Chapter V: The Fairy Halls of Science (1)

1. THE IDOLS OF THE TRIBE

Whenever I stand beside one of those wonders of modern achievement, a great turbine engine, for example, smoothly and silently performing the work of a myriad men, I feel like taking off my hat to the geniuses (for the most part unnamed and unknown) who have made such a thing possible. There may be two opinions about the social effect of machinery, but there can be no two opinions about the prodigies of intelligence which have gone into its making.

Everybody knows that machinery is scientific. And because of the vast esteem which our master mechanics rightly enjoy, the word Science has come to command a reverence once accorded only to the name of God. It is no longer possible to advertise a toy or a tooth-brush without calling it “scientific.”

But what is Science? Is it a synonym for Truth? By no means. It is not even a search for truth. Truth is something general; the highest truth is universal. The search for it is called Philosophy. Science, as we now understand it, did not begin to have an independent existence until it definitely abandoned Truth as its province and devoted itself to the study of those--not general but particular phenomena known as facts. When we say that Science is classified knowledge we mean that it is our classified knowledge of facts. And in that word “classified” lies the root of its only difference from common sense.

Science is also a method for ascertaining new facts as well as the classification of those we already know. What do we mean when we say that science is a method? What is its method? Every schoolboy can answer, “The method of science is the experimental method.”

The experimental method itself is less generally understood. To experiment without an object in view is like starting on a journey with no destination in mind. In the vernacular phrase, it does not get you anywhere. The object of an experimenter is always to prove or to disprove something. And what is there for him to prove? A fact, once established, is already proven. But behind one fact there always lies another, and behind that yet others. We soon leave the world of certainty and find ourselves in the world of theories. It is a theory, then, which the experimentalist seeks to prove--his own theory, while disproving that of somebody else. Theories, dignified by the name hypotheses, are as necessary to science as are microscopes and scales. They are invented generalities used as conveniences in a region where Truths are too much to expect. A hypothesis does not even pretend to be true. It is merely the best approximation, the best guess, possible under the circumstances.

Every scientist worthy of the name has at one time or another said something like the following: “The only thing we positively know about a hypothesis is that it is to a certain extent wrong. Progress is made by gradually substituting the less erroneous for the more erroneous, until the hypothesis is finally established in a modified form as a fact, or becomes so untenable that it must be abandoned altogether. In either case, it has served its turn.” Thus Darwin, true scientist that he was, characterized his theories as to the descent of man as “highly speculative,” adding, “Some will no doubt prove erroneous.”[98]

The ideal scientist, therefore, never becomes dogmatic, never cocksure. He knows that though Truth be not relative, Knowledge is. He forever deals with conclusions which are highly tentative, and constantly waits for that appeal to experience which will reveal his mistakes. Unfortunately, scientists are but men, and the ideal scientist no more exists than does the ideal Christian. Only those whose specialties keep them constantly close to experience remain truly scientific for any length of time--which is one of the reasons why most of our progress has been made in physics and chemistry.

Francis Bacon, who is generally credited with having first put science upon the firm ground of inductive reasoning, or generalizing from observed particulars, says in his _Novum Organum_:[99] “Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity ... leads her about like a captive in a procession.”

How well Bacon understood our human nature’s proneness to determine questions according to its will, and then to bend experience to fit the occasion! But he did not call this method the scientific method. On the contrary, he described it as one of those “Idols of the Tribe,” or habits leading to error, to which everybody is subject. And he only _hoped_ that science would avoid it as much as possible.

True science has avoided it--as much as possible. But how little true science we have! The experimental method is so limited in its application that there are few matters important to human life which can be put to the test of immediate experience. We must wait long years for experience in general to tell its tale, and even then its conclusions are not always convincing. To be convincing, experience must take place under conditions of our own contriving, every unknown influence eliminated. And the experience must be repeated time and again. The field of true science is, therefore, one of the narrowest in the world. Much that goes by the name of science is but semi-science, pseudo-science, false science, or no science at all.

