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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76629 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                                                                GALLIO
+                                                                  OR
+                                                             THE TYRANNY
+                                                                  OF
+                                                               SCIENCE
+
+
+
+
+                                 GALLIO
+                                   OR
+                         The Tyranny of Science
+
+                                   BY
+                           J. W. N. SULLIVAN
+
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+
+                     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
+
+
+
+
+                                   1
+
+
+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,[1] 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[2] unprecedented in the history of science. The feeling of the
+artist about it is right――it is vastly important to him.
+
+  [1] 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.
+
+  [2] I say “almost” because there was Bernhard Riemann and his disciple
+      W. K. Clifford.
+
+
+
+
+                                   2
+
+
+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.
+
+The point of view has been well put recently by Mr I. A. Richards,[3]
+a literary critic who thinks it possible that poetry may be destroyed
+by science. He speaks of the “neutralization of nature” which has been
+effected by science, and contrasts this with the “magical view” of the
+world that has hitherto been accepted by artists. What he means by
+this is that science reveals to us a universe quite indifferent to all
+human aspirations, whereas artists have hitherto assumed that man is
+of cosmic significance. The poet must learn to accept the scientific
+universe and give up believing in things like “inspiration”, “a reality
+deeper than the reality of science”, and so on. “Experience”, says Mr
+Richards, “is its own justification”, by which he appears to mean that
+experience just happens to be what it is by some kind of accident. It
+points to nothing beyond itself. The ground for this belief is not,
+in Mr Richards’ case, old-fashioned materialism. “It is not what the
+universe is made of but how it works, the law it follows, which makes
+knowledge of it incapable of spurring on our emotional responses.” This
+reminds one of the “iron laws” of the Victorian age, which many people
+found so depressing, although the logical connection between existence
+having conditions and existence being purposeless is a little hard to
+follow. But although the particular iron laws of the Victorians have
+gone, Mr Richards finds the theory of relativity no more cheering. “A
+god voluntarily or involuntarily subject to Einstein’s General Theory
+of Relativity does not make an emotional appeal and physics does not
+find it necessary to mention him.” Apparently it is the existence of
+any law at all that is resented: the poet can feel happy only in a
+world of pure miracle. I strongly doubt the correctness of Mr Richards’
+diagnosis.[4] I am certain that not all poets have been as childish
+as that. No――the essential element in this general outlook is not
+that phenomena occur in an orderly way, but that man’s existence is
+not regarded as forming part of some universal purpose. The essential
+element is the same as in old-fashioned materialism, the “accidental
+collocations of atoms” theory. The emphasis was on the “accidental”
+not on the “atoms”. This becomes clear when Mr Richards describes the
+appropriate emotional reaction to his view. “A sense of desolation
+and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness of aspirations, of
+the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which
+seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in consciousness of this
+necessary reorganization of our lives.” It is difficult to believe
+that this state of mind can be produced by the recognition of such
+facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the ground. But if Mr
+Richards is right, I suggest that the poets who are so depressed by
+law and order should study, besides the theory of relativity, Quantum
+Theory. They will find there much that is, at present, agreeably
+miraculous. But one need not fly to miracles to get rid of the bug-bear
+of “unalterable law”. It is only necessary to understand the true
+status of the unalterable laws, and this is just what relativity theory
+enables us to do.
+
+  [3] _Science and Poetry_, 1926.
+
+  [4] But possibly Mr Richards means that the scientific description
+      does not include values. See Section 5 of this essay.
+
+
+
+
+                                   3
+
+
+The idea that there is a conflict between science and art, which is at
+bottom the idea that there is a conflict between science and mysticism,
+rests, I have suggested, upon an old-fashioned conception of the
+status of physics. The first duty of a man who bases his conclusions
+on science is to make sure that his science is up-to-date. The science
+that leads to the depressing conclusions I have just sketched is not
+up-to-date. Until a few years ago the physicist thought that the
+material universe he dealt with was a real, objectively existing
+universe in the sense that, in the absence of consciousness, it would
+be very much the same as it appeared to be. This universe was subject
+to laws, and these laws might conceivably have been different. There
+was no _a priori_ reason, for instance, why the force of gravitation
+should not vary as the inverse cube of the distance. There was no _a
+priori_ reason why matter and energy should be conserved. These were
+laws of governance of the material universe; their discovery had
+required much effort and the rejection of alternatives. Man was in no
+sense responsible for them: he happened to live in a universe governed
+by them. These were the iron laws of the Victorians and are the laws,
+apparently, that depress modern poets. One of the great discoveries of
+relativity theory is that these laws need be no more depressing than
+the laws of Euclidean geometry. No artist has felt his aspirations
+baseless because he cannot draw a circle whose circumference is six
+times its radius. He has no more right to despair because there
+is an inexorable law of gravitation. This has been made clear by
+Professor Eddington, whose mathematical development of relativity
+theory is of great philosophical importance, and would, in a more
+adequately educated community, be given more newspaper headlines than
+Tutankhamen. The real universe, according to relativity theory, is a
+four-dimensional world of point-events. Of the nature of point-events
+we know nothing. All that we require to know, for the purposes of
+physics, is that it takes four numbers to specify a point-event
+uniquely, and that some kind of structure――a minimum amount of
+structure――may be postulated of the world of point-events. We then
+find, purely by mathematical processes, that certain characteristics of
+this world will have the quality of permanence. The mind, faced with
+this world of evanescent point-events, selects those characteristics
+that are permanent as being of special interest. This is merely because
+the mind happens to be that kind of thing. As a consequence of this
+predilection of the mind there arises space and time, matter, and the
+laws of nature. There arises, in fact, the “objective universe”. The
+real world of point-events has many other characteristics to which the
+mind pays no attention. A different principle of selection, exercised
+on the same total world of point-events, would result in an utterly
+different universe, a universe that is, for us, quite unimaginable. And
+the universe that the mind has selected and constructed from the world
+of point-events does not in the least depend on what the point-events
+_are_. All that is necessary is that a certain minimum amount of
+structure should be attributed to the world of point-events. It is from
+the relations between the point-events, quite independent of their
+substance, that the mind has created the material universe and its
+laws. These laws, it must be emphasized, are _necessary_ consequences
+of the mind’s selective action. They are necessary in the same sense
+that the sum of the three interior angles of a Euclidean triangle must
+be two right angles. Of the underlying reality deduced by physics we
+can say almost nothing. It may be what Newton called the “sensorium”
+of God, and the point-events may be his thoughts. They do not succeed
+one another in time for, at this stage of analysis, space and time are
+“merged in one”. This perfectly gratuitous hypothesis may appeal to
+some mystics, for our thoughts, considered as belonging to the world
+of point-events, would be part of the thoughts of God. It would be
+indeed true that in him we lived and moved and had our being. We see,
+then, the limitations of physics. All that depends on the _structure_
+of reality belongs to physics, including other universes than ours.
+All that depends upon the _substance_ of reality for ever lies outside
+physics. As to the actual universe we live in, why we should regard
+it as actual is a problem for psychology. The difference between the
+actual and the non-actual is a distinction conferred by our minds. It
+is very probable that the whole movement of the universe in time is
+also contributed by our minds. It seems to be true that events do not
+take place――we come across them. Why we do not know the future is again
+a question of psychology. Ignorance of the future, like the existence
+of the material universe, is a clue to the constitution of our minds.
+This has a bearing on the question of “purpose” in the universe. The
+conception of purpose seems to suppose a process in time, and therefore
+may be a totally irrelevant idea when applied to reality.
+
+The philosophical implications of relativity theory will doubtless
+take a long time to work out. The four-dimensional universe of
+point-events is something that can be argued about but it is, to use an
+old-fashioned phrase, “inconceivable”. Mankind, excepting professional
+logicians, never remains content with the inconceivable. A purely
+logical conclusion is not enough; it has to be grasped imaginatively,
+by which I do not necessarily mean that it has to be pictured. To
+become familiar with a theory does not merely mean that one is able, as
+a form of mental wire-walking, to slip nimbly back and forth over the
+logical connections of the structure. It means taking it into oneself
+in some indefinable manner――becoming “intimate” with it. Only when a
+theory is “realized”, as we say, do we feel that we truly understand
+it. Ideas, points of view, that we were able to see only in flashes,
+become part of our normal intellectual equipment. The process may
+well be called a growth of consciousness. There are ideas which our
+consciousness, when it first approaches them is, as it were, too flabby
+to grasp. We first have to exercise our mental muscles. Every student
+of a line of thought such as mathematics, which is rather outside
+our normal preoccupations, becomes aware of an actual change in his
+mental powers. Notions so abstract that at first they seemed almost
+meaningless gradually become perfectly clear and permanent additions to
+one’s mental resources. Students of musical composition find that their
+capacity for mentally hearing a number of parts rapidly increases. In
+some cases it is almost as if a new faculty of the mind were born and
+developed.
