jacket..'mr. Lunn here examines the doctrine that reality can be described in terms of matter and motion, that quality can be expressed in terms of quantity. he calls it 'the Victorian Heresy' because it was born of the great scientific discoveries of the victorian age and was raised to doctrinal rank by the Victorian philosophers. on its authority, Science has been and still is popularly supposed to be antagonistic to Religion, as if in reality these two fundamental activities of the spirit could be opposed. indeed the doctrine has at times assumed such proportions, having been embraced by so many men of eminence in all walks of life, as almost to be accepted as a new religion itself, 'the religion of Science', denying immortality, a personal God and the freedom of the will. L, however, shows the twentieth century since has outgrown the dogmatic stage. the victorian heresy is no longer acceptable to men who are in the forefront of scientific advance, though the general public, which is beginning to suspect the fact, is not yet fully aware of it. this book shows how far the heresy is now discredited and why, pointing out that there is no true conflict between religion and science but only between reason and unreason, between science and those who usurp the name of science to attack the very source of science itself. it sounds a requiem for the Dogmatic Materialism that so long masqueraded in scientific dress.
CHAPTER 1 - THE AGE OF REASON
20 ..the Reformation and the scientific movements of the 16th century did not appeal from authority to reason, but from reason to experiment. the Protestant appeal to experience and the scientific appeal to experiment are indeed two sides of the same movement...
24 ..again, those who accept with uncritical satisfaction the popular and flattering contrast between the credulous medieval and the hard headed and rational Victorian, fail to realise the Victorian rationalism was a product of the flight from reason, whereas the 13th century deserves the description of a great french scholar as 'the most rationalistic of all centuries'...
..the code of the high minded materialist...is an irrational deduction from materialistic premisses, for if thought is a bye product of matter and if free will is an illusion, morality, in the proper sense of the term, ceases to have any meaning. we do not describe machines as moral or immoral and on the materialistic hypothesis we differ from machines only in the fact that we are conscious.
25 ..St. thomas aquinas, greatest of all the scholastics...Summa Theologica..is not intended as an apologetic for the catholic faith, but as a treatise on the sacred science on the basis of an accepted Bible, , addressed to readers familiar with the arguments for accepting the bible as the Word of God...
26 ..i do not, of course, dispute the verdicts of those medieval scholars, professor Tout and professor a.e.Taylor, who rank Aq among the master intellects of all time. A's range of knowledge was undoubtedly immense.
27 he was the first to attempt a comprehensive survey of philosophy in its entirety and nobody before or since has made such a determined effort to embrace in one synthesis a comprehensive metaphysical system and a complete compendium of the religious and civil obligations of man and of his destiny in the world to come.
why, then, does this great synthesis possess so narrow and so eclectic an appeal?
i can only hazard a guess, but i am inclined to believe that the explanation must be sought in the complete change of mental climate since the age of A, a change from a prior reasoning to empiricism.
every man tends to be either an apriorist or an empiricist; tends, that is either to argue deductively from first principles or inductively from facts and experience.
the case for christianity is based partly on a priori reasoning from first principles and partly on the appeal to experience.
the existence of God may, for instance, either be demonstrated by a priori reasoning from first principles, that is, by deduction, or by induction from the evidence of design in Nature, or again by the empirical appeal to religious experience.
the following argument, which is one of many advanced by A for the existence of God, is an excellent example of sound a priori reasoning:
"it is certain and obvious to our senses that some things are in motion. now whatever is in motion is set in motion by another...if that which sets it in motion is itself in motion, then this again must owe its motion to another, and that again to another. but this cannot go on to Infinity, for
28 in that case there would be no first Mover, and in consequence no other movers; since subsequent movers move only because they are set in motion by the firsts mover; as the staff moves only because it is set in motion by the hand. it is therefore necessary to arrive at a first mover set in motion by no other; and this fist mover is understood by all to be God".
this argument, though undoubtedly valid, is a curiously ineffective weapon for the conversion of a modern agnostic. he is uninfluenced by the type of argument which appealed so strongly to the medieval mind. why? because we have lost our faith in reason. the englishman, perhaps more than other people, is by nature an empiricist, and by temperament suspicious of pure logic. he has no use for the God who lies at the end of a chain of syllogisms.
'St. anselm, writes tyrell, constructs his equilateral triangle, but the constructions are equally bloodless. who cares about his three cornered equilateral God? ' there speaks the modern world. apologetics, of course, change from generation to generation and in our age the appeal to intuition and personal experience seems to carry more conviction than the appeal to reason. it is newman
29the modern believer has exchanged the austere mental climate of the 13th century, a climate warmed only by the cold light of reason, for the more temperate zone of intuition and personal experience.
Aquinas, as Father D'Arcy, S.J., remarks in his admirable study, 'takes sides in the age long quarrel between those who cherish experience, mysticism, love or life as in some way superior to reason and those who trust only the lamp of the latter in a night where all else may prove to be illusion. we shall see later the (A) is not so inhuman as to exclude the factor of love in his philosophy of life; his dislike is reserved only for those who put 'the reasons of the heart' before those of the head'. father d'arcy might have quoted in support of this last statement A's careful and reasoned proof, a proof which finds no place for 'the reasons of the heart', that the blessed in heaven rejoice in the sufferings of the damned.
the following is a quotation from the third par, supplement, Quaestio XCIV, Articles 1,2 and 3:
" we proceed to the first article:
'objection 1. it would seem that the blessed in heaven will not see the sufferings of the damned...
i answer that nothing should be denied to the blessed which belongs to the perfection of their beatitude. now all things are the better known for being compared with their contrary. consequently, in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful and that they may give to God more copious thanks for it, they are permitted perfectly to behold the sufferings of the damned...
we proceed thus to the second article:
objection 1. it would seem that the blessed must pity the
30 sufferings of the damned. for pity proceeds from charity, and the most perfect charity will be in the blessed...
reply to objection 1. charity is the principle of pity when it is possible for us, inspired by charity, to desire the termination of a person's unhappiness. but the saints cannot wish this for the damned, since this would be contrary to divine justice. consequently the argument does not prove.
we proceed thus to the third article:
objection 1. it would seem that the blessed do not rejoice in the punishment of the damned. for to rejoice in another's misfortune pertains to hatred. but there will be no hatred among the blessed. therefore they will not rejoice in the unhappiness of the damned...
'i answer that a thing may give cause for rejoicing in two ways. first, directly, when one rejoices in a thing for itself. second, indirectly, on account of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the damned, for they will see in this the order of Divine justice and their won escape which will fill them with joy. and thus the direct cause of the joy of the blessed will be the Divine justice and their own deliverance; whereas the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly'.
31 ...'what difference would this make, even if it were proved to be true, to the practical issues of everyday life and to the life of devotion? had Aquinas ever asked himself this question, many volumes of the Summa would have remained unwritten. A, of course, would have rejected with scorn the pragmatists' test. he had much in common with the true mathematician. a true mathematician always considers applied mathematics rather vulgar, and keenly resents any suggestion that the value of mathematical research is to be measured by the results in, say, engineering. A, like the mathematician, is concerned with truth for the sake of truth. he moved in a world as remote as the world of mathematical symbols...
34 ..the 12th and 13th centuries gave us the poetry of dante, the glory of the great gothic cathedrals, the 'imitation of Christ', and the Summa Thelogica. in 1266 a pig was solemnly put on trial for its life and burnt alive for the crime of eating a child. the highest expression of human genius in philosophy, poetry and art was contemporary with the infinite childishness of the legal trial of animals.
35..it is difficult to avoid the two extremes of overpraise of the past and undue complaisance with the present. when i feel myself in danger of the former failing, i remind myself of the free conduct awarded by a learned judge to the field mice and when i suspect myself of undue satisfaction
36 with modernity, i contrast the child's vision of beauty which found expression in 14th century venice with the adult disillusionment which has produced baker street and bermondsey.
i am concerned in this book with the victorian heresy in its various manifestations and the reader may perhaps wonder why i have devoted so much space to Aquinas. i have done so because the contrast between the 13th and 19th centuries is so instructive. the flight from Reason is best studied against the background of an age which made Reason the ultimate criterion of human knowledge. there is something childlike in the sunny confidence with which they trusted Reason, unchecked by experiment, to solve all problems. in the last decade of the 19th century the process was reversed. the emphasis was on experiment and research and close knit reasoning on fundamentals was at a discount.
..Science owes a debt to the scholastics which few scientists are prepared to admit. 'the Middle Ages, as professor Whitehead-whose authority to speak on behalf of Science need not be disputed- remarks, formed
37 ...''the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement was the 'inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles'...the faith in the possibility of Science generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology'.
38 Aquinas began by facing the greatest of all problems-'How does everything start?' the moderns tend more and more to evade this problem, a problem to which there are only two answers-'God' and 'i don't know'.
our modern sceptics are not courageous enough to announce their failure to solve the problem. accordingly, they take refuge from the pain of thought in the cloud-land of metaphor.
mr. Joad, for instance, would be very unfashionable if he admitted the existence of a personal God, but apparently there is no restriction on personifying 'life'. 'life is purposive, continues mr. joad, but its purpose is at first latent and only rises into consciousness in the course of life's evolution and development'. no medievalist could have been guilty of such depressing vagueness.
scholasticism, at least, inculcated one valuable habit, a 'habit ' which, as prof. whitehead remarks, 'remained long after scholastic philosophy had been repudiated, the priceless habit of looking for an exact point and sticking to the point when found'.
the medieval theologian may justly be accused, not of depreciating the importance of Reason, but of assuming
39 that Reason unchecked by experiment, was capable of solving all problems in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.
Faith, Reason, Experiment-there is room for all three in religion. faith is essential, not only in religion, but in every phase of mental activity, for complete scepticism does not work. it is by faith that the scientists believe in the reality of the external world and no rational argument has yet been discovered satisfactorily to refute the lunatic who declares that the world exists only in his dreams. but though religion cannot survive without faith, a creed which asks for blind faith will never endure. the theologian may assert that there are truths beyond the power of human reason to comprehend, but he must not ask us to accept those truths until he has proved by pure reason the credentials of the authority which proclaims the truths in question.
finally, religion must satisfy the experimental test. it must justify itself by the appeal to experience.
the medieval theologian, as we shall see..overrated the appeal to Reason and underrated the appeal to experiment. the modern scientist is in danger of falling into precisely the opposite error.
DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE REASONING i apologise to the majority of my readers for the following note, which is intended for the minority who are not quite clear as to the distinction between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.
a deductive or a priori reasoner deduces either from truths universally admitted or from truths deduced from truths universally admitted, their necessary consequences. thus., Aquinas, starting from the universally admitted truth that 'it is certain and obvious to our senses that some things are in motion', proceeds to deduce the existence of God.
40 inductive or a posteriori reasoning is the attempt to discover the nature of a general law from its observed consequences. astronomers observed that certain planets did, in point of fact, move in elliptic orbits. they inferred by inductive reasoning that the movements of those particular planets was a consequence of a General Law that all planets move in elliptic orbits. induction will thus often create a strong presumption in favour of a General Law, the proof of which depends on deduction or on mathematical processes. from the fact that certain planets move in elliptic orbits, it is impossible to infer with certainty that all planets must move in such orbits. observation must be supplemented by mathematics in order to achieve exact proof.
philosophy emphasises the value of deduction; science, of induction.
throughout this book i have described those who tend to argue deductively as apriorists and those whose opinions are mainly the result of observation as inductive reasoners or empiricists.
CHAPTER 2 - THE DAWN OF EMPIRICISM
41 the contrast between the medieval and the modern outlook may be illustrated by Galileo's retort to Sarsi. S maintained that motion invariably produced heat and in support of this theory he quoted a statement, which he had seen in print (and which he therefor assumed to be infallible), that the babylonians cooked eggs by whirling them in a sling. G made the obvious reply that it would be perfectly easy to test the truth of this statement by repeating the experiment. S, we may be very sure, had never thought of that, for the very idea of appealing from authority to experiment and from a priori reasoning to empiricism, was foreign to the medieval mind.
G, like the modern scientist, was mainly interested in the 'why', the medievalist in the 'how', of phenomena. in other words, he was a teleologist. teleology is the doctrine of final ends rather than of efficient causes. the telelogist explains phenomena, not by trying to discover how things work, but by attempting to show why things are. to the medieval thinker the 'why' of natural phenomena was solved once you had discovered their usefulness to man.
43 ..in the ancient and in the medieval world, however, the apriorist was almost invariably a teleologist and the opposition to teleology came from the empiricists.
i do not wish to suggest that there is no place for a priori reasoning in science or in religion. the apriorist and the empiricist have their proper roles.
Euclid, for instance, provides the supreme example of the value of a priori reasoning. some of his theorems may conceivably have owed their origin to observation or even to experiment, but they are not presented to the reader as the result of inductive, but rather of severely deductive, reasoning. E and geometry represent the triumph of deductive logic.
the greeks were attracted by mathematics, especially by geometry, but, with few exceptions, they did not take kindly to the discipline of patient and systematic observation. they were interested in the great general questions.
44 'what is the basis of the physical world? water? fire? or a perpetual flux?' they were too preoccupied by these teleological problems to concern themselves greatly with specific problems.
the development of science along observational and experimental lines was checked by...Socrates. (470-399 bc) ..assumed a position of scepticism with regard to the validity of all human knowledge.
...in its decay platonism dragged science down and destroyed by neglect nearly all earlier biological material...the mighty figure of Aristotle (384-322) stayed the tide for a time'.
A was a great naturalist. he had a genius for observation and displayed in his work a marvellous knowledge of the animal kingdom...based on close and careful observation. but..his system..had constantly to be readjusted to suit the requirements of certain a priori beliefs which A made o attempt either to prove or to check by observation or indeed by reason.
45 ..it was in medicine that the empiricists won their first victories. the Hippocratic Collection contains a tract 'upon ancient medicine' which is a spirited challenge to the apriorists. medicine, so runs the argument, should be an empirical art based on observation collected from a careful study of disease ...ridicule is poured on the contemporary belief that a man can know nothing of medicine unless he knows how a man came into existence...
empedocles, again, was an empiricist. he had challenged the contemporary bias towards teleological explanations...
46scince ceases to have a history in the middle ages. a general statement of this kind can, of course, always be challenged. it is possible to cite instances...such as Albertus Magnus. but an age must be judged by its master energies,
47 ...roger bacon was the first thinker of modern europe to base his system of natural knowledge on observation and on experiment. like his great namesake, francis bacon, he advocated the experimental method, but unlike FB, he was himself an experimenter.
48 ...roger bacon was in some respects very modern and in other respects a child of the Middle Ages. nothing, for instance,could be more medieval that (his) insistence that all branches of knowledge must serve theology and must find in that service their justification. the chief value
49 of mathematics, so he tells us, is the light which it throws on many problems in the Holy Scriptures. the mathematician can, for instance, help to determine the exact position of heaven and hell..
..these were, however, the limitations of his age and in spite of those limitations roger bacon can clearly be described as the first man of science in the modern sense of the term.
'his legacy to thought, writes dr. singer, may be regarded as accuracy of method, criticism of Authority, and reliance of experiment-the pillars of modern Science.
RB, in other respects a child of the Middle Ages, has a far greater claim than his great namesake, Lord Bacon, to be considered the real father of modern science.
52 B was a philosopher rather than a scientist and was not a particularly good philosopher; but he had, at least, the distinction of being the first clearly to formulate and proclaim the real difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. to do him justice, he never claimed to be a scientist and described himself as a maker of bricks for others to build with. he believed that he had invented an infallible technique for scientific discovery. he was wrong. modern science is not built up by baconian bricks, as B himself might have learnt had he been more interested in the actual scientific discoveries of the day and less interested in the Baconian discovery of the Baconian key to the riddle of Nature.
53 as it was, B never realised the importance of Napier's discovery of logarithms and did not follow with any attention the great discoveries of Galileo and Kepler.
his admirers have claimed that he was the first to discover and to formulate the technique of scientific discovery.
the Baconian method may be briefly summarised as follows: the first step, so B taught, was to collect as many facts as possible and over as wide an area as possible. all tentative theories as to the bearing of these facts had to be postponed until a vast array of facts had been correlated. the discovery of new truth is the reward of induction rather than deduction, of a posteriori reasoning from facts rather than of a priori reasoning from baseless premisses.
B greatly overrated the power of induction. he believed that a mere collection of unrelated facts would tell their own tale and would suggest to the mind of the observer, duly trained in Baconian induction, the underlying truths to which they bore witness. the Baconian induction was supposed to give the trained observer as absolute a control over truth as a navigator's control over a ship. it was intended, as mr. r.w.church remarks, 'to give all men the same sort of power which a pair of compasses gives the hand drawing a circle'. the facts of Nature, so B believed, tell their own story. all that was necessary was to discover the alphabet in order to read the Book of Nature at sight.
54 he believed that one set of men might be trained to collect the facts and another set of men employed deducing with mathematical certainty the axioms implicit in those facts. the Baconian induction was intended to be a mechanical method of procedure which anybody could be trained to apply.
needless to say, the Baconian method never has and never will produce any scientific results. the 'humbug of baconian induction', as huxley calls it, has been a magnificent failure so far as practical results are concerned. the great pioneers of scientific discovery have arrived at their results by intuition and native genius. B never allowed for the importance of guesses in the discovery of truth. as Huxley says: 'those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of nature', that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run'.
55 the Baconian method itself was the product, not of induction, but of deduction. B did not patiently collect all the available evidence as to how scientific discoveries had actually been arrived at, and then induce his won theory of scientific discovery from these facts. he never analysed the actual mental process, like Harvey or Galileo. he was content to deduce his own theory of scientific discovery, not from facts, but from premisses which he never tested or checked.
CHAPTER 3 - PROTESTANT EMPIRICISM
57 'the Reformation and the scientific movement, writes Professor Whitehead, were two aspects of the historical revolt which was the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. the appeal to the origins of christianity and francis bacon's appeal to efficient causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of thought...it is a great mistake to conceive this historical revolt as an appeal to reason. on the contrary, it was through and through an anti intellectualist movement'.
the Protestantism of luther was certainly an appeal from the head to the heart, a very sensible revolt against 'the rationalistic orgy of the Middle Ages', and prof. whitehead might have pushed his stimulating analogy between the reformation and the scientific movement even further than he has done, for both movements owed their success to the new emphasis on experiment.
luther called on his followers to forget the dusty syllogisms of the scholastics. he appealed to experience, to the believer's conviction of Christ's presence and influence, to the faith that was the product, not of philosophic argument, but of the great experiment of the christian life. the protestant
58 appeal to experience is analogous to the scientific appeal to experiment. L in effect contrasted justification by faith, not only with justification by works, but also with justification by reason. (?!?)
the new emphasis was on the inner life of the individual, on the faith that represented an induction from experience rather than a deduction from general truths. the young Moravian Bohler, to whose influence wesley attributed his conversion, was in this, at least, a true child of the lutheran reformation. W, a typical product of that 18th century which, like the 13the, valued reason above emotion, had attempted to justify his own creed by reasoned argument. B listen patiently and replied, much as J would have replied to a disciple of aquinas, 'myh brother, that philosophy of yours must be purged away'.
protestantism is often represented as a mere appeal from the infallible church to the infallible bible. this is a crude simplification of the real facts. luther certainly appealed to the bible in support of his views, but in this he was merely following the scholastic precedent. to test a particular doctrine by an appeal to scripture is a very different matter from assuming that every word of scripture must be true. L, indeed, expressly stated that he did not consider himself bound to accept the literal accuracy of every incident as reported in the bible. (?!?) 'what if moses never wrote it?' was his comment on genesis.
luther was far less of a literalist than aquinas . L did not, but A did, believe in the literal accuracy and literal inspiration of the bible. it is true that A conceded that biblical metaphors need not always be taken literally. 'when God speaks of God's arm, the literal
59 sense is not that God has such a member, but only what He signifies by this member, namely, operative power'. but 'with A, the letter comes first, writes Father Hugh Pope; '...the more literal opinion is always to be preferred'...