The ideal scientist, having suffered an initial experience, then forms a tentative hypothesis merely to direct his subsequent experiments, and never for an instant permits his enthusiasm for theory to warp his judgment regarding fact. But as there are no ideal scientists, what is to be done? Bacon thus notes what is to be expected:

“The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down ... forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation: and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet [the understanding] either does not observe, or despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions.”[100]

How highly fateful, then, must have been those first propositions which modern science laid down in its infancy. But man is not to be balked by his own infirmities. Since he cannot hope to abolish the worship of this particular Idol of the Tribe, cannot hope to be led by non-existent ideal scientists, he will make a virtue of his necessity and reap what good he may from his very shortcomings. Men will not abandon their fetishes and become reasonable. Very well, then, we will incorporate the Idol of the Tribe in our general method, and let abuses correct themselves. We will give them rope until they are hanged thereby.

This is precisely what has been done. Bacon’s Idol of the Tribe, the human tendency to bend experience to suit theory, has been put upon a pedestal and crowned with the high-sounding name of a principle called “The Economy of Hypotheses.”

Of two possible explanations of a phenomenon, that one is chosen which requires the fewer suppositions, the least departure from hypotheses already existing.

This is nothing more nor less than the principle of conservatism, and probably, in the long run, it does more good than harm. It is a protection against wild and radical theories. It gives men a chance for that long and intense application which they will give to nothing but to the defense of old and cherished beliefs. But it makes the correction of a fundamental error a very slow business, and though a part of the now recognized methods of science, it is not scientific.

It is, however, immensely popular, this principle of the economy of hypotheses. The other ideal--that of submitting continually to the stern discipline of trial--never appealed to the man in the street. For ages he was prejudiced against science altogether. He left it to monks and such people. Then, finally--and not so very long ago--the idea, having proved a money-maker, was “sold” to him. He swallowed it hook, line and sinker, until today he will not admit that he has a pain in the stomach unless he finds in his basic theories something which will let him account for it. What we need now is to be reminded to be economical not with our hypotheses but with our credulity, our acceptance of hypotheses as final. For there are still many things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in our major syntheses.

A major synthesis, of course, is that broadest, most shadowy, least dependable, but widely inclusive hypothesis by which it is sought to bind all minor theories into one more or less coherent system. It is the point where science most nearly approaches to philosophy, the point where, according to its own premises regarding the authority of experience, it should be most cautious and humble. The making of a major synthesis is an awesome business. The fall of a major synthesis marks the end of an epoch. We are now living at the end of such an epoch, though the pseudo-scientists do not appear to be yet aware of the fact. And the major synthesis which has fallen is that which sought to bind all phenomena together as manifestations of matter--the Mechanist Hypothesis.

That the Mechanist Hypothesis should be the first generalization of modern science was inevitable. It began with astronomy, the first science to dare to call itself “exact.” In astronomy we cannot experiment. We cannot take planets and comets and suns, and subject them to laboratory conditions. But we can at least make observations; and what we observe appears to be matter, pure and simple.

Then came physics and chemistry, throwing off the attempt to be magic and buckling down to practical jobs. Both experiment and observation were possible here--and still matter held the field. Matter, it was soon noted, had exceedingly regular habits. And when it failed to follow one habit, continued observation would discover that it was only following some other. These habits came to be called laws, and it was practically impossible not to confound laws with force.

In the back of the scientific mind were those human laws--customs, behind which was Government, always ready to manifest itself as the force in a policeman’s club. And back of that was the idea of the laws of God--of a real God with all the force of the universe in His hand.

“Our laws are the laws of God,” said the early scientist, quite rightly. And then, after he had abandoned that ancient idea, the “hypothesis of a God,” he continued to say it, not realizing how ridiculous and empty his notion of “law” had become. Eventually he did begin to see this, and was minded to drop force altogether. A law became merely the way things acted under given circumstances, and force merely a persistence in such action--in other words, the way in which other things would act which stood in the way.