+
+The physics of recent years has made heavy demands upon our capacity
+for realization. The electron theory, with its analysis of matter into
+“disembodied charges of electricity” required, for its understanding,
+the breaking up of old habits of thought. To young students the idea
+was, at first, extremely baffling――almost nonsense. To realize it one
+had to make more abstract one’s idea of matter until the notion of
+“substance” was replaced by the notion of “behaviour”. Anything that
+behaved in the way characteristic of matter was matter. The central
+idea of the restricted principle of relativity, the idea of different
+time-systems, was still more difficult to grasp. In this case we had to
+become convinced that our ordinary idea of simultaneity, an idea which
+seemed perfectly clear, was really a bogus idea. The attacks on the
+theory of relativity show, for the most part, merely that their authors
+are unable to abandon old habits of thought. With the complete theory
+of relativity, as we have it now, the task of adjustment has become
+enormous. There cannot be, even now, more than very few scientific men
+who naturally approach a problem from the point of view of relativity
+theory. In most cases a conscious effort of mental preparation is
+required, such as occurs when a novelist, sitting down to continue
+his work, deliberately thinks himself into the appropriate frame of
+mind. Yet doubtless the next generation or so will think in terms of
+relativity theory as naturally as we thought in terms of the Newtonian
+system. I would not hold it as impossible that the human mind may come
+to realize, imaginatively as well as logically, the four-dimensional
+space-time continuum. But it seems that the mind of the physicist, at
+any rate, will have to do more than become familiar with relativity
+theory. It will have to accommodate itself somehow to the quantum
+theory for, although we can write down the laws which govern sub-atomic
+phenomena and make deductions from them, these laws are, at present,
+unintelligible. An electron behaves as if it had foreknowledge of
+what it was about to do and could make the mathematical calculations
+necessary to achieve its end. We cannot admit this to be possible, and
+we can only suppose that the difficulty arises from the way we think
+about things. We must learn to think in a different way, and what the
+consequences of that new way of thinking will be no one can say. We
+know very little of the possibilities of the development of the human
+consciousness.
+
+The proper attitude to-day in which the problem of man’s place in
+nature should be approached is one of bewilderment and humility. Both
+the material universe and the mind of man are very mysterious things.
+At the present time it is only an inadequate mind which is confident
+that it knows what is impossible. There was never a time when hearty
+dogmatism and loud confidence were more out of place. We must think as
+best we can, of course. The next step upward in the development of the
+human consciousness will not be achieved by either slovenly credulity
+or slovenly scepticism, but only by a terrifying mental travail. I
+see a human mind as some multiple plant, here in full flower, there
+still in the bud. Different minds have flowered in different ways.
+Beethoven’s _Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit_
+points to the complete development in him of something which those
+of us who understand him have only in embryo. In those who do not
+understand him it is non-existent. And the great mystics ought at least
+to make us doubt whether it is we who are not deficient rather than
+they who are mad. It is rash to dismiss our exceptional moods, our
+strange flashes of what seems like insight, as mere whimsies without
+significance. They may be faint stirrings of the next thing that is
+destined to become fully alive. All that we can say is that the mind
+lives in a universe largely of its own creation, and that the universe,
+together with the mind, will change in ways we cannot foresee.
+
+
+
+
+                                   4
+
+
+We have seen that the philosophy that regards man as a meaningless
+accident in an alien universe receives no support from modern physics.
+The true ground of that philosophy is now, as it always has been, the
+apparently meaningless misery that forms part of life. It is not by
+mistaking matter for an ultimate reality or by pondering on the fact
+that laws of nature exist that we can conclude that man is of no cosmic
+significance. That conclusion can be reached logically only on the
+basis of arbitrary assumptions. But the conclusion is not, in fact,
+reached in that way: it is reached through feeling. And it cannot
+be transcended by a logical process, but only in virtue of a mystic
+experience.
+
+The old materialistic outlook, although it no longer has any scientific
+justification, is still active in many branches of science. It has made
+popular certain types of explanation and is the cause of the direction
+pursued by certain researches. In particular it has led to a great
+deal of useless or misleading work being done in the attempt to reduce
+qualitative to quantitative differences.
+
+A good deal of what passes for scientific work amongst eugenists
+and psychologists consists of attempts to match things which are
+qualitatively different. This is the favourite procedure of that kind
+of psycho-analysis which reduces everything to sex. Discrimination
+is fatiguing; also, it makes appeal to sensibilities which many
+earnest “scientific workers” do not possess. It is much easier to make
+measurements than to know exactly what you are measuring.
+
+To give up the ideal of measurability would be equivalent, to many
+people, to abandoning “science” altogether. “Science is measurement”,
+we are informed. This ideal is borrowed from physics, the science
+whose aim it is to give mathematical descriptions of phenomena. But
+we may have branches of knowledge that may fairly be called science
+although they are not mathematical. We may find it necessary to use
+concepts that cannot be mathematically defined. It may not be mere
+lack of knowledge which prevents biology, for instance, from being a
+mathematical science. It may be impossible in the nature of things ever
+to give the equation to a chicken. But the bias towards measurability
+is very strong and has led to measurements being made, particularly in
+psychology, where we really have no clear idea at all as to what is
+being measured. When, for instance, Professor Karl Pearson compares
+fraternal resemblances in such things as stature and arm-length with
+fraternal resemblances in intelligence and conscientiousness, what
+exactly is he doing? A great deal of what is called experimental
+psychology impresses one as being nothing but the application of
+an inappropriate technique by exceptionally innocent and unworldly
+“scientists”. The methods found so successful in physics are applied
+to everything under the sun. It is pretty obvious that this is not due
+to some mystic, Pythagorean conviction that number is the principle of
+all things, but merely to mental inertia. Many “intelligence tests”
+and many of the statistical results obtained by the eugenists impress
+the ordinary person as being laughably superficial. In their eagerness
+to “measure” something our researcher seem to lose their ordinary
+common sense, whereas their subject really requires the subtlety and
+sympathy of a very good novelist. It is amazing the number of dull,
+unimaginative people who find a congenial life work in prosecuting
+researches in pseudo-science. The ordinary public, unfortunately,
+does not discriminate between one kind of science and another, with
+the result that the contempt they rightly feel for some so-called men
+of science is apt to be extended to all scientific men. Thus Mr G.
+K. Chesterton, having heard that some “scientists” explain the shape
+of a church spire as symbolical of phallic worship, begins to doubt
+the whole Royal Society. It must be remembered that in science real
+insight and imagination are as rare as in any other human activity. In
+the clear-cut sciences, such as physics and chemistry, where the right
+way of attacking problems is known and where an elaborate technique
+has been built up, there is plenty of room for valuable routine work.
+All the difficult preliminary work of getting right conceptions and
+principles has been done. The routine worker can measure the electric
+capacities of different condensers because the difficult notion of
+electric capacity has been made clear by his masters. But the routine
+worker in psychology who measures “intelligence” is not doing anything
+definite at all. His subject is not yet ripe for the application of
+such exact methods. In this way the prestige of physics has exerted
+a harmful influence on the study of psychology. It is true that some
+experimental psychologists are becoming aware of the fact that they do
+not always know what they are measuring. There are controversies as to
+what a given set of measurements has measured, and some measurements
+seem to be undertaken on the off-chance that a meaning will some day be
+found for them. It is not suggested that all experimental psychology is
+of this kind, but it is certainly true that many psychological papers,
+complete with correlation coefficients and “curves” of all kinds, wear
+an air of precision to which they have no real claim.
+
+A more definitely materialistic bias is observable in the attempts to
+explain psychological happenings in terms of physiology. The result
+is that learned and acute men, caught in the jungle of neurology,
+painfully fight their way out with some such epoch-making discovery
+as that one learns a subject more rapidly if one is interested in
+it. This result, which is supposed to be incompatible with the
+purely physiological theory of the mind, owes all its difficulty to
+that in compatibility. Otherwise it is a perfectly obvious fact of
+experience. If it were not for the prestige achieved by materialism
+in the Victorian age it is probable that psychology would be very
+much further advanced than it is. But the side-tracking influence of
+that philosophy has meant that psychologists have had painfully to
+discover the obvious. But if materialism, in small doses, delays the
+recognition of the obvious, it does, when fully developed, deny the
+obvious. This is what the behaviourists do. They deny that we think or
+that we can form images in our minds. The only possible answer to this
+theory is a satire, as when Voltaire answered the theory that in this
+world everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds
+by writing _Candide_. But in this queer modern world behaviourism,
+instead of being greeted with laughter, is answered carefully and
+politely, apparently in the spirit in which Monsieur Bergeret shook
+hands with the _vers libriste_ poet, “for fear of wronging beauty in
+disguise”. The position of the ordinary man in face of these theories
+is, nevertheless, a difficult one. Behaviourism may sound to him
+nonsense, but so does non-Euclidean geometry. His natural reaction
+would be to class both of them with the theory that the English
+are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. Nevertheless,
+non-Euclidean geometry is not nonsense. In these circumstances it is
+probably fortunate that there are people patient enough to prepare
+careful and reasoned refutations of any whimsy that anybody cares to
+put forth. The extraordinary predisposition of the learned towards
+concocting merely silly theories must always be borne in mind. Studious
+persons often have a very small range of experience of life; they have
+nothing like so broadly based a sense of probability as the ordinary
+man of the world possesses, which is why so many of them seem curiously
+innocent and gullible. The beaming and genial professor expounding
+his theory often seems curiously like a child playing with toys. The
+mixture of amusement and respect with which the world watches him is,
+on the whole, the correct reaction. As long as he is dealing with
+the incomprehensible one may grant him authority. Nobody dreams of
+questioning astronomical pronouncements about forthcoming eclipses. But
+when he is talking about the very stuff of our ordinary experience,
+as in psychology, we do wrong to accept the obviously absurd for
+fear that it cannot be as silly as it looks. A great deal of what is
+called psycho-analysis, for instance, is merely silly. Only people
+singularly deficient in common-sense and completely lacking in a sense
+of humour could have invented anything so preposterous. Undoubtedly
+some pathological states are of sexual origin, but the lengths to
+which the theory has been carried and the kind of interpretations
+that are given make the development of psycho-analysis one of the
+greatest psychological curiosities of our time. Whole-hearted belief in
+psycho-analysis certainly points to the existence of a complex. As with
+any other complex, it is defended by arguments to which none except
+those who are similarly afflicted can attach the slightest validity.
