particularities. Mr Bernard Shaw is another of the transition prophets, having marked affinities to the new Biological School; but, like the rest, is transitional in lacking the regalia of office and authority with which the newer prophets are endowed.

The first of the prophets of the twentieth-century school was Mr J. B. S. Haldane. In Daedalus we find a frank abandonment of the pose of scientific reserve about the future. Scientists generally for long had said that they were concerned only with verifiable facts. Newton, in particular, had said quite publicly that he had no use for hypotheses; and his successors for the sake of their reputations had to keep up the Newtonian manner. To distinguish themselves from journalists and philosophers they avoided speculation like a plague. Now Haldane found himself, I imagine, somewhat unduly constrained by this taboo. Pursuing the most rigid methods of inquiry, he had come to conclusions about some probable developments in the future, conclusions much less speculative than many of the things it was his duty as a biologist to teach about the past. So he prophesied.

Part 2

The relief in the scientific world was heartfelt and instantaneous. Scientists and others, of various degrees of eminence, literally scrambled into Mr Haldane’s bus. In the year or so that followed some twenty prophetic volumes had been produced, and the publishers tell us of many others in the press.

However, in many of these documents we fail to detect the authentic guiding hand, and these uncanonical works we must leave to the Higher Critics of the future. The genuine prophet is to be known by his strictly impersonal manner. He tells you neither what he wants nor what he fears. So far as we can judge, he has no wants or fears. He merely tells you what is going to be. Judged by this test we must, I think, reject Thrasymachus, as purely propagandist. Mr Joad wants to popularize immorality. He tries to persuade us to join the ranks of the libertines lest we be swamped in the coming Neopuritan revival. By the same token we must, reluctantly, reject Mrs Bertrand Russell. In Hypatia the quasi-prophetic rôle is assumed, we fear, merely as a vantage point from which to wage sex-war.

Coming to the genuine prophets, I would divide them into two kinds; the mechanists and the vitalists, not however, using these terms in their traditional philosophical senses. The mechanists are those who view the future in terms of the development of machinery. Man, having a nature very much what it is to-day, is seen in an environment of mechanical perfection, a world of wireless telegraphy, television, fuelless traffic, moving pavements, rubber roads, windows of flexible glass, rustless metals, dustless and smokeless cities, and private houses fit for a plumber’s paradise.

The vitalists, of whom I take Mr Haldane to be the leading spokesman, have a message in the face of which the wonders of wireless are relatively tame. The time has come, they say, when our science and our inventive genius are to be applied to life itself. In a sense, of course, the journalists and men of letters got in first. Kapek with his Robots made the idea dramatic; but the mechanical tradition was too strong. The Robot was little more than clockwork. Wells’s “Men like Gods” are perhaps a slight advance, but the gods are all too human, and a bit too much like Mr Wells. Shaw, I think, got nearest. In Back to Methuselah the problem of biological invention was approached in a more biological manner. But all these are prophets of the transition. They are at heart Utopians, and neglect the evidences of the present upon which the forecast must be based.

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