A given amount of some substance put into a scale pan will lift the same amount of the same substance to a level with it, and this behavior of the substance in the second pan is the measure of the “force” of gravity moving the substance in the first pan. As to the nature of force itself, the scientist came to say that it lay outside of his province--which was well and good. Pseudo-sciences went further, and said that there was no such thing as force--quite another pair of shoes. But long before this, which marks the end and not the beginning of the last scientific epoch, the Mechanist Hypothesis had been formulated in terms recognizing both force and matter, and brought to the attention of the average man through the writings of Newton.

Sir Isaac Newton had one of the greatest minds granted to a human being since the Reformation; yet inadvertently he did his fellows about the most evil turn which modern history records. He robbed them of their belief in free will--or if not quite that, he at least induced them to abandon those fundamental propositions upon which alone the belief in free will can reasonably be based.

Free will presupposes force--real force--at the disposition of the will. A will without force is a powerless will--no will at all. And a man without will is not a man; he is not even an animal. He is on a level with his own lawn-mower. Upon free will depends not only all religion, all ethics, all sense of human responsibility, but our physical and mental well-being, our happiness, our very self-respect. If we are but weathercocks, blown this way and that by every breeze, it is folly to talk of striving; of reasoning; of good or of evil; of loyalty or of treason; of anything which makes us act indeed like human beings. It is folly to speak even of consciousness. What good could it do us? We might as well surrender to Dr. Watson at once--and it is folly for him to write books to tell us so, though a folly which he cannot help. To rob man of his will would be to rob him of his life, and to rob him of his belief in the freedom of his will is to rob him of all faith in any means proposed to make life better. Yet our mechanists one and all pretend to be philanthropists, and nearly all are reformers. Every day of their lives is a self-contradiction.

Sir Isaac Newton, when he saw the apple fall and deduced the law of gravitation, did not intend to precipitate another Fall of Man. He seems to have been quite unmindful of the evil reputation of the fruit in question. Nor would much harm have been done had not his discovery been one of those rare scientific ventures which are “good theatre.” Everybody has seen apples fall. Nobody can ignore gravity. The law was the best newspaper story of a scientific sort since Copernicus and Galileo dislodged the earth from the center of the universal stage. It gave Newton such prestige that his slightest word became Gospel.

Much of this prestige was deserved. His laws were, and still are, mighty monuments of human genius. The trouble came from the implications that were drawn from them. The mechanistic hypothesis had long been in existence--no fruit of science, but both root and branch of an old mechanistic philosophy. Descartes had brought it up to date. So Newton adopted it in preference to any other philosophy. And his worship of that Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses, led him to arrange his laws so as to cause as little disturbance to Cartesianism as possible.

The result was a world in which the Conservation of Energy was the only real God. Neither energy nor matter could be created or destroyed. Whatever went into anything, that or its equivalent came out. A “free” creature gives out more energy than it receives. Therefore to believe in freedom was to be crazy.

Moreover, the “laws” did account very well for most of the known physical phenomena of the day. There were then no Becquerel rays, X-rays, actinium, radium, protons, electrons, quanta or ultramicroscopy to be dealt with. Accurate observation was in its infancy. Materialism was in the very air. Had not science won its first triumphs by looking at matter and ignoring everything else? Newton lived some two hundred years ago. His “closed system” of a universe in which all creative activity had ceased, though it gave us a life without a future, a life wherein everything had already as good as happened, a life that was really a moving death with its future behind it--this all fitted amazingly well with the static ideas of the age. It was a Calvin’s universe, unlit by the fires even of fanaticism. Prayer was futile. Initiative an illusion. Heaven and hell either non-existent or foredoomed. We were here but to turn the pages of a book printed long before we were born.

Actual mechanics, busy at their work-benches, satisfied with a hypothesis which was accurate enough for their immediate needs, thought very little of these far-reaching implications. But here were weapons forged to a nicety for the hands of the leaders of that vast movement which today we loosely and inaccurately call modern paganism--it being neither pagan nor modern, but an old, old disease marked by the hardening of the arteries of the soul self-deprived of conscious communion with God. Pains were taken to bring Newton’s findings home to every intellect. Popular science became intensely interesting, and hot with fervor; for in reality it was not science at all but anti-religious propaganda--and this even when it sugar-coated itself, as it sometimes did, with phrases having what might pass for a pious taste.