+The complex is strongly materialistic, not in the sense that everything
+is reduced to “matter and motion”, but in the sense that the lowest
+human activities are made explanatory of all the rest. One often finds,
+associated with a belief in materialism, a desire to deny any form
+of spiritual excellence. The ostensible motive is simplification, as
+when material substances are reduced to a small number of chemical
+elements; but it is usually obvious, from the forced explanations that
+are attempted, that the real motive is something very different. Much,
+of course, must be attributed to insensitiveness, as we see when we
+turn to psycho-analytic explanations of works of art. The extraordinary
+force of the psycho-analysts’ complex is well shown by the sort of
+arguments they find convincing. Thus they may profess to show that
+artistic tastes never exist without suppressed sexual desires. Their
+way of establishing this fact, which is chiefly by asserting it, is
+comparatively rational. But they then proceed to the statement that a
+taste for art is merely a disguised form of sexual desire. They might
+as well say that it is a disguised form of hunger, since artists are
+quite as notorious for being hungry as for being erotic, and artistic
+tastes are never found to exist in a man who takes no nourishment.
+
+Not only much modern psychology, but some other modern sciences such as
+comparative religion, are prone to a certain fallacy that may be called
+the fallacy of “explanation by origins”. This kind of explanation has
+been made popular by the theory of evolution, and the fallacy consists
+in supposing that to give the historical antecedents of a thing is to
+give an analysis of that thing. Thus, some authorities suppose that by
+showing that religion has developed from primitive magic rites, they
+have thereby proved that religion is nothing but a disguised form of
+magic. One might as well say that an oak-tree is a disguised form of an
+acorn, or that a man is a disguised form of an amoeba. But this error
+is too glaring to be committed by more than a small percentage of our
+modern “thinkers”. A much more insidious danger is that this type of
+explanation leads one to under-estimate the complexity of the thing
+to be explained. There is a tendency to neglect those factors in the
+final product which cannot be traced in its historical antecedents.
+This is one form of the widespread error of undue simplification. No
+human mind can deal exhaustively with concrete facts. Every natural
+entity, whether it be a flower or a nation, contains far too many
+factors for thought to grasp it completely. The art of human thinking
+is to make useful abstractions. Any man is a very complicated creature.
+All the artists and scientists of the world could not describe him
+exhaustively. But for the purposes of war every man under a certain
+military rank was regarded as a physical structure supporting weapons
+and a stomach on two legs. This abstraction was useful for the purposes
+for which it was invented. A somewhat different abstraction is required
+when a man is considered as a voter. When a man is considered as
+a “hand” or a “worker” it is found that slightly more complicated
+abstractions are required. In fact, the great fault of economic theory
+has been that its “economic man” was too simple an abstraction. The
+economist left out certain factors in his conception of man, with the
+result that his plans, when applied to real men, do not work. I am
+suggesting that the sciences which ape physics suffer, amongst other
+things, from inadequate abstractions. This is not surprising, for
+there is every reason to suppose that the extraordinary difficulties
+experienced by physics itself, at the present day, are due to the same
+cause. An analysis of this position will show us the direction of the
+probable future development of science and help us to see in what
+consists the importance of the arts.
+
+
+
+
+                                   5
+
+
+Many people, including some scientific men, take science too seriously.
+They think that science gives a far more comprehensive picture of
+reality than it really does. There have been philosophers who have
+gone so far as to suppose that those factors of experience that
+science does not find it necessary to talk about do not really exist.
+This is the basis of the belief that colours, sounds, and scents have
+no “objective” existence; they exist only in the mind, whereas such
+qualities as mass and extension are supposed to exist independently of
+the mind. It is true that science does not find it necessary to refer
+to colours, sounds, and scents in giving its description of nature,
+whereas it does find it necessary to refer to mass and extension. But
+that does not prove that the former qualities are not as real as the
+latter, are not as indubitably part of the universe. The scientific
+concepts have by no means proved themselves adequate to account for
+the whole of experience. Nearly everything of real importance to
+man lies at present outside science. The fact is that science was
+undertaken as an intellectual adventure: it was an attempt to find
+out how far nature could be described in mathematical terms. Certain
+primary conceptions――time, space, mass, force, and so on――all of which
+can be defined mathematically, were adopted, and it became a highly
+absorbing game to find out how much of what goes on around us could be
+described, mathematically, in terms of these conceptions. The success
+of this effort has been so astonishing that some scientific men have
+forgotten to be astonished. They have come to take it for granted that
+a complete mathematical description of the world should be possible.
+This assumption is not a rational one: it is a pure act of faith. The
+great founders of the scheme made no such mistake: they were quite
+aware of the precarious nature of their enterprise. Thus, Newton, the
+greatest and most successful of them all, says that, if they find the
+mathematical method does not work, they must try a different method.
+The mathematical method, which is the very essence of modern science,
+has, however, worked splendidly. From the time of its origination in
+the seventeenth century until the present day it has had no serious
+rival. The ancient æsthetic principle, which led to the conclusion that
+the planets moved in circles because the circle is the only perfect
+figure, is still used by theosophists, but not by men of science.
+Similarly the old moralistic principle, which explained the fact
+of water rising in a pump by saying that nature abhorred a vacuum,
+possibly lingers on only in such superstitions as that sunlight puts
+the fire out. In more modern times the only notorious rival of the
+Newtonian method was the dialectic method of Hegel, who evolved the
+laws of the universe from his inner consciousness. But the best-known
+result of this method, that there could not be more planets than were
+known to exist, happened to be published on the very day that a new
+planet was discovered. The mathematical method, then, is at the present
+day without a rival. But, although we cannot at present imagine what
+could replace the mathematical method, we must be careful not to
+exaggerate the significance of the results that have been achieved by
+it. For these results depend not only on the method, but also on the
+material the method has to work with. And there is good reason to
+suppose, in the present state of physics, that the material with which
+science has worked hitherto is turning out to be not quite satisfactory.
+
+This material is chiefly the Newtonian set of abstractions. Newton
+postulated, as the fundamental constituents out of which the perceived
+universe is built up, Space, Time, and Matter. Space and time he
+regarded as absolute and as quite independent of matter. Matter was an
+enduring substance that simply inhabited space and time. The analysis
+of these conceptions has resulted in the Einstein theory, in which
+neither space, time, nor matter are fundamental. The interesting
+thing about this analysis, from our present point of view, is that it
+shows clearly what arbitrary elements are present in the scientific
+description of the universe. For we must remember that moral and
+æsthetic elements were ruled out of the real universe simply because
+science did not find it necessary to mention them. The foundation
+stones of the scientific edifice, namely space, time, and matter,
+were supposed to be the only realities. Everything else was a sort
+of illusion. Men who must have been theory-mad soberly maintained
+that little particles of matter wandering about purposelessly in
+space and time produced our minds, our hopes, and fears, the scent of
+the rose, the colours of the sunset, the songs of the birds, and our
+knowledge of the little particles themselves. The sole realities were
+the little wandering particles and the space and time they wandered
+in. The existence of everything else depended on the mind, and was
+inconceivable without the mind. It is interesting, therefore, that
+science has now reached a position where space, time, and matter also
+depend on the mind. In giving a scientific description of the universe
+Einstein does not find it necessary to begin with space, time, and
+matter. These entities become “derivative”. The universe becomes more
+spectral than ever if we are going to adopt the materialist principle
+that what depends on the mind does not really exist. Even the universe
+of wandering particles is comparatively cosy compared with this modern
+universe of undefinable “point-events”. But if we do not adopt the
+materialist principle we may assert that moral and æsthetic values
+are as much a part of the real universe as anything else, and that
+the reason why science does not find it necessary to mention them is
+not because they are not there but because science is a game played
+according to certain rules, and those rules have excluded these values
+from the outset. The life-insurance actuary may, for his purposes,
+neglect many things about men, and yet calculate, quite correctly,
+what percentage of them will die at forty. But he has not proved that
+the qualities he has neglected do not exist simply because they do not
+come in to upset his calculations. A politician finds that he has to
+base his calculations on quite different aspects of mankind from those
+found satisfactory by the actuary. In the same way, a mountain is a
+different thing to a poet from what it is to a man of science. For the
+kind of understanding of the universe that the man of science is after,
+the mountain is merely a heap of certain kinds of matter weighing so
+many millions of tons. The poet, who is after a different kind of
+vision, finds it necessary to take into account quite other factors
+which enter into his total experience of the mountain. The scientist
+may also experience emotions of awe and reverence in the presence of
+the mountain, but for the purposes of his science these factors of his
+experience may be neglected. He _abstracts_ from the total concrete
+fact of his experience of the mountain. The mountain, as he describes
+it in the scientific paper he proceeds to write, is a mere pale
+shadow of the real mountain; he probably leaves it indistinguishable
+from any other mountain that happens to weigh the same, just as to
+the life-insurance actuary all men of forty are exactly alike. If we
+believe that the factors in experience that the scientific man neglects
+are quite as real as those he takes into account, it becomes a matter
+for wonder that science is possible. How is it that science forms a
+closed system――that nothing from the worlds it neglects ever comes in
+to disturb it?