CHAPTER 4 - QUALITAS-QUANTITAS
61 the transition from medieval scholasticism to modern science is marked, not only by the tendency to substitute inductive for deductive reasoning, but also by the ever increasing importance attached to measurement, and to the ever growing conviction that science consists only in metrical knowledge. measurement gradually takes the place of syllogisms, mathematics of logic...
..the year 1543 marks, according to dr. singer, the endpoint of medieval science. in that year two works, modern in outlook and both based on the experimental method, were published - de fabrica corporis humani of vesalius and the de revolutionibus orbium caelestium of copernicus.
the copernican theory represents the first serious attempt in modern europe to apply a mathematical criterion to nature.
62 according to the ptolemaic system, the earth was stationary and situated at the centre of the universe. round the earth the planets and the sun revolved in circular orbits with unvarying velocities. observation soon showed that the path of a planet in the sky is neither simple nor apparently circular. this difficulty was met by assuming that the planet itself moved round the circumference of a small circle, and the centre of this small circle moved with unvarying velocity round the circumference of a large circle. this solution in turn broke down and finally a whole series of circles had to be invented in order to preserve the principle of a fixed earth round which the planets revolved.
copernicus discovered that if the earth was permitted to move, the mathematical explanation of the planets in motion was vastly simplified.
C originally put forward his theory merely as a mathematical device for representing in the simplest possible fashion the celestial phenomena. 'mathematics is written for mathematicians, he explained, to whom my labours, if i am not mistaken, will appear to contribute something'.
modern science has adopted C's view that the universe lends itself to mathematical description, but it does not regard the mathematical relations thus established as the cause of phenomena. kepler revived the mathematical mysticism of pythagoras. he believed that the universe was not merely explicable in mathematical terms, but is itself governed by mystical mathematical relations.
63 modern physical science is largely the result of a successful attempt to describe all phenomena mathematically.
64 it was copernicus, galileo and kepler who inaugurated the crusade to substitute measurement for a priori reasoning.
newton, again, whose great achievement was to prove that one and the same law rules throughout the universe, that the force which causes the apple to fall in the orchard is the same force that controls the movements of the nearest planet and the most distant star, had an immense faith in mathematics as the final test of truth. 'the certainty of a mathematical demonstration' was indeed the only certainty which he recognised as absolute.
science, as we have seen, made no progress so long as the intellectual energies of men were devoted to a priori reasoning. science advanced with astounding rapidity directly men began to measure, but the very success of measurement engendered that absurd delusion, the foundation of the Victorian heresy, that everything is measurable and that nothing which is not measurable is real. the victorian materialist looked forward with confidence to the day when the beauty of a landscape or a painting could be expressed in terms of a mathematical formula.
science deals with things that can be measured and the things which can be measured are of far less importance to man than the things which cannot be measured, such as happiness, heroism, sanctity and beauty, all of which escape the metrical test.
science, in other words, deals with the relatively unimportant aspects of life, a fact which scientists are always in danger of forgetting.
'the fact is, as sir bertrand windle said, that duhem was abundantly right when he asserted that if the Middle Ages exaggerated the importance of Qualitas, as for a time they certainly did, our day has equally exaggerated the importance of Quantitas'.
CHAPTER 5 - THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS
66 that darwin discovered 'evolution', and that the word 'darwinism' may properly be used as the equivalent for the theory of evolution, is a vulgar error.
evolution, in the widest sense of the term, is an obvious fact of human experience. the baby evolves into the man, and the acorn into the oak. the term 'evolution' is, however, often used in the more restricted sense to signify the transformation of species by descent. and even in this restricted sense evolution is not a modern doctrine. the resemblance between a donkey and a horse would suggest to any thinking man the possibility of a common ancestor, and once that point had been reached, it was not a very big step in advance to wonder whether animals which resembled each other less closely than the donkey and the horse might also have had a common ancestor. and indeed such speculations were common in the ancient world.
the scholastic doctrine of mediate creation is tolerant of an evolutionary interpretation. the universe, according to this view, came into being as the result of a supernatural act of Direct creation. modern forms of life have however, developed according to natural law from the
67 primordial forms and are an example of Mediate creation.
AUGUSTINE has been claimed, with great plausibility, as an evolutionist on the strength of certain passages in his work in which he certainly appears to teach that God created the various species by endowing the original matter with power to evolve them.
..the modern scientific form of the doctrine of evolution cannot, however, be traced further back than the 17th century. the mutability of species was a hypothesis certainly present to the mind of DESCARTES, of SPINOZA, and of LEIBNITZ, as passages in their works clearly prove. during the 18th century, evolutionary theories were widely discussed in european scientific circles.
those who have read samuel butler's book, Evolution Old and New, a book which summarises the evolutionary theories of BUFFON, ERASMUS DARWIN (CHARLES DARWIN's grandfather) , and LAMARCK, will find the greatest difficulty in understanding how D could ever have permitted the public to credit him with the discovery of evolution.
68 'the pre eminent claim of B , writes butler, to be considered the father of the modern doctrine of evolution cannot be reasonably be disputed, though he was doubtless led to his conclusions by the works of D and L, of both of whom he was an avowed and very warm admirer. his claim does not rest upon a passage here or there, but upon the spirit of 40 quartos written over a period of about as many years... B was the first to point out that, in view of the known modifications which had been effected among our domesticated animals and cultivated plants, the ass and the horse should be considered as, in all probability, descended from a common ancestor; yet, if this is so, he writes-if the point were once gained that among animals and vegetables there had been, i do not say several species, but even a single one which had been produced in the course of direct descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once shown that the ass bas but a degeneration from the horse, then there is no further limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that, with sufficient time, she has evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type...
evolution, or in B's own words, 'the alteration and degeneration of animals', must be attributed 'to temperature and climate, quality of food and the ills of slavery'.
69 B was born in 1707 and died in 1788. charles D's grandfather, Erasmus D, was B's junior by a quarter of a century (1731-1802). he was an ardent believer in evolution and his theory of ev marked a great advance on B's.
according to B, ev
L, the great french naturalist (1744-1829), elaborated in far greater detail a very similar theory of evolution. there is no direct evidence that L ever read a line of ED's writings, but the similarity between their views is so striking that it is difficult not to credit L with some knowledge of ED's theories.
L emphasised the important role played by use and disuse, by use in strengthening a particular limb or organ and by disuse in producing the decay of a limb. the development of the blacksmith's arm is an obvious instance of the effect of 'use'. L accounted for evolution as follows: he contended that great changes in environment involved changes in the needs and wants of the animals. if these wants become permanent or of long duration, the animal will contract new habits which will last as long as the wants which gave rise to them. 'on the
70 other hand, new wants have rendered a part necessary, which part has accordingly been created by a succession of efforts; use has kept it in existence, gradually ceasing to receive the development which other parts attain to; on this account it becomes reduced and in time disappears.'
according to B and according, as we shall see, to D, the animal may be regarded as the passive mould on which environment impresses its signature. according to L, changes are brought about by the fact that the animal consciously and intelligently adapts itself to its own environment.
CHAPTER 6 - 'THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES'
72 whether the pen is more or less mightier than the sword is a matter of opinion, but among the books which have played a greater part in shaping our european culture than most battles, are the de revolutionibus orbium caelestium of copernicus, which was published in 1543 and charles darwin's origin of the species, which was published in 1859.
there is no doctrine of the church which is inconsistent either with the copernican system or with the doctrine of evolution, but it would be idle to deny that both C and D were responsible for a reorientation in the religious life of their day.
medieval man was at home in the universe, a universe of which the earth was the centre, a universe, of which the earth was the centre, a universe which was created to serve the needs of man. the earth had been the basis of that universe, until C proved that it was nothing more than a minor planet wandering through the empty corridor of space. the universe thus revealed was friendless and inhospitable.
the garden of eden still remained. the universe might be terrifying in its immensity, but the mind of man could still anchor itself within the homely limits of mensurable
73 time which separated him from his first ancestor in the garden of eden.
D performed the same sad service for time that C had performed for space. the garden of eden receded in time just as the roof of heaven had receded into space. evolution proved even more potent as a solvent of traditional doctrines than the heliocentric astronomy of C.
..D is important in the history of thought because he was the first to popularise ev and to transform that theory from the bye product of the study into a world wide force whose influence is still felt in every department of human thought.
74the turning point of D's life was his appointment as naturalist in the Beagle just as she was about to start on a surveying expedition...dec. 27, 1831 until oct. 2. 1836..
D had a genius for patient systematic observation and on this voyage the observations which he made on the relations between animals on islands and those in the nearest continental areas, all helped to turn his mind to the problem of the modification of species.
...in oct. 1838, D read 'Malthus on population' and was much impressed by M's presentment of the struggle for existence. he at once deduced: 'that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. the result of this would be the formation of new species. here, then i had a theory by which to work'.
75M, an anglican priest, had tried, in his 'essay on population', to prove that man multiplies with a rapidity which outstrips the means of sustenance. if this is true of man, argued D, it must be even more true of animals and plants, which multiply much more rapidly. now there is no evidence that the number of animals and plants in the world has materially increased from year to year and consequently an eliminating agent must be at work, for otherwise the earth would be covered by innumerable swarms of animals.
it was in this struggle for existence that D discovered the eliminating agent which his theory required. the means of sustenance are limited and the competition for these limited means is very sever. the successful competitors survive, the less successful tend to die out. M had given the clue and D deduced that favourable variations are preserved and unfavourable variations are destroyed.
'the result would be, wrote D, the formation of a new species.
the argument of (The Origin of Species) may be summarized as follows:
individual members of a species vary. the variations may be slight, but they are none the less real, and, moreover, these variations affect the survival chances of particular
76 individuals. some individuals will be fleeter than others and therefore better able to escape from their enemies. other individuals will be slightly better protected against the cold and will therefore have more chance of surviving an unusually cold winter. the progeny of favoured individuals will inherit the qualities which enabled their parents to compete with success in the struggle for existence.
the gradual and progressive accumulation of small variations would produce, first, a distinct variety and secondly, a distinct species-in other words, gradually transform one type of animal or plant into a totally different type of animal or plant.
in each generation the individuals who are less fitted to survive will die off more rapidly and thus presumably leave fewer progeny, whereas their slightly more fortunate rivals will live longer and consequently presumably leave a larger progeny...
77 the difference between darwinism and lamarckianism may be illustrated by the example of the giraffe.
according to D, the long neck of this animal would be explained as follows: in times of drought or famine, herbivorous animals with necks slightly longer than other individuals of that species would be able to reach the leaves of high branches which were out of reach of their less fortunate rivals. consequently, animals with slightly longer necks have more chance of surviving than those with slightly shorter necks. the former would tend to survive and procreate offspring and the latter to die. the process would be repeated in each generation, with the result that the average length of neck in each generation would tend to increase slightly, thus producing the giraffe in the course of geological ages.
L, on the other hand,would explain the giraffe's neck partly as the result of 'use', partly as the reward of effort. the giraffe that keeps on stretching its neck develops a long neck, much as a blacksmith develops muscles in his arms. the giraffe that refuses to be beaten, that persists in trying to get the foliage just beyond its reach, will be rewarded by the acquisition of a long neck.
according to L, the more intelligent and the more persistent giraffes select themselves, so to speak, and survive as a reward for their efforts. according to D, Natural Selection blindly selects in each generation the giraffes who happen to be endowed, not as the result of their efforts, but by chance, with rather longer necks
78 than their rivals. according to L, the long neck is the prize awarded to the best trier at the end of the race. according to D, the long neck is the equivalent, say, of a start of 50 yards in a mile race and it is pure chance which decides which competitors are to receive this (head) start.
79 ..both L and D failed to explain the comparative rarity of long necked animals, for it is difficult to understand, as D himself admitted, why the long neck which has proved so useful to the giraffe would apparently have no survival value excepting for giraffes.
'why, in other parts of the world, writes D, various animals belonging to the same order have not acquired either an elongated neck or a proboscis, cannot be distinctly answered; but it is as unreasonable to expect a distinct answer to such a question, as why some event in the history of mankind did not occur in one country whilst it did in another'.
a weak answer. the good historian will not rest content until he can explain why a particular event does occur in one country rather than in another. De Tocqueville, for instance, devotes the opening chapter of his great work on the french revolution to explaining why the revolution broke out in france rather than in germany in spite of the fact that the peasantry were, if anything, worse off in germany than in france.
certain events must, from their very nature, be unique. the In carnation could only take place at a given moment in time and at a given point in space. if christianity be true, it would be absurd to expect the Incarnation to have taken place in more countries than one, but if darwinism be true, there is nothing unreasonable in expecting a
80 simultaneous outcrop of animals with giraffe like necks all over the world. if the darwinian hypothesis be correct, Natural Selection, if it operates at all, must operate universally. the darwinian hypothesis would have been stillborn had D admitted that its effects were local.
in this chapter i have confined myself to the early development of D's theory and to the main points of difference between darwinism and the doctrines of his predecessors. in the chapters that follow i shall outline the case against darwinism.
CHAPTER 7 - THE ESSENCE OF DARWINISM
before criticising Dism, it it necessary to define certain terms which will recur again and again in the following chapters.
CHANCE ...'probably the best answer to those who talk of Dism meaning the rein of h', is to ask them what they themselves understand by 'ch'. do they believe that anything in this universe happens without reason or without a cause?'
82...the word 'ch' need not disappear from the vocabulary of a rigid determinist. even if every event could be predicted, a very proper distinction could still be drawn between events which were the result of chance and events which were destined.
in the course of a recent walk, i noticed a cloud which 'by ch' had assumed a shape very similar to that of india on the map. i did not assume that there was any sinister connection between the shape of the cloud and recent events in india. i ascribed the resemblance, which was very striking, to 'ch.
on another occasion, i watched an aeroplane emitting smoke clouds which formed in the sky the words 'Daily Mail'. i ascribed the shape of these clouds, not to ch, but to purpose.
if you ask for a definition of ch and purpose, you cannot better the definition which you will find in 'the old riddle and the newest answer':
'by 'Chance' is meant the concurrence, unguided by Purpose, of independent forces to produce a definite effect. 'ch' denotes the absence of purpose, as 'Vacuum' denotes the absence of air'.
83 EVOLUTION it is difficult to avoid using the word 'evolution' in the loose popular sense as the equivalent of genetic transformism. by 'the theory of evolution' most people mean the theory that one species has been transformed into another species by descent.
nobody, of course, denies the procession of living things from simpler to more complicated forms. that plants appeared on the surface of the earth before man, is the irresistible deduction from the ecological record, and is also in harmony with the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis. it is, however important to realise that ev. does not necessarily imply genetic evolution. the evolution of the fleet from the battle of trafalar to the battle of jutland is not an example of genetic evolution. if, however, man is descended from an ape like ancestor, he owes his present form to the process of genetic evolution.
many of the arguments for evolution are based on the established but unjustifiable assumption that succession implies descent, or, in other words, that evolution implies genetic evolution.
84 DARWINISM by Dism is meant, not the theory of genetic evolution, but the theory that the transformation of species is brought about by natural selection.
nobody denies that natural selection weeds out the individuals least fit to survive, and encourages the survival of the fittest. every farmer knows that the sheep with the best fleeces will have the best chance of surviving an unusually severe winter. mankind discovered this self evident truth many thousands of years before Darwin was born.
by 'Dism' is meant, not the truism that the fittest to survive do survive, but the theory that the survival of the fittest is the chief cause which determines the transformation of one species into another.
D's credo, which he firmly held in moods of buoyant faith, and to which he returned after moods of sceptical depression, was his firm faith in the all-sufficiency of Natural Selection to produce new forms. ..
85 ..Natural Selection, D argued, may be said to create new species out of fortuitous variations as truly as a man may be said to create a building out of the material provided by stones of various shapes.
it is important to insist that D believed in the all sufficiency of Natural Selection as the explanation of ev...
86..that the transformation of species was effected by accumulation, under the influence of Natural Selection, of very small spontaneous variations. he had carefully considered the possibility that evolution might take place by means of small jumps...
87 to sum up, Dism is the theory that ev can be explained without invoking a mind behind creation. the transformation of species is affected by the mechanical action of environment blindly selecting for survival fortuitous advantageous variations. Paley, in his classic 'Natural Theology', had argued that it would be no more difficult to believe that a watch represented a mere chance aggregation of matter than that the human eye, so exquisitely adapted to the purpose which it serves, is not the creation of an intelligent being. the popularity of Dism was due very largely to the fact that D was said to have refuted paley. 'the old argument from design in nature, wrote D, as given by paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. we can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. there seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows'.
CHAPTER 8 - THE FAILURE OF DARWINISM
'to us D no more speaks with philosophic authority'. - Prof. bateson, presidential address to the british association, 1914.
'we have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there is no part of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that, as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact....-dwight, prof. of anatomy at harvard university.
'it is pretty clear that we must wholly the Darwinian hypothesis'. Cuenot, 'La Genese des Especes Animales', 1921, second edition.
'for men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead'. driesch
'Darwinism is a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof, and of attractive explanations without demonstrations'. - 'Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences
..i can only hope, in this chapter, briefly to summarise the main lines of attack of Dism, by which - as explained in the last chapter - i mean the theory that the transformation of species was brought about by the mechanical accumulation of small, fortuitous variations during the course of countless generations.
89 1. natural selection, to adapt D's metaphor, is as powerless without favourable variations as the builder would be without bricks.
D, however, made no attempt to account for the origin of those favourable variations, the transmittance of which is alleged to be due to nat sel.
this point was admirably put by Prof. hans driesch, one of the greatest of german biologists, in the course of his famous gifford lectures delivered before the university of aberdeen in `907:
'it must be certain from the very beginning of analysis that nat sel, as defined here, can only eliminate what cannot survive, what cannot stand the environment in the broadest sense, but that nat sel never is able to create diversities. it always acts negatively only, never positively. ands therefore it can 'explain' - if you will allow me to make use of this ambiguous word - it can explain only why certain types of organic specification, imaginable a priori, do not actually exist, but is never explains at all the existence of the specifications of animal and vegetable forms that are actually found. in speaking of an 'explanation' of the origin of the living specific forms by nat sel one therefore confuses the sufficient reason for the non-existence of what there is not, with the sufficient reason for the existence of what there is. to say that a man has explained some organic character by nat sel is, in the words of Nageli, the same as if someone who is asked the question, 'why is this tree covered with those leaves?' were to answer, 'because the gardener did not cut them away'.
90 ...'in other words, nat sel, as ..arthur harris remarks, may explain the survival of the fittest but cannot explain the arrival of the fittest'.
Delage retorts that no theory is expected to solve any problems other than those which it raises. 'D considers the variations after their appearance and believes them to be accidental. it is only there that his explanation begins and it is only within the limits he assigned himself that we may criticise him'.
2. favorable variations would tend to be extinguished by interbreeding if, as D believed, the accumulation of such variations depends on pure chance alone...
91 3. natural selection, according to D, worked by means of the slow, gradual accumulation of small variations.
now nat sel is presumably still at work, excepting among domesticated animals and domesticated plants and if Dism is true we should expect to find that the world was full of transitional forms, but the world is full of fixed types, and the 5000 years of recorded history are eloquent in their witness, not to transitional forms fading into each other, but to the stability of type.
D was alive to this difficulty. 'why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, he asked, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?'
his explanation is that by competition the less improved parent form and other less favoured forms will be crowded out by the new forms. we should like a little evidence for this process...
92 ...4. natural selection fails to explain the first origin and perpetuation of those slight variations which in their rudimentary stage are not advantageous. 'how could any rudiment of an organism, asks driesch, which is not functioning at all, not only be useful to its bearer, but be useful in such a degree as to decide abut life and death?'
it is, for instance, very difficult to explain not only the final but the first intermediate forms between the ape like ancestor and man himself, if we assume that to be the origin of man.