But it was more than even the “tough-minded”--that is to say, sclerotic-brained--long could endure. Oliver L. Reiser, of the University of Pittsburg (a writer for _The Monist_) goes so far as to say that “had Newton been able to foresee the inevitable logical consequences of his doctrine in the godless universe of Laplace, he might have been constrained towards a more hospitable regard for the views of Leibniz”--the reference, of course, being to the attempt of Leibniz to reconcile the mechanical Cartesian universe with the idea that creation, after all, has a meaning and a purpose. Newton, indeed, might have done even more than this.

But he died leaving us nothing but a big machine which continued to dominate men’s minds until about the year 1890, when the whole thing suddenly broke down. Says R. A. Millikan, of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, writing recently for _Scribner’s_: “In [the discovery of radio-activity and the electrical constitution of matter] the physical world changed in our thinking over night in its fundamental elements from a fixed, changeless, static, dead thing, to a changing, evolving, dynamic, living organism. Two principles, conservation of mass and conservation of energy, are now gone, clean gone, as distinct and separate verities.” In other words, matter and energy are now thought to be capable of changing, the one into the other. In the opinion of G. Urbain,[101] the experiments of Rutherford entitle us to say that there are “two chemical elements, the electron and proton, out of which the universe is made.” But--“we physical chemists of today do not tell what matter is.... The least metaphysical among us all see in electrons and protons merely centers of convergence of lines of force. That evidently explains nothing fundamental.... It makes for us a world formed of minute hairy points, the hairs strikingly abstract.”

So matter itself is force and nothing else--or rather it is two forces, electrons (negative electricity) and protons (positive electricity) locked together in a strange conflict whose resistance to interference gives tangibility and “hardness” to the things of the world--all of which sounds rather as if it had been translated from the Rig-Veda. Gone by the board is the idea that matter is the fundamental reality, that nothing can happen in the mind but what has first happened in the brain.

But has mind itself to obey the old law? Is it but a more subtile manifestation of the preponderance of exterior forces? We shall have to penetrate yet farther into these fairy halls of science before finding an answer to that question.

2. SOME NEBULOUS MATTERS

Of all the facts of the old science, none was more firmly established than what was known as the “Nebular Hypothesis.” The name “hypothesis” clung to it always, because “nebular hypothesis” makes an imposing mouthful of syllables. Yet it was everywhere treated as a fact. Indeed, after the “fact” of the conservation of energy, it was just about the fact of facts. What has become of it now?

A. Vibert Douglas, M.B.E., M.Sc., writing in _Discovery_ for August, 1925, says, “The nebular hypothesis of Laplace and the planetesimal hypothesis of Chamberlain have gone into the history of science as great and lasting _monuments_ to their originators.”

Monuments! Memorials marking the last resting place of things now dead.

How carefully Herbert Spencer used to explain the manner in which a lot of star-dust, scattered somehow through the space marked roughly by the orbit of the planet Neptune, started to contract, revolve, grow warm, and to throw off rings (since known as Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Earth, Mars, _et cetera_) and ended by central concentration in our glowing sun. There was nothing difficult to understand about the theory except the language in which Spencer couched it--that is, unless one tried to look beyond and into some of the things which it took for granted. In that case certain questions arose. What scattered the dust in the first place? Would it scatter it again, again, and yet again, thus creating the universe of recurrent phenomena imagined by the horror-loving Nietzsche? What force separated the rings from the mass and rolled them neatly up into planets? Why haven’t Saturn’s rings rolled up? Will they, in time? What is keeping them back? These matters, and various details which had been observed but by few, troubled the mathematicians.

They hardly caused the average citizen to lose a wink of sleep. Saturn looked like a working model preserved for school-room purposes. And the nebular hypothesis was a pleasant story to tell to children. But the contrary observations increased and multiplied--for the most part without getting into the newspapers--until now we have Vibert, with a host of competent astronomers ready to echo his words, saying, “A nebula giving rise to a solar system [is] an impossible hypothesis in the light of modern knowledge.”