+
+It is one of the great services of relativity theory to philosophy that
+it provides an answer to this question. The answer is that the entities
+discussed by physics are defined in terms of one another. The three
+hundred years of building up exact science really amounts, in the last
+analysis, to doing what the dictionary compiler did when he defined a
+violin as a small violoncello and a violoncello as a large violin. Of
+course, if this statement were literally true, science would give us
+no information about the universe at all. Nevertheless, the statement
+is true about the actual procedure of science, and it is in virtue of
+this procedure that science forms a closed system. But what is left out
+of this description is the scientist himself. The mysterious process
+which is not taken into account in this description of the scientific
+method is the process by which the consciousness of the scientist makes
+contact with the entities he is talking about. In deducting the world
+from “point-events”, for instance, we begin by talking about something
+we have no direct cognisance of, namely point-events. From point-events
+we deduce “potentials”――again a mere word. But from potentials we
+deduce “matter”, and here we are talking of something of which we
+have direct knowledge. Similarly, the circular definition of violin
+and violoncello tells us nothing as it stands. But to a man who can
+identify one of these entities, to a man who has ever seen a violin, it
+gives genuine information.
+
+We need not be surprised, therefore, that nothing from the outside
+ever seems to disturb the equanimity that reigns within the closed
+system of physics. The abstractions with which it begins are all it
+ever has to deal with. There are no subsequent fresh contacts with
+reality. If the region covered by relativity theory embraced the whole
+of physics it would seem that, so far as physical science is concerned,
+we knew all that there is to be known. But it is notorious that, of
+recent years, an entirely new set of phenomena has been discovered in
+physical science. These phenomena arise when we consider, not matter
+in bulk but matter in its smallest particles. These phenomena are,
+at present, strictly incomprehensible. The celebrated quantum theory
+provides us with rules for dealing with some of them, but does not
+make them intelligible. It seems that science has here reached its
+limits. Professor Eddington has even hinted that these phenomena may
+indicate that the universe is finally irrational, that is, that the
+attempt to describe nature mathematically will have to be given up.
+This is a possibility that Newton foresaw. But it seems more likely
+that our present state of bewilderment has a different cause. That
+cause, we shall probably find, is the insufficiency of the abstractions
+hitherto used in science. We have to go back to the concrete facts of
+experience and build up a richer, fuller set of abstractions. Physics
+is now paying the penalty of inadequate abstraction. In particular, it
+must revise its notions of space, time, and substance. This revision
+is quite independent of the Einstein theory, and is made necessary,
+not by that theory but by the quantum theory. A first attempt at
+this revision has been made by that great mathematical philosopher,
+Professor Whitehead.[5] We need not deal with his investigation, which
+is at present in a highly technical state. The space and time of the
+new theory are interconnected and do not consist of independent volumes
+and instants. Every volume of space has reference to the whole of
+space, and every moment of time refers both to the past and the future.
+Hence both memory and expectation are given a rational basis. On the
+old view, as Hume pointed out, there is no reason whatever to suppose
+that the order of nature should continue. Why do we expect that the
+force of gravity will be in existence to-morrow? There was no _reason_
+at all for this expectation or for any other. That is to say, the whole
+of science itself was based on blind faith. The new foundations of
+science make science itself a rational activity. As for the notion of
+“substance”, Professor Whitehead proposes to replace it by the notion
+of “organism”. We may imagine an electron, for instance, as a repeated
+pattern of events. One of the great difficulties of the quantum
+phenomena is that an electron seems to pass from one place to another
+without passing through the intervening space. On the basis of the new
+abstractions this difficulty can be overcome. We have to imagine an
+electron as requiring a certain time to manifest itself――just as a tune
+does.
+
+  [5] _Science and the Modern World._
+
+From our present point of view, however, the chief interest attaching
+to these new foundations for science is the place occupied in them
+by the intuitions of the poets. Mr Richards, literary critic, tells
+us that the poets must learn from science; Professor Whitehead,
+mathematician and physicist, tells us that science must learn from the
+poets. Instead of the poet having to realize that his intuitions are
+illusory and belong to a childish, _démodé_ view of the world, it is
+the scientific man who must realize that his abstractions are too thin
+and narrow to be any longer useful, and that the poet makes closer
+contact with reality. When Wordsworth says:
+
+    “Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
+     And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
+     And Souls of lonely places! can I think
+     A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
+     Such ministry, when ye through many a year
+     Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
+     On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
+     Impressed upon all forms the characters
+     Of danger or desire; and thus did make
+     The surface of the universal earth
+     With triumph and delight, with hope and fear
+     Work like a sea?...”
+
+he is not, according to Professor Whitehead, expressing fantasies that
+the strong-minded realist can afford to neglect: he is describing
+the actual concrete facts of experience, facts which, says Professor
+Whitehead, “are distorted in the scientific analysis”. It is the artist
+not the scientist who deals most adequately with reality. It is the man
+of science, taking his pale abstractions for the only realities, who
+dwells in dream-land.
+
+So far as we can see at present, however, science cannot abandon its
+method. It cannot deal with the whole concrete fact: it must continue
+to make abstractions. But the present _impasse_ in scientific theory
+is an indication that it must go back to the beginning and include more
+factors of the concrete fact in its abstractions. It seems likely that,
+in doing so, it will have to presuppose a philosophy very different
+from the materialism hitherto current amongst scientific men. The world
+will have to be regarded as an evolutionary process, where “patterns
+of value” emerge. It will have to be regarded as an interconnected
+whole, and the separation of mind from matter, and mind from mind, will
+have to be replaced by a conception which regards these distinctions,
+in their present form, as unreal. One very desirable result of this
+transformation will be that the arts will be taken seriously. The
+old outlook did not regard values as inherent in reality. They were
+merely expressive of the accidental human constitution, but had no
+cosmic significance. Art existed to provide a unique thrill, called
+the “æsthetic emotion”. On the new outlook the function of the arts
+is to communicate knowledge and, moreover, the most valuable kind of
+knowledge. Art, much more than science, expresses the concrete facts
+of experience in their actuality. Music, in particular, finds its
+highest function in revealing to us the possibilities of the spirit
+of man himself. The music of such a man as Beethoven is a revelation
+of existence from the vantage point of a higher consciousness. It is,
+we may hope, prophetic of the future development of the race. Not
+only art, but morals, acquire vastly greater importance on the new
+outlook. Morals are no longer a purely private concern, expressive of a
+particular human constitution in an alien, strictly non-moral universe.
+Men are no longer justified in believing that their only duty is to
+preserve their self-respect and to make the most of their opportunities.
+
+Science, in view of our increased knowledge of its aims and powers,
+can no longer be presented to us as a tyrant. Science assumes certain
+fundamental principles and entities, and there is an arbitrary element
+in these assumptions. What science does not assume does not thereby not
+exist. It gives, and it appears that it must forever give, a _partial_
+description of the universe. The fact that the elements of reality it
+leaves out do not come in to disturb it is no presumption against the
+existence of these elements. For science forms a closed system simply
+because it employs the device of cyclic definition. The teachings of
+science, so far as the spiritual problems of men are concerned, need no
+longer be regarded as stultifying: they are merely irrelevant.
+
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ Transcriber’s Notes:
+
+ ――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
+
+ ――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
+
+ ――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76629 ***
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+    text-indent: -3em;
+}
+
+/* Poetry indents */
+.poetry .indent0 {padding-left: 3em;}
+.poetry .indent1 {padding-left: 3.5em;}
+
+/* Transcriber's notes */
+.tnote {
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+    margin-right: 10%;
+    padding: 0.5em;
+}
+
+.tntitle {
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+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+/* Title page borders and content. */
+.title {
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+    font-weight: bold;
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+.subtitle {
+    font-size: 1.5em;
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+.halftitle {
+    font-size: 1.25em;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+.author {
+    font-size: 1.25em;
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+    </style>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76629 ***</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter x-ebookmaker-drop" id="cover_sm">
+  <img class="x-ebookmaker-drop" src="images/cover_sm.jpg" alt="book cover" title="book cover">
+</figure>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="right halftitle">
+  <span class style="margin-right: 2em;">GALLIO</span><br>
+  <span style="margin-right: 3em;">OR</span><br>
+  THE TYRANNY<br>
+  <span style="margin-right: 3em;">OF</span><br>
+  <span style="margin-right: 1.5em;">SCIENCE</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1>GALLIO</h1>
+
+<p class="noic">OR</p>
+
+<p class="noi subtitle">The Tyranny of Science</p>
+
+<p class="p2 noic">BY</p>
+
+<p class="noi author">J. W. N. SULLIVAN</p>
+
+<div class="pad2">
+<figure class="figcenter" id="logo">
+  <img class="illowe4" src="images/logo.jpg" alt="logo" title="logo">
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noic">E. P. DUTTON &amp; CO. &#160;&#160; :: &#160;&#160; NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="noic">GALLIO, OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE<br>
+COPYRIGHT 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON &amp; COMPANY<br>
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="SECTIONS">LIST OF SECTIONS</h2>
+
+
+<p class="noic"><a href="#1">1</a><br>
+<a href="#2">2</a><br>
+<a href="#3">3</a><br>
+<a href="#4">4</a><br>
+<a href="#5">5</a><br></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span></p>
+
+<p class="noic halftitle">GALLIO</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span></p>
+
+<p class="noi title">GALLIO</p>
+<p class="noic">OR</p>
+<p class="noi subtitle">THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE</p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="1">1</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">There can be no doubt that the prestige
+of science has greatly increased of recent
+times. In the days when Dickens wrote <cite>The
+Mudfog Papers</cite> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_1_1" href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> although he may have been more
+inclined to believe their philosophy that existence
+is meaningless. No, the change was,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>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 <em>imaginative</em>
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>popular reaction to Einstein’s theory is perfectly
+justified. It <em>is</em> the most profound and
+original scientific theory that has ever been
+invented, and it displays a kind of imagination
+almost&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_2_2" href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> unprecedented in the history of
+science. The feeling of the artist about it
+is right—it is vastly important to him.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p class="noi"><a id="Footnote_1_1" href="#FNanchor_1_1" class="label">[1]</a> He ought to have been. See <cite>Callinicus</cite>, by J. B. S. Haldane.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p class="noi"><a id="Footnote_2_2" href="#FNanchor_2_2" class="label">[2]</a> I say “almost” because there was Bernhard Riemann and his
+disciple W. K. Clifford.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="2">2</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>impressionable and <em>adopt</em> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The point of view has been well put recently
+by Mr I. A. Richards,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_3_3" href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> a literary
+critic who thinks it possible that poetry may
+be destroyed by science. He speaks of the
+“neutralization of nature” which has been
+effected by science, and contrasts this with
+the “magical view” of the world that has
+hitherto been accepted by artists. What he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>means by this is that science reveals to us a
+universe quite indifferent to all human aspirations,
+whereas artists have hitherto assumed
+that man is of cosmic significance. The poet
+must learn to accept the scientific universe
+and give up believing in things like “inspiration”,
+“a reality deeper than the reality of
+science”, and so on. “Experience”, says Mr
+Richards, “is its own justification”, by which
+he appears to mean that experience just happens
+to be what it is by some kind of accident.