'not very strong of arm, not very swift of foot, without a well developed hairy hide or large teeth or strong claws, man seems as a mere animal an exceedingly unfortunate one, good neither for attack nor defence, in short very unfit for the struggle for existence, in that imaginary period of half-fledgedness between brute and man...let us try to imagine him rising in the scale according to the dogmas of ev. let us watch the arboreal monkey, well fitted for his surroundings, gradually losing all that fits him for them. we see his coat rowing thinner, his arms shorter so that he loses his 'reach', his legs longer so that climbing becomes harder, and at the same time his brain growing in some incomprehensible way and for no good reason, excepting that it is necessary for the theory to believe that the brain development went on so swimmingly that it compensated for the physical degenerattion'.
93 5. it is impossible to explain the last touches of protective mimicry by nat sel. wallace quotes the imitative qualities of the leaf butterfly as follows:
'we come to a still more extraordinary part of the imitation, for we find representations of leaves in every stage of decay, variously blotched and mildewed and pierced with holes and in many cases irregularly covered with powdery black dots, gathered into patches and spots, so closely resembling the various kinds of minute fungi that grow on dead leaves, that it is impossible to avoid thinking at first sight that the butterflies themselves have been attacked by real fungi'.
in the incipient stages of protective colouring or mimicry no deceptive resemblance can be noticeable and such modification can therefore render no real service to the animal or insect. as Delage has pointed out, 'it would little avail an animal living in the polar regions to present a little whit spot or a hide a trifle lighter in shade. in order to escape detection easily, the animal should be completely white'.
6. nat sel fails to explain the evolution of
94 very complex organ such as the eye, which consists of several parts, parts which cannot function unless they are very accurately fitted into each other.
'one might possibly imagine, writes wolff, the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve end through selection among innumerable variations, but that such should take place in a thousand cases in one organism is inconceivable'.
there is, indeed, as Delage points out, not the least reason to suppose that 'an accidental and insignificant variation is always accompanied by other variations which lend it usefulness: and therefore an isolated variation could become not only useless but even harmful.
'if to the mighty antlers of a stag there did not correspond a special development of the skull and of the muscles of the head and neck, those antlers would only prove and impediment to the animal'.
7. D believed that evolution was the result of the struggle for existence and that the transformation of species would be most marked where that struggle was most severe. the statistics, so far at least as human beings are concerned, appear to contradict this view. it appears that the years of rigorous selection, which produce a high death rate among infants, owing to inclement weather or epidemics, do not result, on the contrary, in a weaker generation, which is shown by the death rate, which is usually higher in the years following an epidemic or a rigorous winter than in the years preceding them.
95 again, luther burbank, the well known horticulturist, states that in his experience it is invariably a rich soil and favourable conditions which determine the appearance of new variations, whereas under fertilised round induces reversion.
the more favourable the conditions are, the better the protection the species will receive and the more easily will it evolve.
korschinsky, the russian botanist...'the origin of new forms can only occur under conditions favourable for them...the struggle for existence and the selection which goes hand in hand with it, compose a factor which restricts new appearing forms and restrains wider variations and which is in no way favourable to the production of new forms. it is indeed and inimical factor in evolution'.
delage concludes that the main role of selection is to suppress unsound variations and to maintain the species in its normal character. 'far from being an instrument for the evolution of species, it guarantees their fixity'.
8. Hugo De Vries, in his book, 'the mutation theory', produced impressive evidence in support of his view that evolution takes place, not, as D believed, by the slow, gradual accumulation of small variations, but by means of definite mutations or jumps.
9. natural selection cannot explain the existence, in the same organism, of identical structures. 'it cannot be explained by selection, how the carnivores, for example,
96 can have developed through fortuitous yet always similar variations, two such structures agreeing in all details as the back teeth, which have developed in course of time from small skin teeth. that a tooth can develop into such an admirable biting organ through chance variation may be explicable by selection, because we are accustomed to postulate thoroughly fortuitous and all inclusive variation; but that tooth standing next to it shall have varied always in exactly the same way so that the result of its development shall make it identical with the other one, is inexplicable by selection on a basis of fortuitous variation, but rather indicates that the change of form is ruled by law which we do not know...'
10. many of the characters which distinguish one variety from another are of no particular utility and therefore present no survival value and consequently cannot owe their existence to natural selection. to this D replied, 'shall poor blind man say what characteristic, however slight and insignificant, is or is not of advantage to the great complex of nature?...
...of course, the agnostic who rejects evolution as unproved is fully entitled to exploit the 'poor blind man' argument, but the dogmatic evolutionist who claims to have solved the riddle is not entitled to explain away the inconsistencies of his solution on the ground that the
97 scientist is a 'poor blind man'. perhaps he is, but, if so, he must not expect us to accept his solution.
11. natural selection postulates that slight favourable variations are the main factor in the survival of any particular individual. but in fact survival is determined far less by some slight advantageous superiority than by the pure luck of position. 'what shall decide, writes kellogg, when the big whale opens his mouth in the midst of a shoal of myriads of tiny copepods floating in the pelagic water of the aleutian seas, what copepods will disappear forever? mainly, we may say, the chance of position. a bit more or less of size or strength or redness or yellowness or irritability or what not of form and function is going to avail little when the water rushes into the yawning throat...kelsey creek runs in clear lake in northern california; it is usually ever living, but some summers it suddenly dries up. fish play back and forth between this stream and the lake; at the time of the sudden drying a few hundreds of thousands out of many hundreds of thousands that habitually live in the stream and adjacent lake waters find themselves one awful day gasping painfully for water to wet their drying gills. they gasp a short while and then die. did they all have the same number of scales, the same shape and size of body, he same tinges of fleeting colour? no, they represented most of the possible gamut of Dism variation for their particular species. but they were dead all together, bu the ill chance of position'.
and that will do. there are many other arguments
98 against Dism, but those i have mentioned should suffice. it is, indeed, difficult to understand why biologists continued either to defend or to refute the theory of nat sel, once they had read D's ineffective reply to the strongest of all arguments ( no. 3) against the transformation of species by slow, minute changes, an argument based on the absence of transitional forms, not only from the geological record, but form the world around us.
...the reader will, perhaps, notice that the arguments which have been summarised in this chapter are such as might well have occurred, as some of them did indeed occur, to men of no scientific training and no biological knowledge. the case against Darwinism, in brief, does not rest only on the testimony of experts, but on rational inferences form obvious premisses.
CHAPTER 9 - THEOPHOBIA
99 the real problem of Darwinism is to explain the facil triumph of a theory which, as we have seen in the last chapter, is open to such obvious and to such unanswerable criticisms, criticisms which are based, not on the appeal to esoteric scientific knowledge, but on common sense.
Dism, as we have seen, was not intrinsically plausible. we should, therefore, naturally expect that a theory which did such violence to common sense would be accepted, if accepted at all, only after a long and desperate struggle for recognition. but there was no such struggle. 'why did the victorians, as ..bernard shaw put it, jump at Dism?' that is the problem which we have to solve.
i think the solution must be sought in that definite bias against theism which was common in victorian scientific circles.
paley's famous argument from the design to the designer appeared unanswerable until Darwin offered a way of escape by suggesting that the appearance of design was deceptive and that this seeming design was the result of blind chance alone.
huxley, for instance, began by disbelieving in evolution.
100 he met darwin some years before 'The Origin of Species' was published and expressed his belief 'in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms with all the confidence of youth and imperfect knowlede'.
why 'imperfect knowlede'? did the lines of demarcation seem less sharp as his knowledge advance? (i doubt it.)
by 1857, huxley, we are told, 'was feeling that some working hypothesis bust be found respecting the origin of known organic forms to replace the untenable separate creation theory'. and this explains the enthusiasm with which H flung himself into the fray on D's behalf. H, as we have seen, never fully accepted Darwinism. none the less he clung to Dism, not because he believed in it,m but because it provided a 'working hypothesis', or, to put it more accurately, an excuse to reject the untenable hypothesis of a separate creation.
why 'untenable'? no philosophic argument can be put forward against the possibility of a separate creation.
by 1857 the victorian scientists were seeking for some alternative not only to the 'separate creation theory', but also to a theory which they regarded with equal distaste, the theory of a separate Creator Himself. H and his school did not sit down patiently before the facts and reluctantly arrive at an atheistic conclusion. their belief in a mechanistic universe was based, not only on bad philosophy, but was the outcome of a definite, if unavowed, act of volition: the will to disbelieve in the theistic, the will to accept the atheistic hypothesis.
natural selection is, of course, not inconsistent with
101 theism, for the Creator might, had He chosen, have worked through the agency of pure chance undisturbed by design. but nat sel, though not inconsistent with theism, deprives the theist of one of his most valuable weapons, the argument from design. Dism would not have survived as long as it did, had it not been for the pathetic loyalty of the victorian materialist to a creed which provided him with a plausible alternative to the belief in design with its horrid consequence, the belief in God.
'we must assume, wrote weismann, nat sel to be the principle of the explanation of the metamorphoses because all other apparent principles of explanation fail us and it is inconceivable that there should be another capable of explaining the adaption of organisms without assuming the help of a principle of design'.
...another example, this time form delage, the Prof. of comparative zoology at the univ. of paris.
Prof. delage was reluctantly compelled to reject D's theory of nat sel as the explanation of ev, but he hastens to add:: 'whatever may befall this theory in the future, whether it is to be superseded by some other theory or not, D's everlasting title to glory will be that he explained the seemingly marvellous adaptation
102 of living things by the mere action of natural factors without looking to a divine intervention, without resorting to any finalist or metaphysical hypothesis'.
what does this mean? 'D's everlasting title to glory' is the fact that he was wrong? there is nothing particularly glorious in having provided the fool 'who says in his hear, 'there is no God', with a plausible excuse for his folly.
if we eliminate the Creator, we must assume that life is generated spontaneously from lifeless matter. spontaneous generation is de fide (note: loosely 'necessary for the 'faith'?) for the atheists. unfortunately, all attempts to prove the possibility of spontaneous generation have failed completely. 'spontaneous generation, wrote weismann, in spite of all vain efforts to demonstrate it, remains for me a logical necessity'.
wismann's conception of 'logical necessity' would not be endorsed by a logician.
logic does not compel us to accept a conclusion against all the weight of evidence, merely because we entertain a sentimental affection for a premiss, such as weismann's premiss, 'ther is no God', whose truth we have assumed without adequate proof. on the contrary, the laws of reasoning compel us to reconsider any premiss which leads to a conclusion about which adequate proof is lacking.
the real problem is to explain the reluctance of weismann and others to accept the theistic hypothesis, for it is difficult to understand why anybody should reject with joy a belief which holds out some hope of survival to the individual and which reads some significance into the cosmic process. nor is it easy to understand the fascination of that mechanistic interpretation of life which reduces the universe
103 to an aimless interplay of atoms unredeemed from futility by the least hint of final purpose.
i have described the mechanistic interpretation of the universe as the VICTORIAN HERESY. the heresy in question has its roots in the past, but it reached its most rigorous development in the late victorian era and passed its zenith before the victorian age came to an end.
this heresy was the result of a suppressed phobia, of a complex in the proper sense of that much abused term. the concise oxford dictionary defines 'complex' as 'a mental abnormality set up by a body of suppressed tendencies'.
i do not suggest that the atheist, as such, is mentally abnormal, but i do maintain that the mentality of those who reject theism with relief is abnormal. it is not the disbelief, but the will to disbelieve, that calls for a diagnosis. theophobia, to borrow Father Wasman's useful term, is an excellent example of 'a mental abnormality set up by a body of suppressed tendencies'.
perhaps by analysing these suppressed tendencies we shall find the clue for which we are seeking.
theophobia is a very usual complaint among the products of a calvinistic upbringing.
'if you can realise, writes mr. shaw, himself a product and a reaction from irish protestantism, which has many affinities with calvinism, how insufferably the world was oppressed by the notion that everything that happened was an arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal God of dangerous, jealous and cruel personal character, so that even the relief of the pains of maternity by means of chloroform was objected to as interference with His arrangements
104 which He would probably resent, you will understand how the world jumped at D'.
perhaps, but the jump was by no means a 'logical necessity'.
it is irrational to jump at atheism merely because one rejects with relief a particularly unpleasant and a particularly stupid interpretation of theism.
similarly, the high spirited rebel against victorian society was swayed by emotion rather than by logic in his identification of God with the smug respectability of the possessing classes. in england, it is true, nonconformity has provided the Radical with a safety valve and has thus enabled him to dissociate God from the Conservative Party...
105 ..there are few intellectual pleasures more wholly satisfying than those associated with the discovery of the clue to some complicated natural process, such as evolution. Darwinism appealed to the scientific world because Dism appeared to be a key which opened many doors, a single explanation for the manifold variety of living forms. it is, perhaps, conceivable that the various species were created separately by God, but a premature acceptance of this solution is to be deprecated. it is too easy, too much like looking up the results of a sum at the end of the book before you have tried to work out the sum in question.
the anti-religious bias of the victorian scientists was due not only to such motives, motives which command respect, but also to the dictates of fashion, which are as potent in the scientific world as in the world of society.
christianity was definitely unfashionable in the world of victorian science...
106 ...Prof. j.b.s. haldane has recently affirmed his conviction that 'the meaning of the visible world is to be found in the invisible'. 'if i thought, he adds, that the aims of science and art were merely material i should belong to some church. but i believe that the scientist is trying to express absolute truth and the artist absolute beauty'.
107 what exactly does prof. haldane mean by the 'invisible' world? what does he mean by 'absolute truth'? surely it is unscientific to interlard one's criticisms of creeds, which at least made their meaning clear, with cryptical phrases, to the significance of which prof. haldane provides no clue.
Aquinas would never have made use of an expression like 'absolute truth' until he had carefully defined what he meant by 'absolute', and until he had thought out the conclusions which followed form the belief in 'absolute truth'. Aq is a lucid writer precisely because he treated words and phrases with respect and knew that exact definition must precede intelligent discussion.
the theist, of course, knows exactly what he means by absolute truth and absolute beauty and knows exactly why he believes in an invisible world, but it is difficult to see in what intelligible sense these terms could be used by those who reject theism...
religion, properly regarded, is a branch of scientific research, an important branch which is concerned, not merely
108 with significance of fossils, but with the significance of the universe as a whole. it is irrational to be deterred from this particular form of scientific research merely because religion is often represented as if it were nothing more than a prophylactic against vice...
it is, however, conceivable that a man may accept the theistic solution, not because he is in a state of morbid anxiety about the salvation of his soul, but because he has a strong prejudice in favour of drawing rational inferences from the available evidence. theism is a criterion, not of morality, but of intelligence. the devils also believe and tremble and in so far as they believe, they are, at least, intelligent devils.
CHAPTER 10 - BIAS
114 a trained scientist should be as expert in shifting evidence as a judge, but in one respect, at least, the victorian scientist compares unfavourably with judges.
judges are guided by certain rational principles in estimating the effect of human bias, but the victorian scientist proceeded on the unwarrantable assumption that he was entitled to disregard the arguments of any scientist who could be proved to have a bias in favour of theism.
it was assumed that you could dispose of the arguments of an anti-Darwinian by the simple expedient of proving that he had a christian bias. it would, of course, be equally rational to assume that the arguments of a Darwinian could be refuted by proving that he had an atheistic bias...
115 i suggest that the law of bias might be formulated in some such terms as these:
'bias must be allowed for in estimating the value of evidence, but not in estimating the validity of arguments'.
a few illustrations will, i hope, convince the reader that this law is sound.
in estimating the value of the evidence for a ghost story, we must allow for the bias of a witness known to be a convinced Spiritualist, for a spiritualist starts his investigations with a bias in favour of ghosts and is therefore, more likely than an atheist to mistake some natural for a supernatural phenomenon.
...on the other hand, it is childish to meet an argument by an accusation of bias. the question of bias arises only in connection with the evidence for the facts on which the argument is based and it can therefore only concern the witnesses who have been cited in support of those facts.
you may logically refute an argument by alleging bias against a witness, but you do not strengthen your case by alleging bias against the arguer himself unless he has gone into the witness box.
116 if an theist is arguing with a christian on the subject of miracles, he is entitled to argue that the apostles were biased in favour of the supernatural, but he is not entitled to continue, 'and you of course, are biased in favour of christianity'. it is obvious that both atheist and christian who take part in the discussion are biased in favour of their own particular views.
my only defence for inflicting these truisms upon the reader is the fact that they have yet to be recognised as such by orthodox science.
prof hartog, for instance, tells us the Darwin's most formidable critic, the distinguished scientist Prof. mivart, 'was regarded as negligible since he evidently held a brief for a party standing outside the scientific world'. it would be as rational to regard huxley as negligible because he evidently held a brief for a party standing outside the theological world, or, indeed, to regard the arguments of any barrister as negligible because he was clearly biased in favour of his client. all barristers are 'biassed', but a sound argument is no less sound because advanced by a barrister with a bias in favour of his client.
the Darwininians would, indeed, have been more effective controversialists had they been trained in a court of law to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant considerations.
on one occasion, the counsel for a murderer staggered the court by assuring the jury that he was personally convinced of the innocence of his client. the judge administered a devastating rebuke. 'we are not interested in you personal views. your duty is to state the case for your client. your arguments will be no weaker even if you believe your client to be guilty and no stronger even if you believe him to be innocent'.
117 again, if the effect of the personal equation were more generally understood, we should be spared those acrimonious criticisms of arguments advanced by amateurs against the conclusions of specialists.
...the evidence of an amateur experimentalist on some problem of research would not weigh heavily against the view of an expert researcher, but if expert and amateur are arguing on the basis of facts admitted by the expert, it is ridiculous for the expert to challenge the credentials of the amateur.
the specialist who has convicted an amateur of elementary blunders is entitled to attribute his errors to lack of technical training, but he is not entitled to say, 'i am right because i am recognised as a specialist and you are wrong because you possess no academic qualifications whatever'. this is much as if an eminent counsel were to urge the jury to ignore the arguments of a young barrister on the ground that he had just been called to the bar.
118 i have collected, in this book, many examples of bad logic which i attribute to an anti-religious bias clouding the reasoning powers of men for whose intellect i have a profound respect, but unless i could produce objective evidence in support of this charge, i should not feel entitled to mention the personal factor. in other words, i have introduced the question of bias to explain the weakness of an argument the unsoundness of which has previously been demonstrated. once a man has been fairly convicted of unreason, it is often profitable to seek for the explanation of his sin against sound logic, but you must prove the crime before you begin to reconstruct it.
CHAPTER 11 - AMATEUR VERSUS PROFESSIONALS
119 the facile triumph of Darwinism was partly due to 'Theophobia', partly to the deplorable strategy of ecclesiastical critics and partly to the fact that Darwin's two most effective opponents. mivart and samuel butler, were both discounted, the first because he was a roman catholic and the second because he was an amateur in science.
the Darwinians owed a great debt to men like the Bishop of oxford and gladstone, whose ill-judged attacks helped to create the legend of a conflict between science and religion.
120 it is generally recognised today, even in scientific circles, the butler's criticisms of D were unusually brilliant. prof. j.a. thomson described his book of evolution as 'a keen witted criticism of orthodox Dwinism'. there are many flattering references to butler in
121 the centenary volume of 'D and modern science'. prof. bateson, for instance, described smuel butler as 'the most brilliant, and by far the most interesting, of D's opponents'.
...none the less, B's criticisms were ignored and B himself was completely boycotted, by the scientific world. and not only by the scientific world. his later books were virtually ignored in that lay press which took its opinions in scientific matters from the recognised leaders of orthodox science.
Butler was boycotted for a variety of reasons. his brilliant qualities of irony and humour told against him in that serious age. he expressed the lowest opinion of the members of the royal society and went out of his way to irritate the very audiences to which hsi work should have appealed. not content with attacking Darwinism, he attacted charles D himself and finally he was damned as an amateur, as a man who had no scientific research to his credit, impudently trespassing of the preserves of the specialist.
the recognition which Butler has received since his death is a reflection on those scientists who ignored him during his lifetime.
if the theories which he advanced deserved attention, the manner in which he advanced them should not have deterred the true scientist from giving them careful examination. 'sit down before fact as a little child, wrote Huxley. B's books were packed with new and stimulating facts. the scientist should not concern himself with the dress in which facts are clothed. truth is truth even when proclaimed by the most irritating of prophets.