The hypothesis itself has not been altogether carried away to the bone-yard. Like an old and faithful horse, it has been taken from the shafts and turned out to grass so that it may enjoy its declining years in comparative peace. The latter pastures of the nebular hypothesis are sufficiently large, for it is being used now to help make stellar systems. As there is little in this far region save assumptions to drag around, the work is light. Fit ending for an honorable career. But astronomers have grown cautious. It is not likely that any of them will be rash enough ever again to impose the weight of a real star, let alone a system, upon the already broken back. They at least know the hypothesis for what it is--a hypothesis, and a dying one. Only laymen, half asleep over their Sunday supplements, now think it was ever anything else.

And what has come to take its place? The “Big Star Theory.” An astronomer named Jeans brought forward this entry in 1919. He said that if a big star had ever come near enough to the sun, it might have caused a fearful tide of solar substance--a long arm of stuff more or less gaseous and very hot--to reach out millions of miles into space. And from this hypothetical arm (there were really two, but let us not complicate matters with details), broken into several pieces, the planets might have originated.

This time there was plenty of force at hand, enough to satisfy all the equations which the mathematicians were likely to contrive. No need to try to think how the dust had been scattered. The force came from the big star, which Jeans made a very big star indeed, with a diameter of eight thousand million kilometers--say about twice the distance of the farthest planet from the sun. Anyway, there was a very big star concerned. Too big. The mathematicians could not use all the force thus put at their disposal. Dr. Harold Jeffers therefore reduced the mammoth to a diameter of a mere forty million kilometers.

The mathematicians still objected. It was no longer a question of force. But the theory of probability, they said, made it almost unreasonable to suppose that a collision or near collision could actually have happened within the lifetime of the sun. So astronomers set to work again, some of them to lengthen the past life of the sun, others to bring the stars in general closer together so as to increase the risks of collision. Both parties succeeded admirably. Jeans himself published a calculation which made the sun a million million years of age--seven thousand times older than any other calculation had ever made it. There were now seven thousand times more chances of a collision having taken place than there had been when he started.

Others (you may read an account of their observations in an article on the Spiral Nebulæ, by C. Wirtz, in _Scientia_, November, 1925), discovered that when you look long enough and deep enough into the gulf of space (about three hundred thousand light-years is as far as you need to go), it looks as if all matter were outward bound, and moving faster and faster all the time. Therefore the stars used to be much more thickly placed here around home than they are now. A collision becomes easy to imagine.

But why is matter going away from here? Apparently for the same reason that rats leave a sinking ship. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, ought to be five times more thickly settled with stars. As things stand, it is much too light for its size. It cannot hold itself together and is being deserted by its outer fringe of suns all the time. Nor is this the worst of it. The very matter of our solar system is fifty-two times less dense than it should be. Its critical point--that is, the point where it will fly to pieces at the slightest provocation--has long since been passed. Some day, a few million years hence, when you get up in the morning the morning is likely not to be there. This is not such a good story to tell to the children.

Nor is the situation any better if you turn your back to the stars, and look at those little stars within things which we call atoms. Very much to the contrary. Some meteorologists created considerable consternation a few years ago by prophesying that one of the glacial epochs, probably the last one, was coming back to play a return engagement--decidedly not by request. But what is a glacial epoch or two compared with atoms in the state ours are in?

“We owe to Sir Ernest Rutherford [the great English physicist] what is basic in our actual ideas about atoms,” says Urbain.[102] This savant was once a pupil of Pierre Curie, discoverer of radium, and speaks with authority. And he asks: “As to the atom, have we attained something real, or only a model, symbolic of observed phenomena?” He then answers his own question by declaring that “it is difficult to say.... Rutherford allowed the electrons [in the atom] to radiate, since it was supposed that the model must obey the standard laws.” The difficulty was that such an atom as Rutherford’s ought, all agreed, to be luminous. And all atoms are not luminous. Another difficulty was this. “Each outer electron must gradually approach the central nucleus,”--I still quote from Urbain--“finally falling into it, which means death.” Presumably it is not intended to be implied that the same electrons which were allowed to radiate ended by falling into the thing they radiated from. Anyway, Urbain continues: “We might have accepted the death of the stars ... but we cannot that of the atoms. That would mean a definite death of the universe.”