+It points to nothing beyond itself.
+The ground for this belief is not, in Mr
+Richards’ case, old-fashioned materialism.
+“It is not what the universe is made of but
+how it works, the law it follows, which
+makes knowledge of it incapable of spurring
+on our emotional responses.” This reminds
+one of the “iron laws” of the Victorian age,
+which many people found so depressing, although
+the logical connection between existence
+having conditions and existence being
+purposeless is a little hard to follow. But
+although the particular iron laws of the Victorians
+have gone, Mr Richards finds the
+theory of relativity no more cheering. “A
+god voluntarily or involuntarily subject to
+Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity does
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>not make an emotional appeal and physics
+does not find it necessary to mention him.”
+Apparently it is the existence of any law at
+all that is resented: the poet can feel happy
+only in a world of pure miracle. I strongly
+doubt the correctness of Mr Richards’ diagnosis.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_4_4" href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+I am certain that not all poets
+have been as childish as that. No—the essential
+element in this general outlook is not that
+phenomena occur in an orderly way, but that
+man’s existence is not regarded as forming
+part of some universal purpose. The essential
+element is the same as in old-fashioned
+materialism, the “accidental collocations of
+atoms” theory. The emphasis was on the
+“accidental” not on the “atoms”. This becomes
+clear when Mr Richards describes the
+appropriate emotional reaction to his view.
+“A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of
+futility, of the baselessness of aspirations, of
+the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a
+life-giving water which seems suddenly to
+have failed, are the signs in consciousness of
+this necessary reorganization of our lives.”
+It is difficult to believe that this state of mind
+can be produced by the recognition of such
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>facts as that unsupported stones always fall
+to the ground. But if Mr Richards is right,
+I suggest that the poets who are so depressed
+by law and order should study, besides the
+theory of relativity, Quantum Theory. They
+will find there much that is, at present, agreeably
+miraculous. But one need not fly to
+miracles to get rid of the bug-bear of “unalterable
+law”. It is only necessary to understand
+the true status of the unalterable laws,
+and this is just what relativity theory enables
+us to do.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p class="noi"><a id="Footnote_3_3" href="#FNanchor_3_3" class="label">[3]</a> <cite>Science and Poetry</cite>, 1926.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p class="noi"><a id="Footnote_4_4" href="#FNanchor_4_4" class="label">[4]</a> But possibly Mr Richards means that the scientific description
+does not include values. See <a href="#5">Section 5</a> of this essay.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="3">3</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">The idea that there is a conflict between
+science and art, which is at bottom the
+idea that there is a conflict between science
+and mysticism, rests, I have suggested, upon
+an old-fashioned conception of the status of
+physics. The first duty of a man who bases
+his conclusions on science is to make sure
+that his science is up-to-date. The science
+that leads to the depressing conclusions
+I have just sketched is not up-to-date. Until
+a few years ago the physicist thought
+that the material universe he dealt with was
+a real, objectively existing universe in the
+sense that, in the absence of consciousness,
+it would be very much the same as it appeared
+to be. This universe was subject to laws,
+and these laws might conceivably have been
+different. There was no <i lang="fr">a priori</i>
+ reason, for
+instance, why the force of gravitation should
+not vary as the inverse cube of the distance.
+There was no <i lang="fr">a priori</i>
+ reason why matter and
+energy should be conserved. These were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>laws of governance of the material universe;
+their discovery had required much effort and
+the rejection of alternatives. Man was in
+no sense responsible for them: he happened
+to live in a universe governed by them. These
+were the iron laws of the Victorians and are
+the laws, apparently, that depress modern
+poets. One of the great discoveries of relativity
+theory is that these laws need be no
+more depressing than the laws of Euclidean
+geometry. No artist has felt his aspirations
+baseless because he cannot draw a circle
+whose circumference is six times its radius.
+He has no more right to despair because
+there is an inexorable law of gravitation.
+This has been made clear by Professor Eddington,
+whose mathematical development of
+relativity theory is of great philosophical importance,
+and would, in a more adequately
+educated community, be given more newspaper
+headlines than Tutankhamen. The
+real universe, according to relativity theory,
+is a four-dimensional world of point-events.
+Of the nature of point-events we know nothing.
+All that we require to know, for the
+purposes of physics, is that it takes four
+numbers to specify a point-event uniquely,
+and that some kind of structure—a minimum
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>amount of structure—may be postulated of
+the world of point-events. We then find,
+purely by mathematical processes, that certain
+characteristics of this world will have
+the quality of permanence. The mind,
+faced with this world of evanescent point-events,
+selects those characteristics that are
+permanent as being of special interest. This
+is merely because the mind happens to be
+that kind of thing. As a consequence of this
+predilection of the mind there arises space
+and time, matter, and the laws of nature.
+There arises, in fact, the “objective universe”.
+The real world of point-events has
+many other characteristics to which the mind
+pays no attention. A different principle of
+selection, exercised on the same total world
+of point-events, would result in an utterly
+different universe, a universe that is, for us,
+quite unimaginable. And the universe that
+the mind has selected and constructed from
+the world of point-events does not in the least
+depend on what the point-events <em>are</em>. All
+that is necessary is that a certain minimum
+amount of structure should be attributed to
+the world of point-events. It is from the
+relations between the point-events, quite independent
+of their substance, that the mind
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>has created the material universe and its
+laws. These laws, it must be emphasized,
+are <em>necessary</em> consequences of the mind’s
+selective action. They are necessary in the
+same sense that the sum of the three interior
+angles of a Euclidean triangle must be two
+right angles. Of the underlying reality deduced
+by physics we can say almost nothing.
+It may be what Newton called the “sensorium”
+of God, and the point-events may be
+his thoughts. They do not succeed one another
+in time for, at this stage of analysis,
+space and time are “merged in one”. This
+perfectly gratuitous hypothesis may appeal
+to some mystics, for our thoughts, considered
+as belonging to the world of point-events,
+would be part of the thoughts of God. It
+would be indeed true that in him we lived and
+moved and had our being. We see, then,
+the limitations of physics. All that depends
+on the <em>structure</em> of reality belongs to physics,
+including other universes than ours. All
+that depends upon the <em>substance</em> of reality
+for ever lies outside physics. As to the
+actual universe we live in, why we should
+regard it as actual is a problem for psychology.
+The difference between the actual and
+the non-actual is a distinction conferred by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>our minds. It is very probable that the
+whole movement of the universe in time is
+also contributed by our minds. It seems to
+be true that events do not take place—we
+come across them. Why we do not know the
+future is again a question of psychology.
+Ignorance of the future, like the existence of
+the material universe, is a clue to the constitution
+of our minds. This has a bearing on
+the question of “purpose” in the universe.
+The conception of purpose seems to suppose
+a process in time, and therefore may be a
+totally irrelevant idea when applied to
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>The philosophical implications of relativity
+theory will doubtless take a long time to
+work out. The four-dimensional universe
+of point-events is something that can be
+argued about but it is, to use an old-fashioned
+phrase, “inconceivable”. Mankind, excepting
+professional logicians, never remains
+content with the inconceivable. A purely
+logical conclusion is not enough; it has to be
+grasped imaginatively, by which I do not
+necessarily mean that it has to be pictured.
+To become familiar with a theory does not
+merely mean that one is able, as a form of
+mental wire-walking, to slip nimbly back and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>forth over the logical connections of the
+structure. It means taking it into oneself in
+some indefinable manner—becoming “intimate”
+with it. Only when a theory is “realized”,
+as we say, do we feel that we truly
+understand it. Ideas, points of view, that we
+were able to see only in flashes, become part
+of our normal intellectual equipment. The
+process may well be called a growth of consciousness.
+There are ideas which our consciousness,
+when it first approaches them is,
+as it were, too flabby to grasp. We first have
+to exercise our mental muscles. Every student
+of a line of thought such as mathematics,
+which is rather outside our normal
+preoccupations, becomes aware of an actual
+change in his mental powers. Notions so
+abstract that at first they seemed almost
+meaningless gradually become perfectly clear
+and permanent additions to one’s mental resources.