124 in 1877, samuel butler published his book, 'Life and Habit', perhaps the most brilliant book on a scientific subject which has ever been published by a layman in scientific matters.
the main argument of the book is an attempt to identify instinct and memory. in the opening chapter, B proves that no action is really proficient until it has become unconscious. the novice learning the piano consciously deciphers the musical score, but the expert reads the score subconsciously. the same holds good in reading and writing; the beginner studies the individual letters, the expert reads whole phrases subconsciously. knowledge of any subject 'till we have left off feeling conscious of the possession of that knowledge and of the grounds on which it rests.
'no thief, for example, is such an utter thief-so good a thief-as the kleptomaniac. until he has become a kleptomaniac and can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief, with many unthievish notions still clinging to him. yet the kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he can steal at all, much less that he can steal so well. he would be shocked if he were to know the truth. so again, no man is a great hypocrite until he has left off knowing that he is a hypocrite'.
instinct, according to Butler, is the unconscious memory of actions which we have performed on innumerable previous occasions. there is no real branch of continuity between a man, his parents and his ancestors and B accordingly extends the scope of memory to the memory of actions which we have performed in the persons of our remote ancestors.
125 Butler points out that a baby of a day old 'sucks (which involves the whole principle of the pump and hence a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears-all most difficult and complicated operations, involving a knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance'.
it is incredible, Butler argues, that a baby a day old should be able to perform all these complicated operations so perfectly without long practice and without previous experience. from this, B deduces that the baby has indeed enjoyed both long practice and previous experience. the baby has been performing these actions for millions of years in the persons of its ancestors. long practice has thus made perfect, conscious into subconscious knowledge.
actions performed in this automatic manner did at one time call for conscious thought and were liable to failure. Butler proceeds to show 'that we are most conscious of, and have most control over, such habits as speech and the upright position, acquisitions which are comparatively recent in the history of the human race. but we are less conscious of and have less control over, eating and drinking and swallowing and breathing, seeing that these were acquisitions of our pre-human ancestry, and that we are most conscious over and have least control of, our digestion and circulation, which are, geologically speaking, of
126 extreme antiquity. we have repeated the action so frequently and on such innumerable occasions that the last stage of conscious knowledge has passed into that unconscious knowledge which is described as instinct.
indeed, 'in the case of the circulation of the blood the whole performance has become so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery that we could do it at all was considered one of the highest flights of human genius.
the text on which B continued to preach is all summed up in one sentence: 'we all become introspective when we find that we do not know our business and whenever we are introspective we may generally suspect that we are on the verge of unproficiency...the baby that becomes aware of its breathing does not know how to breathe 'and will suffer for his ignorance and incapacity'.
in other words, consciousness and volition have a tendency 'to vanish as soon as practice has rendered any habit exceedingly familiar, so that the mere presence of an elaborate but unconscious performance shall carry with it a presumption of infinite practice'.
128 to B 'the professional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge for his ideal and aim, was a medicine man, priest, augur-useful perhaps in his way, but to be carefully watched by all who value freedom of thought and person lest with opportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst type.
not content with blackguarding the audience to whom his work should most appeal, he went on to depreciate what work itself and its author in his finest vein of irony.
133 bishops continued to hobnob at the Athenaeum with men who preached a philosophy pregnant with the seed of social disruption. Church and State and Society paid homage to philosophers whose doctrines endangered the very fabric of civilisation, doctrines which were destined to provide the driving force behind Bolshevism. it is no accident that D is almost the only englishman referred to with unqualified reverence in Trotsky's memoirs.
D himself was by no means a militant atheist, but he was certainly not a christian and was indirectly responsible, more than any other individual of his century, for that decline in institutional religion which dates from the publication of 'the origin of species', and which is far from arrested today. and yet, when he died, the church of england paid him the greatest compliment in her power, in spite of the fact that he had not subscribed to her formulas and in spite of the fact that he had provided her most bitter enemies with ammunition...D was buried in westminster abbey as it the abbey were a mere pantheon rather than a christian church.
CHAPTER 12 - CHARLES DARWIN-THE MAN
137 ..D never failed to acknowledge that lyell's 'principles of geology, his companion on the voyage of the beagle, had been the source of his inspiration....
138 ..in his tenth edition he reprinted the original abstract of lamarck's doctrine of transmutation, the abstract which D had read and he added: 'i have thought it right to do this justice to L , in order to show how nearly the opinions taught by him at the commencement of this century resembled those now in vogue amongst a large body of naturalists respecting the indefinite variability of species and the progressive development in past time of the organic world. there is no room, therefore, for suspicion that my account of the Lian hypothesis written by me 35 years ago, derived any colouring for my own views tending to bring it more into harmony with the theory since promulgated by D'.
D was most annoyed. he strongly objected to Dism being described, as lyell had described it, as a mere modification of L's doctrine of development and progression.
practical ignorance' is not an adequate explanation for D's failure to do justice to L and Erasmus Darwin. he came of evolutionary stock. his own grandfather was a distinguished preacher of evolution. he had not the least excuse for 'practical ignorance'. evolution was in the air, though D himself tried to deny this fact in his autobiographical sketch...
139 ..D, undoubtedly, should have prefaced the first edition of 'the origin of species' with an historical summary of evolutionary thought. he should have shown in
140 what respect his own doctrine of ev differed from the doctrine of his predecessors. instead of which neither buffon nor ED, his own grandfather, was mentioned until at least 6000 copies of the book had been sold and L was dismissed with a few contemptuous references.
again, when D found that the public were beginning to identify his contribution (natural selection) with the theory of evolution, he should at once have taken steps to rectify this injustice to his predecessors. he did none of these things...
142 ..,he was at first alone, as his son wrote, or felt himself to be so in maintaining a rational workable theory of ev. it was therefore natural that he should speak of 'my theory'.
... D was naturally a very modest man, but no modesty could have been entirely proof against the flood of fulsome panegyrics of which he was the victim. D was puzzled. he was never really convinced by the conspiracy to represent him 'as the greatest of living men'. none the
143 less, the chorus of praise could not leave him entirely unaffected...
D, is short, erred not as the result of conscious meanness, but as the result of a genuine prejudice against L based on a complete lack of sympathetic understanding of his work.
Butler's attack must have come as a rude shock, not only because it was the one discordant note in a chorus of praise, but because its patent injustice was difficult to disprove.
it is maddening for a man who is upheld by an overwhelming interior conviction of innocence to be confronted by apparently unanswerable evidence of guilt...
D was consoled by the loyalty of the scientific world, which treated B as if he were a pariah dog who had attempted to bite a saint.
144 B's attack was ignored, or rather countered by exaggerated references to D's generosity...
D, indeed, remained unspoilt by success. Dism became one of the most dogmatic of creeds, but there
145 nothing dogmatic or self-assertive about D...
D was indeed, too diffident ever to develop into a dogmatist. the whole tone of the 'origin' is, as his son said, charming and almost pathetic; it is the tone of a man who, convinced of the truth of his own views, hardly expects to convince others; just the reverse to the style of a fanatic who tries to force belief on his readers'.
nobody who visited D in his own home could have any doubt as to his essential modesty. he did not realise that most of his visitors regarded it as a great honour to be received by him at Down.
146 was..D a genius? was his great reputation the reward of 'luck or cunning'?
his academic career was undistinguished. he spent 7 years at shrewsbury without showing any signs of intellectual distinction...
..his father soon came to the conclusion that he would not make a success as a doctor and decided that his son should take orders. ..D accordingly matriculated at Christ's college, cambridge, in 1828, and took his degree in 1831. he mad no attempt to read for honours...his main interest at cambridge was entomology..
147 'but no pursuit at cambridge was followed with nearly so much earnestness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles...
he attempted mathematics: but without success...'the work was repugnant to me, chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra...
this confession is interesting. in later years the criticism of natural selection which made most impression on him was contained in an article which appeared in the North British Review and which referred to 'a vague use of an imperfectly understood doctrine of chance among Dwiniam supporters, a misunderstanding which led Dwinians to believe that species could be changed by the survival of a few individuals in a century through a similar and favourable variation'. had D been a mathematician, he would have realised the immense odds against the possibility of a species being radically transformed by natural selection.
148 ..is it unkind to suggest the 20 years seems rather a short period to transform the D of 33 who gave these great thoughts to the world into the D of 53 who was hailed as the profoundest thinker of his age, 'the greatest of living men'?
D's warmest admirers could not describe him as a clear writer. 'his english, complained huxley, is sometimes wonderful. (note: web. 'incomprehensible') D was well aware of this fact. 'i have as much difficulty as ever, he wrote in his autobiographical sketch, in expressing myself clearly and concisely, and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time. his son, sir francis D, tells us that ..D often laughed and grumbled at himself
149 'for the difficulty which he found in writing english, saying, for instance, that if a bad arrangement of a sentence was possible, he should be sure to adopt it.
clear thinkers usually express themselves clearly, but it does not necessarily follow that confused writing is the product of confused thought.
D's forte was, perhaps, observation rather than philosophy. he was an accurate observer, not only of natural phenomena, but also of his own mental processes. his own account of the mental processes whereby his religious convictions and aesthetic susceptibilities gradually atrophied is an excellent example both of his careful, accurate observation and of his inability to draw logical deductions from such observations.
after describing the devotional mood produced in his mind by the grandeur of a brazilian forest, he adds: 'i well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body, but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such feelings and convictions to rise in my mind. it may be truly said that i am like a man who has become colour blind'.
D's theistic conviction gradually become weaker. his waning sense of the supernatural coincided with the decrease in his aesthetic susceptibilities. as a young man poetry gave him great pleasure; as an old man he tells us that he should no endure to read a line of it. 'i have tried lately to read shakespeare and found him so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. i have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. my mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the
150 atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, i cannot conceive'.
here we have D recording accurately the changes in his own mental outlook. the weakness of his reasoning is at once apparent when he begins to philosophise.
he confesses that he is 'impressed by the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. thus reflecting i feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and i deserve to be called a Theist.l this conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as i can remember, when i wrote the 'origin'.. and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations, become weaker. but then arises the doubt-can the mind of man, which has, as i fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?...but then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. would any one trust the convictions of a monkey's mind and are there convictions in such a mind?'
a profound thinker would never have been guilty of such inconsistent reasoning. if D was not prepared to trust his mind when it drew the 'grand conclusion' that God existed, why was he prepared to trust it when it drew the depressing conclusion that a mind of such bestial
151 origin could not be trusted to draw any conclusion at all?
D's mind at different periods of his life led him to two firm convictions: a. that God exists and B. that Man is descended from the lower animals.
if as the result of b he lost confidence in his own mental processes, he might well have rejected both beliefs, but to retain the latter belief, which was the source of his scepticism and to reject the former, was illogical. it was, indeed, absurd to state on the same page that he 'fully believed' in the bestial origin of his own mind, and that this same bestial origin did not entitle him 'fully to believe' in anything.
it is difficult to understand the great popularity enjoyed by ' the origin'.. outside scientific circles excepting on the hypothesis that fashion will create a circulation of the book of the moment irrespective of the style in which it is written. 'i have been reading 'the origin' again slowly, wrote huxley, with the view of picking out the essentials for the obituary notice. nothing entertains me more than to hear people calling it easy reading. exposition was not D's forte-and his english is sometimes wonderful. but there is a marvellous dub sagacity about him-like that of a sort of miraculous dog-and he gets to the truth by ways as dark as those of the Heathen Chinee'./
H was on of D's warmest admirers. indeed, he described himself as 'Ds bulldog'. genius is a big word. can we properly apply it to a man who according to his warmest admirer, a. wrote bad english, b.
152 had no gift for exposition, c. arrived at a conclusion with which few modern scientists agree, by d. 'way as dark as those of the Heathen Chinee'?
D himself mad no claim to outstanding talent. there is no reason to attribute to his modesty rather than to his habitual accurate of observation his statement that he had 'no quickness of apprehension or wit' or to doubt his own admirable summary of the reasons for his own scientific success:
'therefor, my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as i can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. of these, the most important have been the love of science-unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject-industry in observing and collecting facts-and a fair share of invention as well as common sense. with such moderate abilities as i possess, it is truly surprising that i should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points..
CHAPTER 13 -THE BANKRUPTCY OF NATURALISM
153 1. naturalism defined
the concise oxford dictionary defines 'naturalism' as 'a view of the world that excludes the supernatural or spiritual'.
'nat', in other words, is a polite synonym for 'atheism'.
now a philosophy in which there is no place for the supernatural or the spiritual is a philosophy in which there is no place for God. and yet most of the victorians who championed a crudely mechanical view of the universe usually refused to describe themselves as atheists. their dislike of this uncompromising label was symptomatic of thinkers who shrank from clear cut conclusions.
..'nat' is only 'atheism' in evening dress.
155 2 - naturalism and the individual
156 ..what does mr. wells (note: author of 'the time machine') mean by 'the immortal soul of the race'? does this phrase convey any clear cut idea to mr. wells' mind? no, for mr. wells has refused to think out the implications of extinction. he shies away from the logical conclusion of that grim premiss and drugs his mind (and ours) with soothing phrases.
..of course, the race is not immortal. it is doomed to final extinction in the shipwreck of the solar system. mr. wells' phrase is, therefore, in exact and indefensible.
here is another instance of the substitution of metaphor for definition from mr. wells' 'outline of history': 'the life to which i belong uses me and will pass on beyond me and i am content'.
it is absurd to begin by denying the existence of a personal Creator and then to proceed to personify 'life'. this confusion of thought is, of course,k due to a failure of nerve. mr. wells has not the courage to face the bleak and scientific universe of naturalism, a universe in which there is no single permanent achievement of the least value.
157 mr. (note: author of 'the time machine') wells has not the courage to face the bleak and scientific universe of naturalism, a universe in which there is no single permanent achievement of the least value.
158 mr. j.b.s. haldane, in his contribution to 'points of view', remarks: 'i shall last out my time and then finish. this prospect does not worry me, because some of my works will not die when i do.
i do not see that the evil of extinction is mitigated by the fact that a pale penumbra of personality-a man's work-survives the extinction of his real personality by a few years or even by a few centuries
i should not, as it happens, doubt mr. haldane's sincerity if he confined himself to suggest that he does not fear death.
i have it on good authority that few officers in the war showed a more indecent contempt for danger. he seems to have regarded death as a biological phenomenon of no importance. in this paper he tells us that as a biologist he is interested in his body. 'i like to study the performance of mine as my friends do that of their motor cycles or receiving sets. it amuses me to know what my heart does when i run upstairs'. mr. haldane was also amused during the war to discover what his heart did when exposed to a variety of poison gases with which he was experimenting. he used his body in the most dangerous of biological experiments. he has given proof that he does not fear death, but death is not extinction and the man who does not fear death may well and indeed should dread extinction.
mr. haldane devotes a great part of his paper to discussing death rates. 'i am, he writes, a citizen of the british empire, which includes the great Dominions. our
159 highbrow friends complain that the dominions have produced little great art or literature and i answer that at least they have done something unique. before the war, the average expectation of life of a baby born in new zealand was 60 years, in australia 57..in denmark..56.. england also ran. i am proud to belong to a commonwelth which has won the first and second places in the great race against death'.
i cannot follow this reasoning. he lets us think it is a matter of great importance that mr. jones shall exist for 60 years rather than 50..but that it is a matter of no importance if he ceases to exist at 60..instead of continuing to exist for all eternity. if we increase our expectation of life by 10%, we need not worry about our contribution to literature and art, but it is a matter of indifference whether we succeed in proving our expectation of life is eternal...
160
3 - naturalism and race
mr bertrand russell must be given credit for a courage, rare among sceptics, with which he faces the logical consequences of naturalism. he writes as follows:
'that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth,
161 his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built'.
progress is a myth. science does not support the shallow optimism of the more enthusiastic prophets of evolution. ev recognises no ethical values. those who are fittest to survive are not necessarily 'the best'. 'the theory of ev, wrote huxley, encourages no millennial anticipations. if for millions of years our globe has taken the upward road, yet some time the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. the most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and the intelligence of me can ever arrest the procession of the great year'.
and again: 'the prospect of obtaining untroubled happiness or of a state which can, even remotely, deserve the title of perfection, appears to me to be as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled before the eyes of poor humanity'.
naturalism can provide no real incentive for individual or corporate effort. at best, nat can only preach resignation.
by his special direction, three lines written by his wife were inscribed on huxley's tombstone:
'be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep
for still He giveth His beloved sleep
and if an endless sleep He wills, so best.
for all their beauty, these lines are irrational. the 'waiting hearts' had every reason to 'be afraid'. the last line should read:
'and if an endless sleep He wills, tant pis'.
4 - naturalism and ethics
the victorian rationalist was always incensed at the mere suggestion that immorality was the logical consequence of his creed. this foul slander, so he maintained, was the creation of envenomed and panic-stricken orthodoxy. it could not survive the most cursory study of available evidence, the evidence provided by the exemplary private lives of men like huxley, darwin and tyndall.
in this, as in everything else, the victorian rationalists were less rational that the victorian bishops. the victorian rationalists were living on Christian capital. they had inherited from puritan ancestors prejudices which were plainly inconsistent with their creed.
the bishops were perfectly correct in asserting that the traditional morality depended on the traditional faith, for
163 they knew that chastity is difficult and vice easy and that religion has only contrived to erect a very shaky barrier between man and the brute, a barrier which would collapse if man could be persuaded that, in effect, he was nothing better than a brute.
the militant rationalist was usually a well meaning but muddle headed man. the much advertised austerity of his own private life was a tribute, as he failed to realise, to the christian tradition which he was doing his best to destroy. his artless belief that the christian code would survive the christian creed was sustained by a mystical confidence in the common sense of mankind, that common sense which prevents mankind from taking the rationalist very seriously. the rationalist, though he devoted all his energies to proving that men were no better than the beasts, would have been startled and surprised had mankind begun to behave like beasts. it was because his own muddled code bore no relation to his own muddled creed that he assumed that a similar divorce between creed and code would prove a permanent feature of any society which rejected supernaturalism. we, who have seen a great country officially adopting materialism as its national creed, have less excuse than bradlaugh or haeckel for failing to appreciate the accurate relationship between creed and code.
i admit, of course, that naturalism is not inconsistent with a scheme of rewatds and punishments. to the murderer who pleads that he is the servant of natural law, and as such is not reponsible for the crimes which he has committed, the judge is fully entitled to reply: 'neither am i responsible for condemning you to death. console yourself with the reflection that the execution which will
164 take place in 4 weeks' time will be the result of 'a mutual inter-reaction according to definite laws of the forces possessed by the molecules of the primitive nebulosity of which the universe consisted'.
society will always find means for dealing with crimes against life and against property and a prudent fear of punishment will always be a powerful social factor even in a materialistic faith. but conscience, a far subtler social factor, would disappear in a social state where the citizens were saturated with the doctrines of naturalism.
conscience and moral judgment are out of place in a world of machines. if a dishonest and plausible salesman palms off on you a second hand car which breaks down on its first hill, you will be disappointed with the car and indignant with the salesman. you will reserve your moral judgment for the salesman. if, however, you are a consistent determinist, you will be forced to admit that the salesman was no more responsible for his moral defects than the car for its mechanical defects. you will have no right to discriminate between moral and material defects.
whatever may be the case with the moral indignation provoked by the failings of other people, there is, at least, something to be said for the social value of the moral indignation provoked by one's own misdoings. 'it may be, as lord balfour remarked, a small matter that determinism should render it thoroughly irrational to feel righteous indignation at the misconduct of other people. it cannot be wholly without importance that it should render it equally irrational to feel righteous indignation at our own.