+Students of musical composition
+find that their capacity for mentally hearing
+a number of parts rapidly increases. In some
+cases it is almost as if a new faculty of the
+mind were born and developed.</p>
+
+<p>The physics of recent years has made
+heavy demands upon our capacity for realization.
+The electron theory, with its analysis
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>of matter into “disembodied charges of electricity”
+required, for its understanding, the
+breaking up of old habits of thought. To
+young students the idea was, at first, extremely
+baffling—almost nonsense. To realize
+it one had to make more abstract one’s
+idea of matter until the notion of “substance”
+was replaced by the notion of “behaviour”.
+Anything that behaved in the way characteristic
+of matter was matter. The central idea
+of the restricted principle of relativity, the
+idea of different time-systems, was still more
+difficult to grasp. In this case we had to
+become convinced that our ordinary idea of
+simultaneity, an idea which seemed perfectly
+clear, was really a bogus idea. The attacks
+on the theory of relativity show, for the most
+part, merely that their authors are unable to
+abandon old habits of thought. With the
+complete theory of relativity, as we have it
+now, the task of adjustment has become enormous.
+There cannot be, even now, more than
+very few scientific men who naturally approach
+a problem from the point of view of
+relativity theory. In most cases a conscious
+effort of mental preparation is required, such
+as occurs when a novelist, sitting down to
+continue his work, deliberately thinks himself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>into the appropriate frame of mind. Yet
+doubtless the next generation or so will think
+in terms of relativity theory as naturally as
+we thought in terms of the Newtonian system.
+I would not hold it as impossible that
+the human mind may come to realize, imaginatively
+as well as logically, the four-dimensional
+space-time continuum. But it seems
+that the mind of the physicist, at any rate,
+will have to do more than become familiar
+with relativity theory. It will have to accommodate
+itself somehow to the quantum
+theory for, although we can write down the
+laws which govern sub-atomic phenomena
+and make deductions from them, these laws
+are, at present, unintelligible. An electron
+behaves as if it had foreknowledge of what
+it was about to do and could make the mathematical
+calculations necessary to achieve its
+end. We cannot admit this to be possible,
+and we can only suppose that the difficulty
+arises from the way we think about things.
+We must learn to think in a different way,
+and what the consequences of that new way
+of thinking will be no one can say. We
+know very little of the possibilities of the
+development of the human consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The proper attitude to-day in which the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>problem of man’s place in nature should be
+approached is one of bewilderment and humility.
+Both the material universe and the
+mind of man are very mysterious things. At
+the present time it is only an inadequate mind
+which is confident that it knows what is impossible.
+There was never a time when
+hearty dogmatism and loud confidence were
+more out of place. We must think as best
+we can, of course. The next step upward
+in the development of the human consciousness
+will not be achieved by either slovenly
+credulity or slovenly scepticism, but only by
+a terrifying mental travail. I see a human
+mind as some multiple plant, here in full
+flower, there still in the bud. Different
+minds have flowered in different ways. Beethoven’s
+<cite lang="de">Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen
+an die Gottheit</cite> points to the complete
+development in him of something which those
+of us who understand him have only in embryo.
+In those who do not understand him
+it is non-existent. And the great mystics
+ought at least to make us doubt whether it
+is we who are not deficient rather than they
+who are mad. It is rash to dismiss our exceptional
+moods, our strange flashes of what
+seems like insight, as mere whimsies without
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>significance. They may be faint stirrings of
+the next thing that is destined to become fully
+alive. All that we can say is that the mind
+lives in a universe largely of its own creation,
+and that the universe, together with the
+mind, will change in ways we cannot foresee.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="4">4</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">We have seen that the philosophy that
+regards man as a meaningless accident
+in an alien universe receives no support from
+modern physics. The true ground of that
+philosophy is now, as it always has been, the
+apparently meaningless misery that forms
+part of life. It is not by mistaking matter
+for an ultimate reality or by pondering on
+the fact that laws of nature exist that we can
+conclude that man is of no cosmic significance.
+That conclusion can be reached logically
+only on the basis of arbitrary assumptions.
+But the conclusion is not, in fact,
+reached in that way: it is reached through
+feeling. And it cannot be transcended by a
+logical process, but only in virtue of a mystic
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>The old materialistic outlook, although it
+no longer has any scientific justification, is still
+active in many branches of science. It has
+made popular certain types of explanation
+and is the cause of the direction pursued by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>certain researches. In particular it has led
+to a great deal of useless or misleading work
+being done in the attempt to reduce qualitative
+to quantitative differences.</p>
+
+<p>A good deal of what passes for scientific
+work amongst eugenists and psychologists
+consists of attempts to match things which
+are qualitatively different. This is the favourite
+procedure of that kind of psycho-analysis
+which reduces everything to sex.
+Discrimination is fatiguing; also, it makes
+appeal to sensibilities which many earnest
+“scientific workers” do not possess. It is
+much easier to make measurements than to
+know exactly what you are measuring.</p>
+
+<p>To give up the ideal of measurability
+would be equivalent, to many people, to
+abandoning “science” altogether. “Science
+is measurement”, we are informed. This
+ideal is borrowed from physics, the science
+whose aim it is to give mathematical descriptions
+of phenomena. But we may have
+branches of knowledge that may fairly be
+called science although they are not mathematical.
+We may find it necessary to use
+concepts that cannot be mathematically defined.
+It may not be mere lack of knowledge
+which prevents biology, for instance, from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>being a mathematical science. It may be impossible
+in the nature of things ever to give
+the equation to a chicken. But the bias towards
+measurability is very strong and has
+led to measurements being made, particularly
+in psychology, where we really have no clear
+idea at all as to what is being measured.
+When, for instance, Professor Karl Pearson
+compares fraternal resemblances in such
+things as stature and arm-length with fraternal
+resemblances in intelligence and conscientiousness,
+what exactly is he doing? A
+great deal of what is called experimental psychology
+impresses one as being nothing but
+the application of an inappropriate technique
+by exceptionally innocent and unworldly
+“scientists”. The methods found so successful
+in physics are applied to everything under
+the sun. It is pretty obvious that this is not
+due to some mystic, Pythagorean conviction
+that number is the principle of all things, but
+merely to mental inertia. Many “intelligence
+tests” and many of the statistical results obtained
+by the eugenists impress the ordinary
+person as being laughably superficial. In
+their eagerness to “measure” something our
+researcher seem to lose their ordinary common
+sense, whereas their subject really requires
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>the subtlety and sympathy of a very
+good novelist. It is amazing the number of
+dull, unimaginative people who find a congenial
+life work in prosecuting researches in
+pseudo-science. The ordinary public, unfortunately,
+does not discriminate between one
+kind of science and another, with the result
+that the contempt they rightly feel for some
+so-called men of science is apt to be extended
+to all scientific men. Thus Mr G. K. Chesterton,
+having heard that some “scientists”
+explain the shape of a church spire as symbolical
+of phallic worship, begins to doubt
+the whole Royal Society. It must be remembered
+that in science real insight and imagination
+are as rare as in any other human activity.
+In the clear-cut sciences, such as physics
+and chemistry, where the right way of attacking
+problems is known and where an elaborate
+technique has been built up, there is
+plenty of room for valuable routine work.
+All the difficult preliminary work of getting
+right conceptions and principles has been
+done. The routine worker can measure the
+electric capacities of different condensers because
+the difficult notion of electric capacity
+has been made clear by his masters. But the
+routine worker in psychology who measures
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>“intelligence” is not doing anything definite
+at all. His subject is not yet ripe for the application
+of such exact methods. In this way
+the prestige of physics has exerted a harmful
+influence on the study of psychology. It
+is true that some experimental psychologists
+are becoming aware of the fact that they do
+not always know what they are measuring.
+There are controversies as to what a given
+set of measurements has measured, and some
+measurements seem to be undertaken on the
+off-chance that a meaning will some day be
+found for them. It is not suggested that all
+experimental psychology is of this kind, but
+it is certainly true that many psychological
+papers, complete with correlation coefficients
+and “curves” of all kinds, wear an air of precision
+to which they have no real claim.</p>
+
+<p>A more definitely materialistic bias is observable
+in the attempts to explain psychological
+happenings in terms of physiology.
+The result is that learned and acute men,
+caught in the jungle of neurology, painfully
+fight their way out with some such epoch-making
+discovery as that one learns a subject
+more rapidly if one is interested in it. This
+result, which is supposed to be incompatible
+with the purely physiological theory of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>mind, owes all its difficulty to that in compatibility.
+Otherwise it is a perfectly obvious
+fact of experience. If it were not for
+the prestige achieved by materialism in the
+Victorian age it is probable that psychology
+would be very much further advanced than
+it is. But the side-tracking influence of that
+philosophy has meant that psychologists have
+had painfully to discover the obvious. But
+if materialism, in small doses, delays the
+recognition of the obvious, it does, when fully
+developed, deny the obvious. This is what
+the behaviourists do. They deny that we
+think or that we can form images in our
+minds. The only possible answer to this theory
+is a satire, as when Voltaire answered
+the theory that in this world everything is
+for the best in the best of all possible worlds
+by writing <cite>Candide</cite>. But in this queer modern
+world behaviourism, instead of being
+greeted with laughter, is answered carefully
+and politely, apparently in the spirit in which
+Monsieur Bergeret shook hands with the
+<i lang="fr">vers libriste</i> poet, “for fear of wronging
+beauty in disguise”. The position of the
+ordinary man in face of these theories is,
+nevertheless, a difficult one. Behaviourism
+may sound to him nonsense, but so does non-Euclidean
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>geometry. His natural reaction
+would be to class both of them with the theory
+that the English are descended from the
+lost ten tribes of Israel. Nevertheless, non-Euclidean
+geometry is not nonsense. In these
+circumstances it is probably fortunate that
+there are people patient enough to prepare
+careful and reasoned refutations of any
+whimsy that anybody cares to put forth. The
+extraordinary predisposition of the learned
+towards concocting merely silly theories must
+always be borne in mind. Studious persons
+often have a very small range of experience
+of life; they have nothing like so broadly
+based a sense of probability as the ordinary
+man of the world possesses, which is why so
+many of them seem curiously innocent and
+gullible. The beaming and genial professor
+expounding his theory often seems curiously
+like a child playing with toys. The mixture
+of amusement and respect with which the
+world watches him is, on the whole, the correct
+reaction. As long as he is dealing with
+the incomprehensible one may grant him authority.
+Nobody dreams of questioning astronomical
+pronouncements about forthcoming
+eclipses. But when he is talking about the
+very stuff of our ordinary experience, as in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>psychology, we do wrong to accept the obviously
+absurd for fear that it cannot be as
+silly as it looks. A great deal of what is
+called psycho-analysis, for instance, is merely
+silly. Only people singularly deficient in
+common-sense and completely lacking in a
+sense of humour could have invented anything
+so preposterous. Undoubtedly some
+pathological states are of sexual origin, but
+the lengths to which the theory has been carried
+and the kind of interpretations that are
+given make the development of psycho-analysis
+one of the greatest psychological curiosities
+of our time. Whole-hearted belief in
+psycho-analysis certainly points to the existence
+of a complex. As with any other complex,
+it is defended by arguments to which
+none except those who are similarly afflicted
+can attach the slightest validity. The complex
+is strongly materialistic, not in the sense
+that everything is reduced to “matter and
+motion”, but in the sense that the lowest
+human activities are made explanatory of all
+the rest. One often finds, associated with a
+belief in materialism, a desire to deny any
+form of spiritual excellence. The ostensible
+motive is simplification, as when material
+substances are reduced to a small number of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>chemical elements; but it is usually obvious,
+from the forced explanations that are attempted,
+that the real motive is something
+very different. Much, of course, must be attributed
+to insensitiveness, as we see when
+we turn to psycho-analytic explanations of
+works of art. The extraordinary force of
+the psycho-analysts’ complex is well shown
+by the sort of arguments they find convincing.
+Thus they may profess to show that artistic
+tastes never exist without suppressed sexual
+desires. Their way of establishing this fact,
+which is chiefly by asserting it, is comparatively
+rational. But they then proceed to the
+statement that a taste for art is merely a disguised
+form of sexual desire. They might
+as well say that it is a disguised form of
+hunger, since artists are quite as notorious
+for being hungry as for being erotic, and
+artistic tastes are never found to exist in a
+man who takes no nourishment.</p>
+
+<p>Not only much modern psychology, but
+some other modern sciences such as comparative
+religion, are prone to a certain fallacy
+that may be called the fallacy of “explanation
+by origins”. This kind of explanation
+has been made popular by the theory of evolution,
+and the fallacy consists in supposing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>that to give the historical antecedents of a
+thing is to give an analysis of that thing.
+Thus, some authorities suppose that by showing
+that religion has developed from primitive
+magic rites, they have thereby proved
+that religion is nothing but a disguised form
+of magic. One might as well say that an oak-tree
+is a disguised form of an acorn, or that
+a man is a disguised form of an amoeba.
+But this error is too glaring to be committed
+by more than a small percentage of our modern
+“thinkers”. A much more insidious danger
+is that this type of explanation leads one
+to under-estimate the complexity of the thing
+to be explained. There is a tendency to neglect
+those factors in the final product which
+cannot be traced in its historical antecedents.
+This is one form of the widespread error of
+undue simplification. No human mind can
+deal exhaustively with concrete facts. Every
+natural entity, whether it be a flower or a
+nation, contains far too many factors for
+thought to grasp it completely. The art of
+human thinking is to make useful abstractions.
+Any man is a very complicated creature.
+All the artists and scientists of the
+world could not describe him exhaustively.
+But for the purposes of war every man under
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>a certain military rank was regarded as a
+physical structure supporting weapons and a
+stomach on two legs. This abstraction was
+useful for the purposes for which it was invented.
+A somewhat different abstraction is
+required when a man is considered as a voter.
+When a man is considered as a “hand” or a
+“worker” it is found that slightly more complicated
+abstractions are required. In fact,
+the great fault of economic theory has been
+that its “economic man” was too simple an
+abstraction. The economist left out certain
+factors in his conception of man, with the
+result that his plans, when applied to real
+men, do not work. I am suggesting that the
+sciences which ape physics suffer, amongst
+other things, from inadequate abstractions.
+This is not surprising, for there is every reason
+to suppose that the extraordinary difficulties
+experienced by physics itself, at the
+present day, are due to the same cause. An
+analysis of this position will show us the direction
+of the probable future development
+of science and help us to see in what consists
+the importance of the arts.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="5">5</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="cap">Many people, including some scientific
+men, take science too seriously. They
+think that science gives a far more comprehensive
+picture of reality than it really does.
+There have been philosophers who have gone
+so far as to suppose that those factors of
+experience that science does not find it necessary
+to talk about do not really exist. This
+is the basis of the belief that colours, sounds,
+and scents have no “objective” existence;
+they exist only in the mind, whereas such
+qualities as mass and extension are supposed
+to exist independently of the mind. It is true
+that science does not find it necessary to refer
+to colours, sounds, and scents in giving its
+description of nature, whereas it does find it
+necessary to refer to mass and extension. But
+that does not prove that the former qualities
+are not as real as the latter, are not as indubitably
+part of the universe. The scientific
+concepts have by no means proved themselves
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>adequate to account for the whole of experience.
+Nearly everything of real importance
+to man lies at present outside science. The
+fact is that science was undertaken as an intellectual
+adventure: it was an attempt to
+find out how far nature could be described
+in mathematical terms. Certain primary conceptions—time,
+space, mass, force, and so on—all
+of which can be defined mathematically,
+were adopted, and it became a highly absorbing
+game to find out how much of what
+goes on around us could be described, mathematically,
+in terms of these conceptions. The
+success of this effort has been so astonishing
+that some scientific men have forgotten to be
+astonished. They have come to take it for
+granted that a complete mathematical description
+of the world should be possible.
+This assumption is not a rational one: it is a
+pure act of faith. The great founders of the
+scheme made no such mistake: they were
+quite aware of the precarious nature of their
+enterprise. Thus, Newton, the greatest and
+most successful of them all, says that, if they
+find the mathematical method does not work,
+they must try a different method. The mathematical
+method, which is the very essence of
+modern science, has, however, worked splendidly.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>From the time of its origination in
+the seventeenth century until the present day
+it has had no serious rival. The ancient
+æsthetic principle, which led to the conclusion
+that the planets moved in circles because
+the circle is the only perfect figure, is still
+used by theosophists, but not by men of science.
+Similarly the old moralistic principle,
+which explained the fact of water rising in a
+pump by saying that nature abhorred a vacuum,
+possibly lingers on only in such superstitions
+as that sunlight puts the fire out. In
+more modern times the only notorious rival
+of the Newtonian method was the dialectic
+method of Hegel, who evolved the laws of
+the universe from his inner consciousness.
+But the best-known result of this method,
+that there could not be more planets than
+were known to exist, happened to be published
+on the very day that a new planet was
+discovered. The mathematical method, then,
+is at the present day without a rival. But,
+although we cannot at present imagine what
+could replace the mathematical method, we
+must be careful not to exaggerate the significance
+of the results that have been achieved
+by it. For these results depend not only on
+the method, but also on the material the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>method has to work with. And there is good
+reason to suppose, in the present state of
+physics, that the material with which science
+has worked hitherto is turning out to be not
+quite satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>This material is chiefly the Newtonian set
+of abstractions. Newton postulated, as the
+fundamental constituents out of which the
+perceived universe is built up, Space, Time,
+and Matter. Space and time he regarded as
+absolute and as quite independent of matter.
+Matter was an enduring substance that simply
+inhabited space and time. The analysis
+of these conceptions has resulted in the Einstein
+theory, in which neither space, time,
+nor matter are fundamental. The interesting
+thing about this analysis, from our present
+point of view, is that it shows clearly what
+arbitrary elements are present in the scientific
+description of the universe. For we must
+remember that moral and æsthetic elements
+were ruled out of the real universe simply
+because science did not find it necessary to
+mention them. The foundation stones of the
+scientific edifice, namely space, time, and matter,
+were supposed to be the only realities.
+Everything else was a sort of illusion. Men
+who must have been theory-mad soberly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>maintained that little particles of matter
+wandering about purposelessly in space and
+time produced our minds, our hopes, and
+fears, the scent of the rose, the colours of
+the sunset, the songs of the birds, and our
+knowledge of the little particles themselves.
+The sole realities were the little wandering
+particles and the space and time they wandered
+in. The existence of everything else
+depended on the mind, and was inconceivable
+without the mind. It is interesting, therefore,
+that science has now reached a position
+where space, time, and matter also depend
+on the mind. In giving a scientific description
+of the universe Einstein does not find it
+necessary to begin with space, time, and matter.
+These entities become “derivative”.