165 self-condemnation, repentance, remorse and the whole train of cognate emotions, are really so useful for the promotion of virtue, that it is a pity to find them at a stroke thus deprived of all reasonable foundation, and reduced, if they are to survive at all, to the position of amiable but unintelligent weaknesses.
materialists have tried to explain morality as an ingenious trick whereby nature contrives to cheat the individual by subordinating some, at least, of his inclinations to the good of the race. i do not think our sophisticated descendants will be so easy to deceive. they will smile at this well intentioned trickery of nature. they will argue that they owe no duty to the race, that the race consists of individuals like themselves, individuals who are permitted a few brief, futile moments of consciousness before they pass out into the eternal night. why should the individual jones incommode himself for the individual brown, robinson and smith?
altruism for the benefit of one's immediate family or closest friends might survive, but sacrifice for mere abstractions such as the race or posterity would disappear rapidly in a society saturated with naturalism.
a lady, for whom i have a great respect and who is associated with many public movements, was discussing the breakdown of moral restraint since the war. religion, she explained, had failed. the young people no longer went to church and were uynimpressed by appeals to the christian code. what was the remedy? 'education is the remedy, she continued, education and eugenics. we must
165 teach the young people that this sort of thing is bad for the race. we must impress upon them their duty to the race.
my friend had, of course, been affected by the modern habit of indulging in great windy generalisations, generalisations which they never condescend to test by a concrete case. if my friend is right, some such scene as this should be quite probable:
a moonlight night on the river, two young people who are passionately in love with each other and who are just on the point of yielding to one of the strongest forces in nature. both of them are thoroughly modern young people, and have, of course, no use for religion. would the following scene in a novel impress you as plausible?
'no, my dear, i am sorry. i have changed my mind. i was forgetting about the future of the race. self-restraint has a definite eugenic basis...
167..bertrand russell, in his book, 'marriage and morals', cordially supports the learned judge. he is still to some extent infected by the christian tradition, as he maintains that 'the stability of marriage' is a matter of 'considerable importance' where there are children. but he attaches no importance to sexual relationships which are childless. he regrets that happy marriages should still be imperilled by the foolish prejudices which still linger in society against casual infidelity. he assures us that it is thoroughly unhealthy for either husband or wife to 'close their minds against the approaches of love from elsewhere'. a little adultery every now and then oils the wheels of marriage.
168 these views would have shocked those serious fold, the victorian agnostics. the victorian agnostic attacked the christian creed. his grandson is questioning the credentials of the moral code which was founded on that creed. the grandfather, if he is still alive, is finding it rather difficult to discover the correct answer. i sympathise with the grandson. of the two, he seems to be better entitled to describe himself as a rationalist. i have never been able to solve the riddle of those 'who have not got the faith and will not have the fun'. that mistake, at least, is avoided by the prophets of the New Morality.
mr. bertrand russell, of course, lives in a country which is stll nominally christian, and which is still very largely influenced by the christian tradition. in consequence..R would be condemned by his bolshevik friends as a very half hearted materialist. the russian materialist is far more consistent and we should indeed be grateful to the russians for carrying out with magnificent thoroughness two great experiments. the english, with their traditional love of compromise, have never put communism into practice as a political or materialism into practice as a philosophic creed. russia is the proper laboratory for experiments of this description. thanks to lenin, we are now in a position to know exactly what results follow when a nation is saturated with the materialistic creed. the russians, unlike our own anaemic english materialists, have had the courage both to practise and to preach materialism. they have succeeded, where we have failed, in living down to 'naturalism'. the accuracy of the following account of conditions in russia cannot be disputed, for it appeared originally in the bolshevist paper, pravda,
169 and was quoted from that paper in rene fulp-miller's monumental work, 'the mind and face of bolshevism':
'our young people have certain principles in affairs of love. all these principles are governed by the belief that the nearer you approach to extreme, and, as it were, animal primitiveness, the more communistic you are. every 'Komsomolets', even every member of a labour faculty, whose aim is to raise the intelligence of the working classes, every student, man or girl, considers it as axiomatic that in affairs of love they shoudl impose the least possible restraint on themselves. a second main proposition in these axioms of love is as follows: every 'Komsomoltsa', every 'Rabfaka', every woman student, on whom the choice of one of these young men of strong principles has fallen, must obey unquestioningly'. the third point of the system, which, in practice, is always at the same time a drama, is also a principle. the figure of the doctor appears...his is the revolution of 'Komsomolets love'!'
...from what she says these institutions owe much of their success to these affairs. that it is the girls who suffer from conditions of this kind is shown by the fact that of the promoters of these 'African Nights', 70% are young men and only 30% girls.
170 'these conditions frequently lead directly to a terrorising of their girl comrades by these lads. madame smidovich quotes the case of a quite young girl who refused a proposal after two attempts and was rewarded with insults. in this heavy sexual atmosphere suicides abound. much of the blame for all this is due not only to the new theories, but also to the frightful housing conditions and the undisciplined way of living of young people. as is well known, there is no public criticism in soviet russia, so all the newspaper accounts of occurrences of this kind are influenced by the Government; this is the only possible explanation of the fact that you find only reproaches levelled against 'disgusting bourgeois ideas'. and no unprejudiced judgments on the unparalleled debauchery and its immeasurably harmful effect on the young'.
5 - Naturalism and truth
170 'i believe that Truth is to be preferred to falsehood', is the first aricle in the scientific creed, but naturalism provides the scientist with no justification for his faith. theism and theism alone, can provide the scientist with a rational basis for his creed...
171 ..a quarter of a century later, Prof. eddington developed mr. balfour's contention that unaided science is impotent to justify its existence or to vindicate its criteria, or even to prove that truth should be preferred to falsehood:
'if, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the say in which thought succeed one another in the mind. now the thought of '7 times 9' in a boy's mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of '65'. what has gone wrong? in the intervening moments of cogitation
172 everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. however closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought-that it may be correct or incorrect. the machinery cannot be anything but correct. we say that the brain which produces '7 time 9 are 63' is better than the brain which produces '7 times 9 are 65'; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law-laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. dismiss the idea that natural law can swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single handed'.
science, of course, in so far as it increases our material comfort, requires no justification, but the true scientist would not stoop to defend his creed on the ground that science provides us with wireless, drainage and motor cars. these things, he regards as the mere bye-product of his ideal quest.
173
6 - Naturalism and Aesthetics
naturalism cannot explain the reaction to beauty, for nat provides no basis for discriminating between a grouping of atoms which produces beauty, on the one hand, and ugliness, on the other hand. the chatter of a chimpanzee and a sonata rendered by kreisler hav precisely the same status in the world of natural law.
summary
naturalism is bankrupt. it offers us the universe without significance, a creed without a code and life without
174 hope. it deprives science of its rationale, beauty of its value and history of its meaning.
the bankruptcy of naturalism does not, i admit, demonstrate the truth of supernaturalism. we cannot prove that the universe is not irrational, but we know beyond all need of proof that unreason does not rul the universe. the scientists no less than the theologians tacitly assume that the universe is rational, an assumption which naturalism is not entitled to make, an assumption which forces us back to some form of supernatural philosophy as the only possible escape from the materialistic impasse.
CHAPTER 14 - WHY 'RATIONALIST'?
175 RATIONALISM, n. practice of explaining the supernatural in religion in a way consonant with reason, or of treating reason as the ultimate authority in relation as elsewhere; theory that reason is the foundation of certainty in knowledge (opp. empiricism, sensationalism) - the concise oxfor dictionary
rationalism owes much of its success to its name. it was a stroke of genius to invent a name which begs the whole question at issue and a triumph of audacity to persuade christians to describe their opponents as rationalists, thus labelling themselves, bu implication, as anti rational. the question at issue is not whether reason is to be preferred to unreason, but whether the theistic or the atheistic conception of the universe is the more rational-in other words, whether the theists are right. had the rationalists described themselves as 'rightists', the impertinence would have been more obvious, but, in effect, no greater, for 'rationalist' means 'rightist', seeing that conclusions based on reason are right and conclusions which are based on unreason are wrong.
i have no serious quarred with the genuine agnostic
176 who suspends his judgment. that the available evidence is insufficient to demonstrate either theism or atheism is a claim for which a reasonable argument can be advanced, but the missionary enterprise of victorian rationalism was directed, not by genuine agnostics, but by men who were convinced that they had arrived at a satisfactory 'gnosis', and that it was their duty to deprive their fellow men of the consolations of religion.
their gloomy faith was the spiritual product of puritanism. calvin made things uncomfortable for the cheerful sceptic and the victorian rationalist tried to make things equally uncomfortable for the cheerful believer. to those who argued that even if atheism were true, it would still be best to leave people the comforting illusion of a loving God, the militant rationalist replied sternly that truth is always to be preferred to falsehood and that we should sternly set our face against the use of palliatives.
now, if rationalism be, as the rationalists claim, founded on reason, the rationalist must be prepared to prove the first article of his creed-'i believe in truth'. but the rationalist who is challenged to demonstrate that truth is always to be preferred to falsehood shows signs of irritation as if you were taking an unfair controversial advantage. he is apt to reply that there are certain axioms which no sensible man should be required to prove. there well may be, but the obligation of truth is not one of them.
Prof. julian huxley, for instnce, wrote a long book, 'religion without revelation', in which he dismissed in one paragraph the belief in a personal God. 'it is quite clear, he wrote, that the idea of personality in God is put there by man'. of course, if this is quite clear,
177 there is nothing more to be said, and we need not pause to refute the long array of proofs for a personal God which have been advanced by a long array of unenlightened thinkers, greek, roman and christian. Prof H, withal that fine, hearty confidence of the man whose creed is based not on reason, but on faith, expects us to accept not only his negations, but his beliefs, on trust. 'what, then, do i believe? he writes. 'i believe in the first instance that it is necessary to believe something. complete scepticism does not work'. perhaps not, but the christian would not expect julian H to accept theism merely because 'complete atheism does not work'. for the christian realises that a creed must e supported by reason no less than by expediency.
H continues: 'truth is not merely truthfulness; it is also discovery and knowledge. i believe that the acquisition of knowledge is one of the fundamental aims of man; that truth will, in the long run, prevail, and is always to be preferred to expediency'.
Aquinas, a rationalist living in an age of reason, did not begin by assuming, but by proving, the articles of his creed. he developed his system, not from a highly arguable proposition such as thae theorem that truth is always to be preferred to expediencey, but from such modest premisses as the axiom that nothing moves unless it has been set in motion. no pupil of A would have been allowed to assume that truth should always be preferre to falsehood. he would have been expected to prove his proposition and if he had been unable to do so, he would have been sent to the bottom of the class and required to write out in a fair flowing hand the 23rd chapter of the second book
178 of the Summa contra Gentiles, in which A proves that the first cause of the universe is mind and that the last end of the universe must be the good of mind, that is, truth, and that in the contemplation of truth man finds the principal object of wisdom.
that truth is always to be preferred to expediency is a logical deduction from theistic premisses. that expediency should alawys be preferred to truth is a no less logical deduction from atheistic premisses.
certain configurations of matter produce in one brain the illusion of an all-loving God , in another brain the conviction that God Himself is a figment of the imagination. now, on the atheistic assuption, the movements of matter in the brain of the atheist are alike the product of natual law. by what right do those who maintain the supremacy of natural law discriminate between these varying sequences of matter, sequences dictated by that law? by what right does the atheist despise the victim of grovelling superstition? by what right does he take pride in his own intellectual superiority? credulity and scepticism are alike the outcome of forces over which neither atheist nor believer has the least control. and by what right does the atheist seek to deprive the superstitious of their super- stitions?
if life be nothing more than the flicker of a candle for a few fitful moments, and consciousness be nothing more than an idle spectator powerless to control the chance conglomerations of matter which create the illusion of personality; if the universe be nothing more than an endless rearrangement of atoms without plan and without purpose,
179 why, in the name of reason, should we refuse to dull the edge of mental pain with the frug of consoling falsehood and to render as easy as possible our pointless passage from the darkness of the womb to the oblivion of the grave?
what rational answer can the rationalist advance against the arguments of cicero, who declared that even if immortality was an illusion, he would still prefer to go through life consoled by this illusion, knowing full well that if he was mistaken, the sceptics would never have the laugh of him in the next world?
'quod si in hoc erro, qui animos hominum immortales esse credam, libenter erro nec mihi hunc errorem, quo delector dum vivo, extoqueri volo; sin mortuus, ut quidam minuti philosophi censent, nihil entiam, non vereor ne hunc errorem meum philosophi mortui irrideant'. (de senectute, 23, 85)
II. it is, perhaps, not surprising that a philosophy which cannot prove and which is impotent to justify, it fundamental assumptions should be riddled through and through with inconsistencies.
the note of moral indignation which permeates rationalistic literature is essentially irrational. indignation is a luxury in which the determinist is not entitled to indulge. the consistent rationalist cannot reproach Rome with the Inquisition, for Torquemada, like bradlaugh, represents a legitimate product of natural law. only those who believe in free will can rationally demand religious freedom. the only possible ethic for the determinist is resignation; the
180 only rational attitude is acquiescence in the status quo. the status quo is inevitable; therefore the status quo is right.
a determinist is entitled to take precautions against crime, just as the natives of an alpine valley take precautions against avalanches, but the consistent determinist has no right to pass moral judgments either on criminals or on avalanches. he is entitled to hang but not to criticise a murderer, to regret but not to despise stupidity, to resist but not to resent injustice, to promote but not to admire virtue.
the consistent determinist is not even entitled to say, 'you ought'. 'you ought' takes him into a region where the writ of natural law no longer runs. 'you ought' is, of course, the driving force behind all missionary endeavour. 'you ought to be a christian'..recognises that every man is free either to accept or to reject christianity. 'you ought to be a rationalist' says the militant rationalist, to which the christian is entitled to reply: 'my dear sir, on your own showing, my beliefs are determined for me by the movements of matter. why, then, should you seek to alter them?
the militant rationalist cannot afford to be consistent, or he would cease to be militant. 'drink, for you know not whence you come nor why', is the only logical deduction from his premisses. hedonism, grave or gay, is the only possible creed for the atheist. hence the paradox that the drive behind militant atheism is essentially a religious impulse. the atheist who wishes to convert the world to his views is sustained by irrational mysticism, by the mystical belief that truth is always to be preferred to falsehood.
181 mysticism may be either rational or muddled. the conviction that the great mystics are in touch with ultimate reality is a rational deduction from theistic premisses, but an atheist who worships absolute truth is guilty of muddled mysticism, for this belief is inconsistent with the very basis of the atheistic creed.
it is difficult for a determinist to be consistent. he cannot even describe his own philosophy without contradicting himself. mr. cohen, for instance, that plucky survivor of victorian materialism, is the editor of a periodical in which he proclaims, week by week, that free will is an illusion, that there is no such thing as free thought, and consequently no such person as a freethinker. and the name of the periodical in question is the Freethinker. from which it would seem to follow that the freethinker is a man who disbelieves in the possibility of freethinking...
III. the victorian rationalist committed, in all innocence, most of the dreadful crimes of which the christian is so freely accused. the militant rationalist was more dogmatic than the most dogmatic of ultramontanes and with far less excuse, for the ultramontane, at least, makes some show of justifying his creed by reason.
rationalim is based on blind faith. the christian begins by proving, the rationalist by assuming, the first article in their respective creeds.
the christian is often accused of taking refuge from truth in a world of pleasant dreams and of refusing to
182 follow truth 'to whatever abysses truth may lead'. but it is the rationalist, not the christian, who lacks the courage to face the more depressing implications of his creed. few sceptics are candid enough to admit the bankruptcy of naturalism. they tend to evade this issue with pious phrases about progress, 'absolute values', and so forth, and, above all, by a naive faith in science. the victorian rationalist was convinced that if bishops could only be replaced by biologists, the wold would be a better and brighter place. he was inspired by a mystical faith in the supreme importance of scientific discovery, irrespective of its practical results. he believed, as julian huxley believes, that 'the acquisition of knowledge is one of the fundamental aims of man'. it matters little whether the knowledge in question is useful or useless. according to this creed, an astronomer who discovered a remote planet on the outskirts of the solar system would have every reason to feel vastly elated and to assume that he had made a contribution of great importance to the sum total of human knowledge.
but naturalism, as we have seen, lends no support to this view. science cannot be more significant than life itself and if life itself is futile, the acquisition of scientific knowledge is of no importance. the scientist anxious for a reasoned vindication of his deepest conviction, the conviction that 'the acquisition of knowledge is one of the fundamental aims of man', must fall back upon Aquinas. that is the tragedy of rationalism. the rationalist cannot defend by the reason to which he appeals the first article of his creed. 'i believe in truth', says the rationalist, but he must turn to the theist to justify that belief.
183 'i believe in reason, he continues, and naturalism replies that reason and unreason are alike the products of natural law. 'i believe in science', continues the rationalist, in despair, and the theist smiles, for he knows that theism alone can vindicate the idealism of science, and alone can provide a reasoned basis for that mysticism which is the true inspiration o scientific research.
CHAPTER 15 - 'SIT DOWN BEFORE FACT'
the real importance of a controversy is often hidden from the combatants. huxley and galdstone both believed that the 'impregnable rock of Holy Scripture' was the issue which was at stake in their famous duel. the sceptics hoped and the orthodox secretly feared, that H's dialectical triumph would prove a serious blow to supernatural religion. both were mistaken. religion survived H's attack on genesis, and the only permanent result of the H-G debate has been to substitute one legend for another. the man in the street has ceased to believe in the accuracy of genesis and is in danger of believing in the infallibility of scientists.
huxley's victory in this debate made a profound impression on the public, for it was represented as the victory of a scientist concerned only to discover the truth over a theologian desperately anxious to rig the evidence in order to buttress a shaky creed. the scientist, so the man in the street argues, is briefed by truth, the theologian by his church. this simple dichotomy, so flattering to the scientist, so discreditable to the theologian, persists to this day.
185 the fact is that a dispassionate review of the truth is no more common among scientists than among theologians. the human mind welcomes facts which confirm and evades facts which tend to upset, preconceived theories. a determination to follow the evidence at all costs is the hallmark of authentic greatness and real greatness is no more common in the Royal Society than in the College of Cardinals.
scientists, to do them justice, are usually scientific enough to be immune from those illusions about science which are common among the laity. huxley at least had no such illusions and described 'pedantry and jealousy' as the two besetting sins of scientific men'. moreover, as a young man H wrote a letter which gladstone might well hav quoted had he desired to prove that scientists were quite capable of suppressing inconvenient truths in their own private or corporate interests:
'you have no notion of the intrigues that go on in this blessed world of science. science is, i fear, no purer than any other region of human activity..merit alone is very little good..
for instance, i know that the paper i have just sent in is very original and of some importance . and i am equally sure that if it is referred to the judgment of my 'particular friend'-that it will not be published. he won't be able to say a word against it, but he will pooh-pooh it to a dead certainty.
you will ask with some wonderment, why? because for the last 20 years-------has been regarded as the great authority on these matters and has had no one to tread on
186 his heels, until at last, i think, he has come to look upon the 'natural world' as his special preserve and 'no poachers allowed'. so i must maneuvere a little to get my poor memoir kept out of his hands...'
but of course, no verdict on a class should be based on an admittedly poor specimen of that class. the eminent scientist whose name is discreetly suppressed by the biographer in the above passage was probably a very poor specimen of the victorian scientist. on the other hand, huxley himself was and example of the victorian scientist at his best. he was the soul of honour in his relations with his college, rivals and subordinates. he never schemed for his own ends and he was incapable of jealousy. few men were more respected in his day, even by those who detested the views which he expounded.
huxley himself would have wished to be judges by the scientific code whose tenets he defined in a famous letter to charles kngsley:
'science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which embodied in the christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads or you shall learn nothing. i have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since i have resolved at all risks to do this'.
187 a fine ideal, but unfortunately the scientist finds it no easier to live up to the sceintific ideal than the theologian to the christian ideal.
the reactions of H, a scientist of undoubted integrity, to unwelcome facts, were much the same as the reactions of the more simple minded believers to the fossils which appeared to throw doubt on genesis.
the sincerity of H's determination to 'sit down before fact' was subjected to a severe test by the invitation which he received to examine the mediumship of david home.
david home, whose career is summarised in a later chapter of this book, was the greatest physical medium that ever lived.