+The universe becomes more spectral than
+ever if we are going to adopt the materialist
+principle that what depends on the mind does
+not really exist. Even the universe of wandering
+particles is comparatively cosy compared
+with this modern universe of undefinable
+“point-events”. But if we do not adopt
+the materialist principle we may assert that
+moral and æsthetic values are as much a part
+of the real universe as anything else, and that
+the reason why science does not find it necessary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>to mention them is not because they are
+not there but because science is a game played
+according to certain rules, and those rules
+have excluded these values from the outset.
+The life-insurance actuary may, for his purposes,
+neglect many things about men, and
+yet calculate, quite correctly, what percentage
+of them will die at forty. But he has not
+proved that the qualities he has neglected do
+not exist simply because they do not come in
+to upset his calculations. A politician finds
+that he has to base his calculations on quite
+different aspects of mankind from those
+found satisfactory by the actuary. In the
+same way, a mountain is a different thing to
+a poet from what it is to a man of science.
+For the kind of understanding of the universe
+that the man of science is after, the
+mountain is merely a heap of certain kinds of
+matter weighing so many millions of tons.
+The poet, who is after a different kind of
+vision, finds it necessary to take into account
+quite other factors which enter into his total
+experience of the mountain. The scientist
+may also experience emotions of awe and reverence
+in the presence of the mountain, but
+for the purposes of his science these factors
+of his experience may be neglected. He
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span><em>abstracts</em> from the total concrete fact of his
+experience of the mountain. The mountain,
+as he describes it in the scientific paper he
+proceeds to write, is a mere pale shadow of
+the real mountain; he probably leaves it indistinguishable
+from any other mountain that
+happens to weigh the same, just as to the life-insurance
+actuary all men of forty are exactly
+alike. If we believe that the factors in experience
+that the scientific man neglects are
+quite as real as those he takes into account,
+it becomes a matter for wonder that science
+is possible. How is it that science forms a
+closed system—that nothing from the worlds
+it neglects ever comes in to disturb it?</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the great services of relativity
+theory to philosophy that it provides an answer
+to this question. The answer is that the
+entities discussed by physics are defined in
+terms of one another. The three hundred
+years of building up exact science really
+amounts, in the last analysis, to doing what
+the dictionary compiler did when he defined
+a violin as a small violoncello and a violoncello
+as a large violin. Of course, if this
+statement were literally true, science would
+give us no information about the universe at
+all. Nevertheless, the statement is true
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>about the actual procedure of science, and it
+is in virtue of this procedure that science
+forms a closed system. But what is left out
+of this description is the scientist himself.
+The mysterious process which is not taken
+into account in this description of the scientific
+method is the process by which the consciousness
+of the scientist makes contact with
+the entities he is talking about. In deducting
+the world from “point-events”, for instance,
+we begin by talking about something
+we have no direct cognisance of, namely
+point-events. From point-events we deduce
+“potentials”—again a mere word. But from
+potentials we deduce “matter”, and here we
+are talking of something of which we have
+direct knowledge. Similarly, the circular definition
+of violin and violoncello tells us nothing
+as it stands. But to a man who can identify
+one of these entities, to a man who has
+ever seen a violin, it gives genuine information.</p>
+
+<p>We need not be surprised, therefore, that
+nothing from the outside ever seems to disturb
+the equanimity that reigns within the
+closed system of physics. The abstractions
+with which it begins are all it ever has to deal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>with. There are no subsequent fresh contacts
+with reality. If the region covered by relativity
+theory embraced the whole of physics
+it would seem that, so far as physical science
+is concerned, we knew all that there is to be
+known. But it is notorious that, of recent
+years, an entirely new set of phenomena has
+been discovered in physical science. These
+phenomena arise when we consider, not matter
+in bulk but matter in its smallest particles.
+These phenomena are, at present, strictly incomprehensible.
+The celebrated quantum
+theory provides us with rules for dealing
+with some of them, but does not make them
+intelligible. It seems that science has here
+reached its limits. Professor Eddington has
+even hinted that these phenomena may indicate
+that the universe is finally irrational,
+that is, that the attempt to describe nature
+mathematically will have to be given up.
+This is a possibility that Newton foresaw.
+But it seems more likely that our present
+state of bewilderment has a different cause.
+That cause, we shall probably find, is the insufficiency
+of the abstractions hitherto used
+in science. We have to go back to the concrete
+facts of experience and build up a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>richer, fuller set of abstractions. Physics is
+now paying the penalty of inadequate abstraction.
+In particular, it must revise its notions
+of space, time, and substance. This revision
+is quite independent of the Einstein theory,
+and is made necessary, not by that theory
+but by the quantum theory. A first attempt
+at this revision has been made by that great
+mathematical philosopher, Professor Whitehead.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_5_5" href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>
+We need not deal with his investigation,
+which is at present in a highly technical
+state. The space and time of the new theory
+are interconnected and do not consist of independent
+volumes and instants. Every volume
+of space has reference to the whole of space,
+and every moment of time refers both to the
+past and the future. Hence both memory
+and expectation are given a rational basis.
+On the old view, as Hume pointed out, there
+is no reason whatever to suppose that the
+order of nature should continue. Why do we
+expect that the force of gravity will be in
+existence to-morrow? There was no <em>reason</em>
+at all for this expectation or for any other.
+That is to say, the whole of science itself was
+based on blind faith. The new foundations
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>of science make science itself a rational activity.
+As for the notion of “substance”, Professor
+Whitehead proposes to replace it by
+the notion of “organism”. We may imagine
+an electron, for instance, as a repeated pattern
+of events. One of the great difficulties
+of the quantum phenomena is that an electron
+seems to pass from one place to another without
+passing through the intervening space.
+On the basis of the new abstractions this difficulty
+can be overcome. We have to imagine
+an electron as requiring a certain time to
+manifest itself—just as a tune does.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+  <p class="noi"><a id="Footnote_5_5" href="#FNanchor_5_5" class="label">[5]</a> <cite>Science and the Modern World.</cite></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From our present point of view, however,
+the chief interest attaching to these new
+foundations for science is the place occupied
+in them by the intuitions of the poets. Mr
+Richards, literary critic, tells us that the poets
+must learn from science; Professor Whitehead,
+mathematician and physicist, tells us
+that science must learn from the poets. Instead
+of the poet having to realize that his
+intuitions are illusory and belong to a childish,
+<i lang="fr">démodé</i>
+ view of the world, it is the scientific
+man who must realize that his abstractions
+are too thin and narrow to be any
+longer useful, and that the poet makes closer
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>contact with reality. When Wordsworth
+says:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">And Souls of lonely places! can I think</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Such ministry, when ye through many a year</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Impressed upon all forms the characters</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Of danger or desire; and thus did make</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">The surface of the universal earth</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">With triumph and delight, with hope and fear</div>
+    <div class="verse indent1">Work like a sea?...”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noi">he is not, according to Professor Whitehead,
+expressing fantasies that the strong-minded
+realist can afford to neglect: he is describing
+the actual concrete facts of experience, facts
+which, says Professor Whitehead, “are distorted
+in the scientific analysis”. It is the
+artist not the scientist who deals most adequately
+with reality. It is the man of science,
+taking his pale abstractions for the only
+realities, who dwells in dream-land.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we can see at present, however,
+science cannot abandon its method. It cannot
+deal with the whole concrete fact: it
+must continue to make abstractions. But
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>the present <em>impasse</em> in scientific theory is an
+indication that it must go back to the beginning
+and include more factors of the concrete
+fact in its abstractions. It seems likely that,
+in doing so, it will have to presuppose a philosophy
+very different from the materialism
+hitherto current amongst scientific men. The
+world will have to be regarded as an evolutionary
+process, where “patterns of value”
+emerge. It will have to be regarded as an
+interconnected whole, and the separation of
+mind from matter, and mind from mind, will
+have to be replaced by a conception which
+regards these distinctions, in their present
+form, as unreal. One very desirable result
+of this transformation will be that the arts
+will be taken seriously. The old outlook did
+not regard values as inherent in reality. They
+were merely expressive of the accidental human
+constitution, but had no cosmic significance.
+Art existed to provide a unique thrill,
+called the “æsthetic emotion”. On the new
+outlook the function of the arts is to communicate
+knowledge and, moreover, the most
+valuable kind of knowledge. Art, much
+more than science, expresses the concrete
+facts of experience in their actuality. Music,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>in particular, finds its highest function in revealing
+to us the possibilities of the spirit of
+man himself. The music of such a man as
+Beethoven is a revelation of existence from
+the vantage point of a higher consciousness.
+It is, we may hope, prophetic of the future
+development of the race. Not only art, but
+morals, acquire vastly greater importance on
+the new outlook. Morals are no longer a
+purely private concern, expressive of a particular
+human constitution in an alien, strictly
+non-moral universe. Men are no longer justified
+in believing that their only duty is to
+preserve their self-respect and to make the
+most of their opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>Science, in view of our increased knowledge
+of its aims and powers, can no longer
+be presented to us as a tyrant. Science assumes
+certain fundamental principles and entities,
+and there is an arbitrary element in
+these assumptions. What science does not
+assume does not thereby not exist. It gives,
+and it appears that it must forever give, a
+<em>partial</em> description of the universe. The fact
+that the elements of reality it leaves out do
+not come in to disturb it is no presumption
+against the existence of these elements. For
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>science forms a closed system simply because
+it employs the device of cyclic definition. The
+teachings of science, so far as the spiritual
+problems of men are concerned, need no
+longer be regarded as stultifying: they are
+merely irrelevant.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap">
+<div class="tnote">
+<p class="noi tntitle">Transcriber’s Notes:</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">A List of Sections has been provided for the convenience of the
+   reader, and is granted to the public domain.</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.</p>
+
+<p class="smfont">Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76629 ***</div>
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