'a highly desirable characteristic of Ho's mediumship, wrote the eminent scientist lord rayleigh, was the unusual opportunity allowed to the sense of sight. Ho always objected to darkness at his seances.
Ho's mediumship created such a sensation that a committee was appointed by the Dialectical Society of London to investigate the phenomena which he was alleged to produce. 34 gentlemen of standing were appointed, including well known physician, surgeons, barristers and two fellows of scientific societies. the D Society full expected and hoped that the committee would receive evidence establishing the fraudulent basis of the alleged phenomena. most of those who agreed to serve on the committee did so in the determination to unmask what they believed to be an imposture. the committee met on 40 occasions and the report which they finally presented caused amazement and dismay among the D Society, who refused point blank to publish it. the
188 committee, fortunately, were spirited enough to publish the report at their own expense, though it was the exact opposite of that for which they had confidently hoped. the report concludes with the following observation:
' in presenting their Report, your committee, taking into consideration the high character and great intelligence of many of the witnesses to the more extraordinary facts, the extent to which their testimony is supported by the reports of the sub committees and the absence of any proof of imposture or delusion as regards a large portion of the phenomena...deem it incumbent upon them to state their conviction that the subject is worthy of more serious attention and careful investigation than it has hitherto received.
here are some extracts from the report:
'13 witnesses state that they have seen heavy bodies-in some instances men-rise slowly in the air and remain there for some time without visible or tangible support.
5 witnesses state that they have seen red hot coals applied to the hands or heads of several persons without producing pain or scorching and 3 witnesses state that they have had the same experiment made upon themselves with the like immunity.
Huxley was invited by the Dialectical Society to join their committee and he replied, much as a cardinal might reply if he were invited to examine the case for Anglo-Israelism:
'i regret that i am unable to accept the invitation of the committee of the Dialectical Society to co-operate with a committee for the investigation of 'Spiritualism'; and for two reasons. in the first place, i have not time for such an inquiry,
189 which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind i have known) much annoyance. in the second place, i take no interest in the subject. the only case of 'Spiritualism' i have had the opportunity of examining into myself, was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice. but supposing the phenomena to be genuine-they do not interest me. if anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, i should decline the privilege, having better things to do. and if the folk in the spiritual world do not talk more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, i put them in the same category. the only good that i can see in the demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a seance'.
Huxley failed to realise that the question at issue was not whether the life of a crossing-sweeper was richer and more varied than the life of a spirit, but whether the fact of spirit communications had been proved. the spiritualist might well have rejoined, 'sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads...even to the abyss of the spiritualistic heaven'.
191 it is easier to condone Huxley's reaction to spiritualism than to forgive his failure to realise the importance of samuel butler's criticism of the Darwinian hypothesis. B's books were full of facts. did H sit down before those facts as a little child? B today is receiving from the scientific world that tardy recognition which was denied to him by his contemporaries. he attacked not only
Dwinism, but H's more extreme deductions from the victorian heresy. H never deigned to reply. B's name does not eve occur in the index to the life of Huxley.
H liked to describe himself as D's bulldog. he enjoyed fastening his teeth in episcopal gaiters and it was a pity that he shrunk from accepting B's challenge, a challenge far more formidable than that of Bishop Wilberforce.
many years ago a brilliant but heretical scientist, who was regarded with deep suspicion by the scientific pundits of the day, relieved his feeling in a letter to a friend:
'Oh, my dear Kepler, how i wish that we could have one hearty laugh together? here at padua is the principal professor of philosophy, whom i have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. why are you not here? what shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly!'
194 II. a man who was guided in his study of religious problems by the principles which Huxley so admirably defined would 'sit down humbly' before a variety of facts which H ignored.
he would not handicap himself at the outset by any specific dogma on the nature of God or as to the non-existence of God. he would be prepared to admit the daring possibility that creation may be the work of a Creator, and that this hypothetical Creator might, if He chose, change the action of His own laws.
there is no a priori reason why miracles should not occur. the question of miracles is purely a question of evidence.
the man who rules out miracles as impossible on a priori grounds inevitably commits a series of crimes against logic. this is the sort of reasoning, if you can dignify it by that name, which is common in freethinking literature, an argument which can be summarised as follows:
'miracles do not occur. therefore those who report miracles are superstitious. we can reject their testimony because they are superstitious and we can describe them as superstitious because we reject their testimony. an age which accepts miracles is superstitious and an age which is superstitious accepts miracles'.
195 listen, for instance, to mr. Joad on the Resurrection: 'the evidence for the res consists of a disputable inference from extremely uncircumstantial references to a supernatural occurrence made by unknown writers in a grossly superstitious age'.
i have heard of circumstantial evidence, but ..J alone knows what he means by 'uncircumstantial references', and perhaps ..J could tell us why he considers the first century A.D. more superstitious than our own age.
196 .. these lazy generalisations about past ages will not appeal to the inductive inquirer.
he will examine, not only the evidence for the Resurrection, but also for such well-attested miracles as the Stigmata of St. Francis and, to come to modern times, for the strange happenings reported from Lourdes. before dogmatising on the subject of modern miracles, he will, at least, read standard works on the subject, such as Jorgensen's 'Lourdes'.
but miracles are not the only, or indeed the most important, evidence for the supernatural. the inductive inquirer cannot afford to neglect the evidence of religious experience and in particular of mystical experience. he will note the curious similarity of mystical experiences separated by barriers of time and distance. mystics of different races and of different centuries all appear to be describing an identical experience. they corroborate one another in surprising fashion. this is a fact of which the true scientist will take account. he will not dismiss, on a priori grounds, these experiences as illusory.
197 again, the scientific inquirer will examine with interest the phenomena of conversion.
nothing is easier than to evoke a fleeting condition of religious exaltation. nothing, on thee other hand, is more difficult than permanently to transform character, for character, like personality, is intensely conservative.
consider, for instance, the Evangelical Revival of the 18th century. the historians are agreed that the ev re produced permanent results and that its influence on the health and sanity of english life was beneficial.
read Wesley's Journal and you will find instance after instance of men whose lives had been permanently changed by that revival. facts are stubborn things, whether they be the facts of chemistry or the facts of conversion. to dismiss an inconvenient fact because it does not fit into your system, is unscientific, whether that fact be a fossil in the rocks or a change of heart and of life. the inductive reasoner will take account of the facts of conversion...
198 john wesley was, in many ways, a characteristic product of an age that distrusted emotion and that worshipped reason. the emotional symptoms of conversion did not impress him, but he was rational enough to be impressed by the permanent results: 'let any judge of it as they please. but that such a change was then wrought appears not from their shedding tears only, or sighing, or singing psalms, as your poor correspondent did by the woman of oxford, but from the whole tenor of their life, till then many ways wicked; from that time holy, just and good. 'saw you him that was a lion till then and is now a lamb; he that was a drunkard, but now exemplarily sober; the whoremonger that was, that now abhors the very lusts of the flesh? these are my living arguments for what i
199 assert, that God now, as aforetime, gives remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost, which may be called visions'.
it is difficult to understand why materialists, who believe that everything can be translated into terms of force, should forget their dynamics in the discussion of religious forces. conversion is a very striking example of the neutralisation of force. if a motor car passes you at a speed of 60 miles an hour and stops within 50 yards, you know that the force which impels the motor car has been neutralised by another force.
208 ...true religions grow. they cannot be manufactured. if julian huxley had studied the laws which govern the growth of religion, he would have discovered that religion unbacked by revelation enjoys no more success than banknotes unbacked by bullion. 'ethics' will never fill a church. religions flourish, not in inverse proportion, but in direct ratio, to their insistence on the supernatural. the man who says, 'i know, will always fill a church. the man who says, 'i am inclined to think', will preach to empty pews...
CHAPTER 16 - MISSING LINKS
209 the Victorian scientist enjoyed semonising and one of his favourite texts was the immorality of any belief which was not based on overwhelming evidence. i have already quoted Prof. Clifford's pious conviction that it was 'wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence'. Huxley, again, in his 'Lay Sermons' -a characteristic title-sermonises on the same theme. 'the scientist, unlike the theologian, he tells us, is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretence'.
elsewhere, H informs his readers, or perhaps we should say his congregation, that 'an assertion which outstrips the evidence is not only a blunder by a crime'.
judged by this severe test, every ardent Darwinian was a criminal, nor could H himself hope to escape a criminal prosecution, for his writings are full of assertions 'which outstrip the evidence'. a few examples will suffice:
'none but parsons believe in chance'. it would be
210 paying this fatuous remark an undeserved compliment to describe it as 'an assertion which outstripped the evidence'.
again, consider the following: 'the great struggle between the determinist and the indeterminist, between the opponent and the sustainer of the freedom of the will, has ended today after more than 2000 years, completely in favour of the determinist. the human will has no more freedom than that of the higher animals from which it differs only in degree, not in kind'.
this short passage contains no less than 5 violent assumptions masquerading as facts, an over-generous allowance even for a victorian scientist.
Huxley assumes 1. that the struggle between the determinists and the indeterminists has 'ended today', 2. that it has ended completely in favour of the determinists, 3. that the human will has no more freedom than that of the higher animals, 4. that the human will differs only in degree from that of the higher animals, 5. that animals do not possess free will.
of these assumptions, even the last, which is imp0lied but not explicitly stated, is not amenable to scientific proof or scientific disproof. the arguments for and against freedom of the will are philosophic, not scientific. the struggle between the determinist and the indeterminist has not 'ended today'. it will probably last as long as the world lasts.
211 II. the literature of evolution abounds in 'assertions which outstrip the evidence'. the theory of genetic evolution, which is certainly a good working hypothesis, is habitually referred to as if it were an established fact, nay more, as if there were such a thing as a 'law of evolution' from which other facts could be deduced.
in the nature of things, the theory of ev must rest on indirect evidence and our verdict on that evidence will, of course, be largely affected by our theological prejudices.
212 in other words, the objective facts which suggest ev are tolerant of many interpretations, among which our ultimate choice will be determined very largely by theological or atheistic bias. ..Almighty God, according to philip goss, had created the world just as it is, fossils and all complete. the world was created in 7 days about 4000 years before the birth of Christ. as the world and the fossils were created together, the wold instantly presented the structural appearance of a planet on which life had existed for millions of years.
we cannot refute this theory by scientific inductions from facts. we reject it with confidence on a priori grounds, for it is, as charles kingsley said, 'unthinkable that God had written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie'.
the theory that the separate species were created separately by God, a doctrine which the victorian scientists viewed with quite peculiar abhorrence, cannot, however, be rejected on a priori grounds. none the less, we can sympathise with and even applaud, the reluctance of the scientists to admit special creation. it is the duty of the scientist
213 to search for natural explanations of phenomena. 'not to fall back on the gods', as william james once remarked, when a proximate principle may be found, has with us westerners since become the sign of an efficient as distinguished from an inefficient intellect'.
the scientist instinctively feels that the answer, 'God made them separately', is a lazy answer, even if it should be proved correct, to the question, 'how did the different species arise?'
none the less, it is difficult to see why an omnipotent Creator should not, on a priori grounds, be free to adopt any one of the following alternatives;
1. he might have created the primeval cell with the potentiality to evolve into all the existing species of the world.
2. the act of direct creation might have been confined to the moment at which the world was created, but at that moment a number of different species might have been created with the power to evolve into other species and thus to add to the limited number of existing species originally created.
this would be a case of separate, but at least simultaneous, creation.
3. God might have intervened by a creative act at distinct periods in the world's history (separate and successive creation). wallace, the co-formulator with D of the theory of natural selection, was inclined to believe that there were 'three stages in the development of the organic world when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action', the first when the first living cell was
214 created, the second when the animal kingdom separated from the vegetable kingdom and the third at the creation of Man.
4. God might have created by separate acts of creation all the different species.
there are no a priori reasons which could enable us to arrange this series of possibilities in a scale of plausibility. on aesthetic grounds the first theory is certainly the most and the fourth theory the least attractive, for the simple solution is aesthetically more attractive than the complicated. the scientist who is influenced by aesthetic considerations will be attracted by the theory that evolution is monphyletic rather than polyphyletic, or, in other words, that life evolved from a single primeval cell rather than on different lines of descent from different sources; but this view is dictated, not by scientific reasons, but by aesthetic prejudice.
all scientists are agreed that no life could exist on the surface of our planet at the very beginning of our planet's history. consequently life must have appeared on the surface of the earth at a particular moment in time. but there is no reason why the conditions which produced life should not have recurred again and again, aesthetic prejudice, rather than scientific evidence, weights the scale in favour of monphletic evolution and against special creation.
nobody denies the procession of life from simple to more complicated forms. few things are more certain than that the simpler forms of life were the first to appear on the surface of the globe, that fishes, for instance, were in existence long before man appeared.
215 III. the main lines of evidence for genetic evolution may be briefly summarised as follows:
1. Recapitulation - the striking resemblances between the embryos of different types in the same group are suggestive of genetic evolution. in the early stages, the embryos of reptiles and mammals are very similar, as if these embryos were destined to travel along the same path for some distance before diverging. according to this theory, the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the race. the individual, to quote a famous epigram, 'climbs up its own genealogical tree'.
the human embryo, for instance, begins as a single cell, thus recapitulating the protozoan stage. at a slightly later
216 stage, gill-clefts appear, a reminiscence of man's fishy past; the embryo, when about a month old, show signs of a tail; and even after birth the human baby recapitulates its arboreal past by proving, when required, that it can support itself by its hands alone. a baby ape also possesses this faculty.
these facts strongly suggest, but they are far from demonstrating, evolution.
217 2. the examples of rudimentary and vestigial organs which are alleged to be of no advantage to their possessors are explained by the evolutionists on the hypothesis that these organs were useful to the remote ancestors of their present possessors, and that the changes of structure rendered them useless, as the result of which they dwindled away by disuse.
but surely it is unscientific to insist that an organ is useless merely because we do not understand its use. as Huxley himself remarked, 'the recent discovery of the important part played by the 'thyroid gland', which was once supposed to be quite useless, should be a warning to speculators about useless organs'.
3. paleontological evidence. the geological record undoubtedly bears witness to the regular procession of living things from lower to higher forms. this is indeed the one solid fact on which the theory of ev rests. the doctrine or Genesis, however, records a similar progression from lower to higher forms of life and in order to escape from the theory of special creation, a believer in genetic ev must attempt to prove that the higher forms are descended from the lower forms.
now, if genetic evolution takes place, as Darwin believed, by means of small changes from generation to generation, we should expect to find some fossils of intermediate forms between one type and another. unfortunately, the geological record is entirely in favour of fixed. type. birds are, for instance, supposed to have evolved from reptiles, or at least from an ancestor of the reptile type. fut we search in vain among the rocks for any fossil records of a reptile in the process of growing a wing. 218 geology shows us reptiles without wings and birds provided with perfectly developed wings. there is a sudden jump from no wings to wings, as if the problem of flight had been solved overnight. where are the rudimentary wings, the experimental wings, the wings which just lifted their possessors a few inches from the ground or which just enabled their possessors to plane from one tree branch to another?
219 ...D attempted to explain away the absence of transitional forms by the fact that the geological record was, in effect, 'a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to 2 or 3 countries. of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved and of each page, only here and there a few lines'.
it is, however, singularly unfortunate that, as monsieur quatrefages remarks, 'so many of the facts which tell against the evolutionary theory should have been preserved in the scraps of Nature's great book which remain to us and that invariably those which would have told in its favour were recorded in lost volumes and missing leaves'.
it is easy to imagine what would be said of a theologian who supported a particular doctrine by an appeal to the sayings of Christ of which no record had been kept. fortunately for theology, it is unnecessary for a theologian to appeal to the imperfections of the gospel record.
moreover, the whole case for ev rests on the assumption that the geological record is reasonably reliable.
220 unless we can feel confident that fishes appeared before reptiles and reptiles before birds, there is no case whatever for evolution, but our confidence is only justified by the assumption that the geological record is relatively reliable, for if that record is so imperfect as to be unreliable, we hav no grounds for believing that fossils of reptiles may not yet be discovered in some strata dating from the silurian period and fossils of birds from some strata of the Devonian Age.
it is a little naive for the Darwinian to assume, as he does, that the missing volumes of Nature's book would supply all the evidence which he requires and no evidence which could possibly tell against his theory.
if the transformation of species takes place by the accumulation of very slow, gradual changes, there must have been a vast number of transitional forms between the different types, between, say, the reptile and the bird. consequently, however imperfect the geological record may be, we have every right to expect a larger number of fossils of the transitional type than of fossils which are definitely reptilian or definitely avian.
it is utterly contrary to the mathematical laws of chances that we should find, as we do, an overwhelming number of fossils of the fixed reptilian type and an overwhelming number of fossils of the fixed bird type and only one fossil, Archeopteryx, which could be described by the most sanguine of evolutionists as a missing link. even Archeopteryx is provided with a perfectly developed wing.
i have never seen any estimate of the proportion between fossils so far discovered of reptiles and birds and the probable number of reptiles and birds which have
221 existed, but will assume, for the sake of argument, that in prehistoric times only one bird or one reptile out of a hundred million survived in fossil form. consequently, the geological record may be compared to a book of a hundred million pages of which one page survives. even so,, we should expect to find that that particular page would not consist entirely of records of definite reptiles or definite birds, but would also, by the mathematical law of chances, contain some reference to the vastly larger number of intermediate forms between reptiles and birds.
Huxley, who was a clearer thinker than D , realised that 'the imperfection of the geological record' was a far more serious difficulty than D was prepared to admit.
'in answer to the question, H wrote , What does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of paleontology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification?...i reply: it negatives these doctrines; fo it either shows us no evidence of such modification or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight; and as to the nature of that modification, it yields no evidence whatsoever that the earliest members of a long existing group were more generalised in structure than the later ones'.
222 ..Equus (note: an early horse) had been inconsiderate enough to appear in the rock record before some of his alleged ancestors and once more the pedigree had to be reconstructed...
224 ..IV. the pedigree of the horse provides many examples of the confusion between conjecture and fact, but we do not finally leave the domain of science for poetic fiction until we reach our old friend Pithecanthropus. pithecanthropus is the name given to a skull and some bones found in Java which were assumed to be the remains of an ape-like ancestor. the subsequent career of these bones has been very happily summarised by mr. chesterton.
'the effect on popular science, writes ..Ches, was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. he was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. people talked of Pith as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. a detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully
225 shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. no uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium'.
226..our scientists certainly do not lack imagination. Haeckel, for instance, is not content with one missing link. he provides man with a complete genealogy. the pedigree begins thus: '1. monera 2.single-celled primeval animals.
227 3. many-celled primeval animals. 4. ciliated planulae (planaeada).. and concludes with '18. semi apes (prosimiae) 19. tailed narrow nosed apes. 20. tailless narrow nosed apes (man-like Apes), ' etc.
the innocent reader, who has been educated to accept with simple faith the pronouncements of learned scientists would never guess that this pedigree is pure fiction. he would be impressed by those wonderful latin names...(ie 'monera' etc.) and would be much surprised to learn that the creatures represented by these latin names have left no traces in the geological record...
...family trees abound in evolutionary literature and many of them are at least as fanciful as Haeckel's.
'far more eloquent than any amount of polemics, wrote Driesch, the great german biologist, is the fact that vertebrates, for instance, have already been 'proved' to be descended from, firstly, the amphioxs; secondly, the annelids; thirdly, the Sagitta type of worms; fourthly, form spiders; fifthly, from Limulus, a group of crayfishes; and sixthly, from echinoderm larvae. that is the extent of my acquaintance with the literature, with which i do not pretend to be especially familiar. emil du bois-reymond said once that phylogeny of this sort is of about as much scientific value as are the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer, and i think we may fully endorse his opinion on this point.
228 V. ...'it does not, writes D, appear altogether incredible that some unusually wise ape like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. and this would have been a first step in the formation of a language'.
D was not alone in attempting to justify a scientific hypothesis by means of guesses which 'do not appear altogether incredible'. the mere fact that Pro-Avis, Pithecanthropus, and the rest of them 'do not appear altogether incredible', is held to justify the elaborate descriptions and accurate representations of these imaginary missing links.
Gerard, again, quotes Prof. whitney's remark about the Pithecoid 'men': 'there is no difficulty in supposing them to have possessed forms of speech, more rudimentary and imperfect than ours'.
'there is no difficulty in supposing...' of course not, if you are a scientist. the mere theologian, however, would not permit himself to indulge in this pleasant game of 'Let us suppose'. he is expected and is rightly expected, to advance evidence for his suppositions.
'sit down before fact'. now what are the facts? animals have been closely studied by mankind for many a
229 long century, and we have yet to discover a wise ape like animal capable of imitating the growl of a beast of prey. why should these wise ape like animals have disappeared entirely from the face of the globe? in the 5000 years of history, there is no record of an ape like animal developing habits and acquiring the first dawnings of human speech. why were these intelligent beasts confined to Miocene Age?
the real advances of science have been based on fact. a scientific theory should no more be based on missing links than a logical proposition on a non sequitur.
all that we know of man emphasises the vast gulf between the lowest of men and the highest of animals. the australian aborigines are the most backward of races, yet they invented the boomerang, which the wisest of apes could not handle or understand.
Mivart declared that there was a wider break in nature between man and the highest ape than between the highest of apes and an oyster, and even D admitted that the Fuegians, who 'rank amongst the lowest barbarians, ..resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties'.
again, all that we know of prehistoric man suggests that man, from his first appearance on the globe, was as immeasurably superior to the highest animals as are the lowest and least intellignet of modern savages.
the first rude outline of a reindeer drawn on the cave walls tells its own tale, the tale of a complete break with the past, of the intrusion into the world process of something entirely new, the spirit of creative man. no finger
230 but man's has 'ever traced one significant line upon the sand...or begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form...Art is the signature of man'.
disabuse your mind of the belief that science is or indeed that science ever will be, in a position to demonstrate the bestial origin of man. skulls and skeletons at best emphasise the physical resemblances between man and the apes, resemblances which nobody disputes, but you do not bridge the spiritual gap between the chattering ape and man endowed with speech, by means of a few skulls.
231 i am no scientist and i have no theory to suggest. i am not concerned either to prove or to disprove any particular theory of man's origin, but merely to protest against the dogmatism of those who pretend that this great riddle has been solved.
'the only statement, wrote the great botanish Reincke, consistent with her dignity that science wan make is to say that she knows nothing about the origin of man'.
232 VI. the will to believe is at least as potent among scientists as among theologians. the evidence for genetic evolution is, for instance, far weaker than the evidence for telepathy, and no stronger than the evidence for ectoplasm. and yet, whereas the overwhelming majority of scientists reject edtoplasm, they accept evolution. they are influenced by the will to believe in ev, and by the will to disbelieve in ectoplasm. the former satisfies and the latter fails to satisfy, their aesthetic, no less than their scientific standards.
mr. h. g. wells and his son and Prof. julian huxley recently co-=operated in producing a popular work entitled 'the science of Life', which i have read with lively interest. it is admirably written and admirably illustrated. 'Evolution beyond Dispute' is the title of one of the parts. psychical research is also discussed with great fairness and the authors deserve to be congratulated on realising that science can no longer afford to ignore this perplexing branch of research.
of the remarkable experiments in telepathy between Prof. gilbert murray and his daughter these authors write as follows:
'results have been got by these two of a quality and exactitude difficult to explain by any other hypothesis than that of a direct thought transmission'.
let us compare the evidence for telepathy with the evidence for the theory that birds are descended from reptiles.
233 there is no direct evidence for the evolution of reptiles into birds, a process which, if it ever took place, has mysteriously ceased. there is no direct evidence of any modern reptile showing a tendency to develop into an ancestor of the bird of the future.
on the other hand, there is a mass of unimpeachable direct evidence for telepathy.
again, the theory of telepathy, though inexplicable by science, is not in flat contradiction to other facts. the theory that birds developed from reptiles is, however, very difficult to reconcile with the absence of transitional forms.
our authors do not treat evolution as a working hypothesis, but as an established dogma- 'ev beyond dispute'. they adopt, however, a very cautious attitude towards the evidence for telepathy, which is overwhelmingly stronger than the evidence for genetic evolution. 'there remains enough, they write, to justify an attitude of critical indecison'.
much the same might be said, with far greater justice, of the theory of genetic evolution. a plausible case has been made out for ev, but in view of the admitted difficulties we are not entitled to describe this theory as anything better than a good working hypothesis.
it is the lack of logic so common in evolutionary literature, not the theory of ev itself, to which one takes exception. there is a growing tendency to treat missing links, no as defects in an argument, but as strengthening in some mysterious fashion the chain from which they are missing. the missing link is subpoenaed, not only to prove the existence of a continuous chain, but also to demonstrate the imperfections of the geological record. 'there is not,
234 as the great scientist a.r.wallace remarked, as is often supposed, one missing link to be discovered, but at least a score of such links, to fill adequately the gap between man and apes; and their non-discovery is now one of the strongest proofs of the imperfection of the geological record'.
why is the geological record imperfect? because we continue to miss the missing links. why do we miss the missing links? because the geological record is so imperfect.
CHAPTER XVII - UTRUM DEUS SIT
235 the theory of genetic evolution may be plausible and, perhaps, very probable, but it is none the less grossly unscientific to promote this theory, as Weismann and others promoted it, from the category of a working hypothesis to the domain of law and then to deduce from this 'law' conclusions against the weight of scientific evidence.
the dogma of spontaneous generation is a case in point, for this dogma is de fide for pious Darwinians who reject theism.
it is important to realise that whereas the atheist is compelled to accept, the theist is under no obligation to disprove, spontaneous generation. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, neither affirmed nor denied spon gen. all he denied was the thesis put forward by Avicenna that inanimate matter produced life by its own inherent powers. A maintained that if inanimate matter does produce life, matter must have been endowed by God with special powers for this purpose.
Spon gen was, in fact, widely accepted
236 until an italian physician, Redi, proved that no maggots developed in meat which had been protected by gauze screens. spallanza proved that putrefaction does not develop in fluids which have been boiled and which are kept in hermetically sealed vessels, and Pasteur provided still more exact proofs in support of the theory that to exclude infection is to exclude generation of new life. P's verdict is almost universally accepted today and the complete failure of comparatively recent experiments to develop life from lifeless matter has still further strengthened the case against spontogenesis.
in that popular work, 'the science of Life', from which i have already quoted, there will be found a portrait of P under which is written: 'Louis Pasteur, who gave the death blow to the theory of Spon Gen', but apparently the theory is not yet dead, for on the opposite page we are informed that ' at some remote time in the remote past, when the earth has hotter and its air and crust differed, physically and chemically, from their present sate, it seems reasonable to suppose that life must have originated in a simple form from lifeless matter'.
but why is it 'reasonable to suppose' that spontogenesis is facilitated by a rise in temperature? life is possible only within narrow limits of temperature, all of which can be duplicated in our laboratories today. again, why should a chemical difference in the crust of the earth's surface facilitate spontogenesis?
237 D disbelieved in spon gen and Huxley referred with contempt to 'the rich absurdities of spontogenesis'.
i have already referred to lyell's book which inaugurated modern geology. the subsidiary title of that book was 'an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation'. lyell, in other words, believed in the uniformity of Nature. tyndall, again, emphasised this point. 'men of science, he wrote, prolong the method of Nature from the present into the past. the observed uniformity of nature is their only guide'.
238 the scientist, therefore, if he were logical, should argue as follows:
1. the earth began as a red hot globe on which no life was possible.
2. life has since appeared on the surface of the globe.
3. science has no record whatever of the emergence of life from inorganic matter. all attempts to prove spon gen have failed.
4. guided, as we must be, by the uniformity of Nature, we must assume, as a working hypothesis, that sponto-genesis has never taken place and that life owes its origin to a supernatural and not to a natural, act.
we cannot, of course, prove a universal negative. we cannot demonstrate that spontogenesis has never taken place, but we can show that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against spontogenesis, from which it follows that it is more logical to accept as a working hypothesis the supernatural origin of life.
but no such logical conclusion was possible for men whose reactions to this problem were confused by theophobia.
i have already quoted Weismann's naive remark, ' spontaneous generation, in spite of all vain efforts to demonstrate it, remains for me a logical necessity', and Herbert Spencer's illuminating pronouncement that at a time 'when the temperature of the surface of the earth was much higher than at present and other physical conditions were unlike those we know, inorganic matter, through successive complications, gave origin to organic matter'.
this verbose verdict is characteristic in its attempt to palm off
239 as an explanation the question-begging phrase 'successive complications'.
Huxley, in the course of a presidential address to the British Association on 'biogenesis and abiogenesis', expressed the opinion that the biogenesists who denied spon gen had been victorious all along the line, but he added that if it were given to him 'to look beyond the abysses of geologically recorded time', he would expect 'to be the witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from no living matter'.
H distinguished, it is true, between 'belief' and 'expectation', and he did not dare, 'in the admitted absence of evidence', to profess belief in spontogenesis, but he asked his audience to accept his opinion that sponto-genesis had taken place in the remote past as 'an act of philosophic faith'. it is easy to imagine the fine scorn with which H would have overwhelmed a bishop who had drawn such fine distinctions between 'belief' and 'religious faith', and the retort which gladstone would have provoked had he opened his controversy with H on Genesis with some such words as these:
'if it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of historically recorded time, i should expect to be a witness of the emergence of eve from adam's rib'.
what justification did H offer for his 'philosophic faith' that spontogenesis had occurred at a remote date?
he admitted that all attempts to prove spontogenesis had failed, but he maintained that spontogenesis was 'a necessary corollary from Darwin's views if legitimately carried out'. in other words, though evolution, uncontaminated by supernatural intervention, was the very thing
240 which H was trying to prove, he appears to have considered it scientific to assume the existence of the facts he required against the weight of evidence, merely because those facts were indispensable to the theory.
one more missing link' whose absence proves the existence of a continuous chain.
II. Reason is subject to Gresham's Law. bad logic drives out good...
241 III. one is chiefly impressed, not by the scepticism, but by the credulity, of the leading victorian philosophers...
242 ..no theologian has ever been more exacting in his demand
243 for faith than mr. spencer. here is his explanation of the origin of music: strong emotions, according to..S, are associated with muscular exertion. the muscles of the abdomen contract and expand under emotional stress, and the noises which result revive by association the pleasurable emotion which engendered them. to this primordial coincidence we owe, first of all, cadenced speech and then music.
and here is Cardinal Newman's explanation:
'can it be that these mysterious stirrings of heart and keen emotions and strange yearning after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial and comes and goes and begins and ends in itself? it is not so; it cannot be. no; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of angels, or the magnificat of saints or the living laws of divine government or the Divine attributes; something are they beside themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter-though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, had the gift of eliciting them'.
which explanation is the greater tax on our credulity? is it easier to believe that music delights us because it causes emotions associated with some primeval howl at the delight of food or that music opens a window into a world of eternal values?
one of the penalties attached to the victorian heresy was that clever men like mr. spencer and mr. grant allen were condemned to deduce from their faulty premisses
244 conclusions of the absurdity of which they were probably uneasily conscious.
that men and animals are automata and that thought and feeling have no influence on action, is again a perfectly logical deduction from the victorian heresy.
'Prof Huxley, says mr. romanes, in his Rede Lecture of 1885, argues by way of perfectly logical deduction from this statement, that thought and feeling have nothing to do with determining action; they are merely the bye-products of cerebration, or, as he expresses it, the indices of changes which are going on in the brain. under this view we are all what he terms conscious automata, or machines which happen, as it were by chance, to be conscious of some of their own movements. but the consciousness is altogether adventitious and bears the same ineffectual relation to the activity of the brain as a steam whistle bears to the activity of a locomotive, or the striking of a clock to the time-keeping adjustments of the clockwork...now this theory of conscious automatism is not merely a legitimate outcome of the theory that nervous changes are the causes of mental changes, but it is logically the only possible outcome. nor do i see any way in which this theory can be fought on grounds of physiology'.
this view also met with the approval of Prof. Clifford and of mr. spalding, who, in the course of an article which he contributed to Nature on aug. 2, 1877, wrote as follows:
'we assert not only that no evidence can be given that feeling ever does guide or prompt action, but that the process of its doing so is inconceivable'.
245 Samuel Butler quotes other passages from contemporary scientists in favour of the theory that mental processes have no effect on physical processes, from which, as he remarks, it is obvious that they must have supposed 'that no accompaniment of feeling and consciousness at all'.
men and animals are permitted, according to this theory, to think and feel and even to reflect, but everything would go on exactly the same even if the consciousness which is a meree bye-product of the physical movement in their brains did not exist. juliet would set up precisely the same physical movements in the brain of romeo even if romeo and juliet were both automata. the clues left by an unconscious murderer would produce just the same physical effect on the brain of an unconscious detective, and the unconscious witnesses in the witness box would set up exactly the same physical reaction in the brains of an unconscious jury and of an unconscious judge. and, finally, an unconscious hangman would then proceed to hang an unconscious murderer.
that thought and consciousness are impotent spectators of the drama of life is a logical deduction from the victorian heresy and, as such, clearly refutes the heresy in question.
clearly we need waste no time in disproving the thesis that action is uninfluenced by thought, though we may well inquire how such a grotesque conclusion could ever have been entertained by men of intellect.
materialism has a certain superficial plausibility. the scientist is mainly concerned with the metrical aspects of reality. he finds that most phenomena can be expressed in
246 terms of matter and motion, and he is sometimes tempted to suppose that the residue of non-metrical facts has no real significance.
materialism is as complete and as irrefutable an explanation of the universe as the lunatic's explanation of his presence in an asylum. you cannot disprove the lunatic's thesis that the rest of the world is mad and that he alone is sane. you cannot dispute the materialist's thesis that the overwhelming majority of mankind have been completely mistaken and that the materialist alone is completely right. the insane explanation is, as mr. chesterton has remarked, 'if not conclusive, at least unanswerable. ...if a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot refute him except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. his explanation covers the facts as much as yours. or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do'.
the materialist, like the madman, is not hampered 'by the sense of humour or by the dumb certainties of experience'. and of these dumb certainties there is none more sure than that our wills are free and that the choice between good and evil represents a real option which we are free to accept or to reject.
the victorian scientist always tacitly assumes that he was entitled to the verdict provided that the theories which he advanced could not be definitely refuted, but he was not prepared to allow Bible Christians to avail themselves to this curious. H, for instance, would have rejected with contempt mr. philip goss's theory that Almighty God had created the world in the twinkling of an eye, fossils and all complete, but he could never have refuted this absurd view.
the most grotesque theories are often the most difficult to refute. there is no logical answer to the complete sceptic who doubts his won existence. those who part company with the complete sceptic must begin by making certain assumptions which cannot be demonstrated beyond all possible doubt. the theologian and the scientist both tacitly assume that the universe is rational, but the theologian can no more demonstrate that the will is free than the scientist can demonstrate that the sun will rise tomorrow. the theologian cannot disprove by pure logic that the mind is a bye-product of matter and the scientist cannot disprove by science or by logic that the lunatic alone is sane in a mad world.
God gave us dialectics to refute the errors of men who argue incorrectly from sane premisses. He gave us laughter and 'the dumb certainties of experience' as our only adequate answer to those who argue correctly from premisses which are fundamentally insane.
thought is impossible without some assumptions. the assumption that the external world exists as the basis of science, is more open to doubt than the assumption that there is a difference, no only of degree but of kind, between Shakespeare and a sewing machine.
Utrum Deus Sit. those who do not find the right answer to this, the quaestio in the summa thelolgica, will inevitably pay for their failutre by losing touch with reality. those who doubt the existence of mind behind creation are very likely to end, as the victorian heretics ended, by doubting and reality (the)..reality of their own mental processes.
those who deny the Creator are apt to make a sad mess of things when they try to explain creation.
CHAPTER 19 - THE REVOLUTION IN MODERN SCIENCE
293 in this chapter i am concerned with the modern scientific revolution in so far as it affects the ultimate problems of religion. ...
'The Bases of Modern Science', by j.w.m.sullivan, is another excellent book, written in a most agreeable style by a great authority on the history of science. ..
294 it was bad enough that a scientist of european standing should assert that modern scientific discoveries have banished 'strict causality', and with 'strict causality' the very foundations of victorian materialism, from the material world. it was intolerable that sir arthur eddington should proceed to prove that naturalism is bankrupt, and supernaturalism by far the most plausible explanation of the great riddle.
...the man in the street is, of course, less impressed by the merits of an argument than by the credentials of the arguer. he would have ignored eddington's views had they been expressed by a bishop, but he sits up and takes notice when a prominent scientist attacks the creed associated with victorian science.
in this respect there is little to choose between the attitude of the man in the street and the attitude of the average churchman. the churches are more infected than they might care to confess by a superstitious reverence for the pronouncements of scientists, not only on science, but on all other subjects as well. sir arthur eddington's views on religion are of great interest, not because he is a scientist with a european reputation, because he is a very able philosopher.
295 compare Huxley's attempt to prove the all-sufficiency of naturalism as an explanation of both physical and mental phenomena and eddington's brilliant attack on naturalism and you will find yourself contrasting not only their scientific attainments, but also their philosophic acuteness. you may be unconvinced by eddington, but even mr. cohen would have an uneasy feeling that H ought to have anticipated eddington's line of attack. E's argument owes nothing, beyond an occasional illustration, to science. he is more convincing than H, not because he is a better scientist, but because he is a more profound and a more logical philosopher.
it is undignified of churchmen to adopt an attitude of self-congratulation if a distinguished scientist appears as a defender of the Faith...
it is a great mistake to associate enduring truths with passing scientific fashion of the moment. 'strict causality, writes ..E, is abandoned in the material world. our ideas of the controlling laws are in process of reconstruction and it is not possible to predict what kind of form they well ultimately take; but all the indications are that strict causality has dropped out permanently...if our expectations should prove will founded that 1927 has seen the final overthrow of strict causality by Heisenberg, Bohr, Born and others, the year will certainly rank as one of the greatest epochs in the development of scientific philosophy'.
296 II. the old guard of victorian materialist have long regarded science as their natural ally and consequently resented E's attack as a treacherous onslaught. 'Et tu, Brute!' they cry with poignant sincerity. we are all creatures of habit and the freethinker, who is protected by the routine of fixed thought from the painful necessity of thinking freely, has a legitimate grievance against E. it is, for instance, extremely trying to be forced to revise those old-fashioned sermons on cosmic humility which enjoyed such continuous popularity among the more devout rationalists. 'the medieval Christian, so ran the simple tale, lived in a small and friendly universe of which the earth was the centre and the pivot. man was Lord of Creation, the sun shone to warm him and the earth was created to serve as his dwelling place during that brief period of probation in which his eternal destiny was decided.
297 'modern science, continues the rationalist, has shattered this snug comogony. science teaches that we are the inhabitants of an insignificant planet revoving round an insignifican star. the universe is doubtless full of countless solar systems, many of which are far more splendid than our own. science forbids us to assume that in all this vast universe our planet has been signalled out as the home of intelligent beings.
'the realisation of this fact, so he concludes, should fill our minds with awe and inspire us with that true humility which it is the mission of science to promote. the Christian cosmogony belongs to a primitive stage in human development and the creeds which are based on that outworn cosmogony cannot long survive the attacks of science. science, like a glorious sun, is busily engaged in dispelling the clouds of outworn superstition,' etc, etc. that sort of thing wrote itself, which was very restful.
it must be painful for mr. cohen to realise that modern science confirms the cosmogony of the medieval Christian.
Sir Arthur Eddington, who speaks with unrivalled authority as an astronomer, assures us that a solar system is a freak which could be formed only if a very unusual accident occurred at a particular stage of condensation. the accident in question must have been the close approach of another star, which by tiday distortion caused the sun to spurt out filaments of matter which condensed to form planets. 'even in the long life of the star, he continues, encounters of this kind must be extremely rare. the density of distribution of stars in space has
298 been compared to that of 20 tennis balls roaming the whole interior of the earth. the accident that gave birth to the solar system may be compared to the casual approach of two of these balls within a few yards of each other. the data are too vague to give any definite estimate of the odds against this occurrence, but i should judge that perhaps not one in a hundred millions of stars can have undergone this experience in the right stage and conditions to result in the formation of a system of planets'. and he adds, 'i feel inclined to claim that at the present time our race is supreme; and no one of the profusion of stars in their myriad clusters looks down on scenes comparable to those which are passing beneath the rays of the sun.'
cosmic humility must therefore give place to cosmic pride. so far, so good. this volte-face of science will encourage those who share mr. belloc's belief that they may yet live 'until that perhaps immediate day when the fantastic figures of astronomy will burst and the stars will be at reasonable distances again: as they are even now to a friend of mine who estimates the sun at twelve miles, the moon at 20, and all the stars at a common distance (about a hundred miles) from the earth; and, firm in this faith, is as happy as one can be in this world'.
III. the victorian view of the atom has shared the fate of victorian cosmogony. i am sorry to see the atom go. the victorian atom was a friendly, concrete little fellow
299 that i much prefer to the shadowy mists of unintelligible symbols which have replaced him.
thought was considered to be a bye-product produced by the interplay of atoms in the brain. 'it was, as E has pointed out, the boast of the victorian physicist that he would not claim to understand a thing until he could make a model of it; and by a model he meant something constructed by levers, geared wheels, squirts and other appliances familiar to an engineer'.
a material brain obviously suggested a ready made model of the mind. 'and being a model, it was for them (the victorian physicists) the full explanation of the mind. a mechanism of concrete particles, like the billiard ball atoms of the brain, was their idea of an explanation'.
the concrete model has disappeared from modern physics. the modern physicist does not try to explain the ether or the electron 'in terms of billiard balls or flywheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. what do the symbols stand for? the mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. to understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised'. and here it is necessary to insert a warning note. there are people who seem to think that the dissolution of the atom from a small billiard ball into a shadowy mist of mathematical symbols strengthens the case against
300 materialism/ of course, they are wrong. the arguments for and against materialism are entirely unaffected by the nature of matter. the essence of materialism is the belief, not that matter is necessarily solid, but that there is no fundamental distinction between mental and physical phenomena. science is metrical knowledge and the materialistic fallacy consists in the assumption that all knowledge is ultimately metrical. the argument between the materialist and his opponent is entirely unaffected by our view as to the nature of the atom, the ether, or the electron. the only important effect of the new outlook of physics on the religious problem is, as Sir Arthur Eddington observes, 'that we are no longer tempted to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness. we have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete.
mr. j.w.n. sullivan, one of the most attractive of modern writers on science, contributed on april 13. 1930, to the Observer a profoundly interesting review of the present outlook of science. he began by alluding to the disconcerting fact that the actual status of physical science is a matter of dispute among scientists themselves, who are by no means agreed as to the real aim and character of science. in order to throw a little light on this problem, mr S interviewed the actual creators of the quantum and relativity theories of Profs. Planck and Einstein, and also discussed these theories with Prof. Schrodinger, a leading authority on the new views of matter.
301 Prof. S was convinced that something like free will was the basis of all natural phenomena. P and E were emphatic in rejecting 'the free-will theory of the universe', and apparently on this point mr. Sullivan found their personalities more convincing than their arguments. he says: 'these men possess a sort of scientific wisdom which often cannot be supported by reasoned arguments but which is, nevertheless, pretty well infallible. Einstein, in one of his most interesting remarks, acknowledged that some of his scientific judgments are based, not on reason, but on feelings'. it is interesting to observe Newman's 'illative sense' turning up again, this time no in support of theological, but of scientific faith.
Planck then proceeded to develop the interesting theme that science 'is a constructed work of art, expressing a certain side of man's nature. another side is expressed in art and religion'. sullivan objected that science differs from art in that science gives us a knowledge of objective reality. Prof. planck promptly countered by asking what reason mr. sullivan had to suppose that 'art and religion did not give us such knowledge'. science is an art, he insisted, and the fact that it also gives us 'objective knowledge' is an indication that art and religion also do so.
Einstein went even further than P in insisting on the affinities between science and religion. mr. sullivan concludes his profoundly interesting article with the reminder that modern science has entirely disowned victorian materialism:
302 'in the new universe, it appears, our religious insight is granted as great validity as our scientific insight. indeed, in the opinion of the greatest creator of them all, our religious insight is the source and guide of our scientific insight'.
CHAPTER 20 - THE LIMITATIONS OF THE SPECIALIST
303 a medieval scholar could acquire a reputation as an authority on almost every subject included in the university curriculum, but every succeeding century has added to the accumulation of human knowledge, with the result that scholarship is tending to become more and more specialised. a modern historian, for instance, would feel very will satisfied if he were treated as an expert on the history of a particular country during a particular century.
the power of the specialist increases with every addition to human knowledge, for it becomes increasingly difficult to keep pace with modern discoveries and increasingly tempting to save oneself the trouble of forming an opinion by accepting at secnd hadn the verdict of a recognised expert.
it is only in theology that the amateur still feels free to air his views. our scientists would be shocked if a bishop held forth on relativity and would be startled if the views of a scientist on the religious implications of some scientific theory were challenged on the ground that he was not a doctor of divinity.
304 the position, so far as the relations between religion and science are concerned, is the exact reverse of the medieval. in the middle ages science was regarded much as theology is regarded today, as the natural playground for the amateur and theology as a subject reserved for experts.
the medieval theologian was a specialist whose opinions no amateur would have dared to question. indeed, no man who was not trained in dialectics and who had not mastered the technical vocabulary of scholastic philosophy could possibly have understood, much less have taken part in, a medieval debate. moreover, the arguments of the expert could, in the last resource, be reinforced by the stake.
the relative positions of science and theology are reversed in the modern world. the amateur is warned off scientific research bu encouraged to express his opinions on theological problems, once regarded as the province of the expert.
the Daily Mail would scarcely invite mr. arnold bennett, ms. rebecca west, mr. owen nares and mr. a.p.f. chapman to express their considered opinions on Einstein's theory of space-time, but the editor would not hesitate to invite these distinguished people to contribute to the popular symposiums, which are a regular feature of the press, on the immortality of the soul and the efficacy of prayer.
it would be peasant to represent this as a spirited protest against the excessive tyranny of theological experts, but it would, i fear, be idle to pretend that the editor argues in some such fashion as this: 'i know, of course,
305 that the Bishop of Birmingham is a great authority on prayer/ he as been praying, on and off, for a great many years, and has done valuable research work on this subject. but i refuse to be browbeaten by the specialist. prayer is one of those branches of science on which the man in the street has as much right to express his opinion as the Bishop of...'
it is not, i fear, arguments such as these which account for the greater importance attached to the views of religious amateurs that to the views of the amateur in science.
II. on the general relations between amateurs and specialists, mr, chesterton has made some very shrewd observations. he writes as follows:
'i did not venture upon guesses and generalisations about history without considering somewhat seriously the problem which it raises, touching the inevitable inferiority of the amateur to the specialist. it seems to me rather a difficult problem with difficulties for the specialist as well as the amateur. my critic has complimented me with a comparison to Goldsmith and certainly there is more real English history in ten lines of 'The Deserted Village' than in the whole of Hume. but it is the very depth and darkness of my ignorance that discloses the difficulty. i am willing to believe that not only mr. coulton, but every other man i meet in Cambridge, knows much more than i do. but, in that case, how inconvenient and incalculable must be my course and progress through the Cambridge streets. i must become modernist after meeting one man, a medievalist after meeting the next. the man in the street must be wholly at the mercy of an academic priesthood. when the priests quarrel, he cannot
306 even cling to the most learned; for he cannot know which is the most learned without being more learned than all of them. and as there are specialists about everything, it is impossible for any ordinary person to form any impression about anything. even a protestant priesthood will hardly demand so complete a surrender of private judgment. i have reflected; and i think i see the place of the amateur.
'the obscure things, the details and disputed points, the great scholar can always see, and note better than we can. it is the obvious things that he cannot see. i do not say this in mere deprecation; i think it is really inseparable from that concentrated research to which the world owes so much. it is the truth in the traditional picture of the absent minded professor, who remains gazing at a fossil or a roman coin and fails to observe external objects, such as a house on fire, a revolution, an escaped elephant putting its head through the skylight, and similar things. mr. coulton's view of history shows the same limitations; and it is precisely because i am so much less learned than he that it is my privilege to lead him through common ways, pointing out elephants and other enormous objects. for instance, inferior as i may be about information about the medieval world, i have as much right as anyone else to form impressions of the modern world. and i can hardly trust myself blindly to one who really seems to believe (as does mr. coulton) that the field of 'science is free from journalistic adventurers, amateur experimenters, quacks and charlatans, even as this Chesterton.
Samuel Butler would have endorsed, with enthusiasm, mr. chesterton's brilliant defence of the amateur, for B admitted frankly that he had made no original experiments and that he had taken most of the facts at second hand. an architect, he explained, does not quarry his own bricks. 'if the facts are sound, he wrote, how can it matter whether A or B collected them? if Prof.Huxley, for example, has made a series of original observations ( not that i know of his having done so), why am i to make them over again? what are fact collectors worth if the fact co-ordinators may not rely upon them?'
307 III. every age has its Butler and the B of our own day would appear to be Commander bernard acworth. ..A, like B, is a fact co-ordinator rather than a fact collector. 'it must be acknowledged, he writes, that the author's knowledge of the curiosities of bird life have been in great measure derived from the patient and brilliant observation of famous ornithologists. he resembles B not only in the brilliance of his destructive criticism and in the creative originality of his constructive criticism, but also in the intemperance of his attacks on distinguished scientists.
..A, in his book, 'This Bondage', was one of the first to enunciate and certainly the first fully to appreciate, the importance of the law which he describes as the first law of currents. 'no bird and no machine can experience any pressure from the movement
308 of the medium in which it is supported and operating'.
he quotes many passages from distinguished scientists who fall into the error of supposing that a bird in flight FEELS the wind. a bird in flight is, of course, AFFECTED by the wind, delayed by a head wind and helped by a following wind, but in so far as its sensations are concerned, storm and calm are much the same thing. from this law commander A has deduced a fascinating theory of bird migration.
here is a characteristic extract from the writing of an eminent scientist: 'thus the young eels or elvers must swim straight upstream, for their bodies automatically adjust themselves to have equal pressure on both sides.
'this statement, writes ..A, is a mere repetition of the innumerable fallacies contained in 'scientific' treatises on flight, with water substituted for air. a fish in a current, like a submarine in a current or a bird in a current, can experience no pressure from the current in which it is operating, the pressure on the sides of the fish being equal, whatever the course of the fish relative to the direction of the current may be'.
..A's revolutionary explanation of bird migration is based partly on the first law of currents, which i have already quoted, partly on the second law of currents, with which i need not trouble the reader, and partly on the fact, which is accepted as such by the overwhelming majority of ornithologists, that birds and insects have an inherent power to sense and aim at a given spot in space, 'this sense of exact direction being the sole and automatic, but at the same time amply sufficient, guide in their navigation'.
309 from these simple but apparently indisputable premisses ..A proceeds to develop very persuasively his most fascinating argument. he regards birds and insects as mere parasites of the air, their movements, including migration, being determined exclusively by the movements of the prevailing winds.
once we are prepared to admit that the bird is a mere parasite of the wind, ..A's explanation of the desertion of nests, the arrival of male migrants before the female, and the system of mating, becomes almost irresistible.
..A also advances strong arguments for believing that the recognition of landmarks plays no part whatever in migration, and that migration itself is not migration at all in the objective sense, but is only a seasonal drift in which there is no evidence of intelligent aim on the part of the bird.
the book was virtually boycotted by the scientific press, but enjoyed a magnificent reception in the lay press. competent laymen pointed out that ..A's premisses appeared to be unassailable, and assumed that the conclusions which he deduced from those premisses, conclusion which, it correct, would revolutionise current ornithology, would either be accepted or refuted by scientists. the scientists, however, adopted much the same tactics as those which enjoyed temporary success in the case of samuel butler.
there were honourable exceptions. mr. t.a coward, one of the leading ornithologists of the world, reviewed the book in the Manchester Guardian and described it as 'a really remarkable book-a dirct challenge, soundly
310 reasoned, to generally accepted ideas about flight, especially migratory flight of birds, insects and indeed anything, including aircraft, which moves in a single moving medium'.
thanks very largely to the persistent propaganda of an admirer of..A's books, a few belated reviews had begun to creep into the bir magazines more than a year after the book had appeared.
18 months after the book's appearance, our leading scientific paper, Nature, which had been criticised in another periodical for failing to notice ..A's book, attempted to dispose of his arguments by means of a foolish dialogue between a mr.
A and a mr. B., who devoted between them 5 short paragraphs to the Commander's theories.
'i have had the uncomfortable feeling, says mr. A, 'that the author had a few axes to grind'. the old game. if you cannot refute an argument, you discount it on the ground of bias. mr. B then continues: 'with regard to the effect of wind velocity on the flight of birds, which is ostensibly the main purpose of the book, i feel unkind enough to say that the author has discovered-somewhat belatedly-the parallelogram of velocities and is anxious to tell the world about it. he should have confined himself to that, for, as he justly points out, some naturalists talk a lot of nonsense on the subject.
the passage which i have quoted from a very short review contains the only fraction of the review which could conceivably be described as a criticism of ..A's theories.
311 ..A may have discovered the parallelogram of velocities 'somewhat belatedly', but he has no difficulty in showing that practically every scientist and ornithologist has failed to apply this law to the phenomena of bird flight. ..A is not in the least anxious to tell the world about 'the parallelogram of velocities', but he has every right to publish his brilliant applications of that law to the phenomena of bird flight. Nature admits that 'some naturalists talk a lot of nonsense on the subject', but..discreetly omits to mention that among the naturalists whom..A has convicted of ignorance on this point are men with a european reputation, such as Prof. patten and Prof j.a. thomson.
313 IV. books like Butler's 'Life and Habit' and Acworth's 'This Bondage' are good for the soul. they remind us that research is not the equivalent of invention and that a state cannot supply discovery by the simple process of subsidising professional scientists.
'of all forms of enterprise, writes mr. a.h. pollen, that which is the most wholly personal is the gift of suddenly perceiving what is hidden from other men. it is this rare gift that we recognise to be the peculiarity of those pioneers in discovery and invention who are the true authors of modern progress'.
watt, who invented the steam engine, was an artisan. it was a veterinary surgeon who discovered pneumatic tyres. Browning, who invented automatic weapons, was the son of a gunsmith. at the age of 13 he mad his first gun out of the scrap iron in his father's workshop. De Saussure has been called with justice the father of modern geology. in the course of his mountain wanderings he must often have seen erratic boulders and moraines far beyond the limits of existing glaciers. yet he never drew the obvious conclusion that glaciers must at one time have extended many miles beyond their present limits.
314 Agassiz and Charpentier, great naturalists and great observers, also missed the significance of these signposts of past glacial ages.
a simple chamois hunter, Perrandier by name, observed a block of granite resting on limestone in the neighbourhood of Neuchatel. granite cannot grow out of limestone like a mushroom, and P accordingly deduced that the granite must at one time have been carried to Ner by a glacier; from which it followed that galciers must at one time have covered the whole of Switzerland. P was, therefore, the discoverer of the glacial epoch of the past.
military science tells the same tale. a civilian called Bloch foretold, some years before the Great War, many of the more important developments of war, notably the immobilisation of armies by the effectiveness of modern weapons. B was a fact co-ordinator. those who have read his book and also the reminiscences of the late Lord French, must have been impressed by the artless fashion in which Lord F records the fact that he was taken completely by surprise again and again by aspects of the war which B had foretold with complete accuracy.
315 V. englishmen have always viewed the expert with healthy suspicion. our most successful politicians have been those who succeeded in persuading the public that they were not professional politicians. public trial by jury, that is, by amateurs, has been the rule in our country from the earliest times and this essentially English institution survived in England at a time when trial by jury was disappearing in other countries.
we are prepared to accept without criticism the considered opinion of experts on the things that do not greatly matter, the distance of a star or the age of a fossil. but on the greater issues we put our experts in the witness box and we entrust the decision to 12 plain citizens.
in a murder trial were poisoning is alleged, experts are called, both for the prosecution and for the defence, to give their expert views not only on the question as to whether death was due to poisoning, but also on the amount of poison administered, the number of times it was administered and the time that elapsed before the fatal dose and death.
experts are the fact collectors, but the task of coordinating the facts which they have collected is left to the jury.
in other words, when a man's life is at stake, we put the experts in the witness box and leave the decision to the amateur.
few of us will be called to serve on juries in murder trials, but we have, one and all, to render a verdict on the great question utrum deus sit. on that issue let us hear
316 what the experts have to say, by all means, but let us keep them in their proper place-the witness box.
Samuel Butler once remarked that he wrote 'Life and Habit' 'to place the distrust of science on a scientific basis'. there is no more reason to distrust science than the multiplication table, but there is good reason to distrust organised scientific opinion.
the scientific expert has his value, but it is unhealthy for the expert and demoralising for the public for his authority to be accepted with uncritical respect. Organised Science is gradually usurping the position which was once held by the church. scientists are beginning to assume that their pronouncements on religious or political or social problems deserve a respect greater than that accorded to the views of the non-scientific. 'i do not thing said Lord Rayleigh in his presidential address to the British Association, that the scientific worker has a claim superior to that of other people to assume the attitude of a prophet. in his heart he knows that underneath the theories he constructs there lie contradictions which he cannot reconcile'.
i am not sure that it would be much pleasanter to be governed by organised Science than by organised Religion. it is an illusion to suppose that there is a natural alliance between Science and Democracy. on the contrary, Science encourages in it prophets an attitude of aristocratic aloofness. 'i have not very much use for people, writes Prof. j.b.s. haldane, who are not in touch with the invisible world. at best they are good animals,
317 too often not even that. 'this world and its future, writes mr. h.g. wells, is not for feeble folk any more than it is for selfish folk. it is not for the multitude but for the best. the best of today will be the commonplace of tomorrow' (a view, by the way, for which there is no scientific evidence whatever). 'if i am something of a social leveller it is not because i want to give silly people a good time, but because i want to make opportunity universal, and not miss out one single being who is worth while'.
'Let the Lord God be praised in ALL His creatures, said St. Francis and i am inclined to think that i should feel more comfortable in the world of St. Francis than in a world controlled by mr. wells.
'in my youth, wrote Horace Walpole, philosophers were eager to ascribe every uncommon discovery to the deluge; now it is the fashion to solve every appearance by conflagrations...i am a great sceptic about human reasonings; they predominate only for a time like other mortal fashions, and are so often exploded after the mode is passed, that i hold them little serious, though they called themselves wisdom. how many have i lived to see established and confuted!
..W give a long list of the scientific dogmas of his own time, all of which have been quietly dropped since his day. i sometimes wonder whether modern science will make much the same impression upon our descendants 150 years hence as the science of W's day makes on us.
one thing is certain: very clever men are capable of talking very great nonsense.
318 the victorian heresy itself might be described, as Prof. Broad has described 'Behaviorism', a modern variation of that heresy, as 'an example of those theories which are so preposterously silly that only very learned men could have thought of them'.
there is no conflict between religion and science; but there is a very real conflict between reason and unreason, between science and those who usurp the name of science to attack the very source of science itself.
'it is true, as Lord Rayleigh remarked in that presidential address from which i have already quoted, 'that among scientific men, as in other classes, crude views are to be met with as to the deeper things of Nature; but that the lifelong beliefs of Newton, of Faraday, and of Maxwell are inconsistent with the scientific habit of mind, is surely a proposition which i need not pause to refute'.
it is the duty and privilege of science to interpret the world of experience, and, for the rest: arkei gar A patrios kI palIa pistis.