For once, even scientists were appalled. What was to be done? Something, evidently. So an astronomer named Bohr rose to the occasion. He constructed--not another atom, but another “model.” This one was guaranteed to last forever, and if real atoms would only conform to it all would be well.

“Bohr’s atom,” says Urbain, “is not a clear explanation, for the privileged orbits [he gave the electrons ‘privileged orbits’ to keep them contented without either flying off into space or into the deadly nucleus] are not understandable in themselves; neither are the quanta of energy set free by the electrons in leaping from one privileged orbit to another.... Bohr’s models have their own laws with no necessary relation to the law of ordinary experiments, and he thus turned scientific thought into a new and unknown direction.... In the future are theories to be built upon such contradictions?”

Apparently they are. We have now observed so many things that it is flatly impossible to grapple with them, or to find out which ones are so and which are not. The “new and unknown direction” into which scientific thought has been turned is clearly that of imagining artificial working-models known to be at variance with reality, getting what satisfaction can be had from the models, and leaving reality to shift for itself until some really serious collision with fact damages the model beyond repair. It is not such a new direction, after all, but merely a new frankness which acknowledges the shortcomings of a hypothesis from the start without a period of pretending that it is a genuine “explanation.” Every new discovery makes the universe--not easier, but more difficult to explain. Progress uncovers our ignorance much faster than it brings us knowledge--arm-chair progress, of course excepted.

So Urbain is thankful for the new model atom, and says that “Bohr, in reviving our hopes, is a great benefactor.” Adding, “It seems necessary either to resign ourselves to not understanding, as Bohr has done, or to resign ourselves to a model in flagrant violation with experience.”

Those sufficiently resigned to not understanding I now ask to return with me for a short and final visit to those suburban stellar districts situated some three hundred thousand light-years from our sun, where matter is moving ever faster and faster away from us. By a strange contradiction, time in those regions seems to be moving slower and slower, as if tired with the long journey and no longer able to keep up the killing pace set by the stars. Light, too, appears to be losing the race. Professor Michelson, of the University of Chicago, established the velocity of light not long ago at 299,796 kilometers per second--roughly 186,000 miles. But now Monsignor E. J. Gheury de Braye, in an article in _L’Astronomie_, official organ of the Astronomical Society of France, declares that the velocity of light decreases by four kilometers every second. We may perhaps grasp a moment’s understanding by saying that this is relativity, that light merely travels slower in comparison with the quickened pace of time and matter in the outer stellar spaces.

This, however, will not serve us long, for W. de Sitter, the Dutch astronomer, taking all these things into consideration, must needs offer an “explanation.”

“The world of de Sitter,” says Wirtz in summing it up, “is a four-dimensional continuum of space and time, forming the surface of a sphere in five-dimensional co-ordinates.”

If you look wise and pretend in scientific circles that you understand this, you go to the foot of the class. A four-dimensional sphere with a surface in five-dimensional co-ordinates does not pretend to be comprehensible. To declare it to be graspable by the human mind is to insult it. But it can be used in equations, like any other “imaginary” quantity, though--again like any other imaginary quantity--it is quite unimaginable.

Imaginary quantities are not such awesome nonentities. Anybody can make a few for himself and play with them as well as can anybody else. Let us take nothing to begin with, thus--0. Write a 2 under it--0/2. We have now one-half of nothing. Now multiply a cipher by 2, and we have twice nothing, or 2(0)--not for a moment to be confounded with twenty. Then one half of 2(0), or twice nothing, equals two times 0/2, or one-half of nothing, because each is equal to nothing at all and things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other--and for various other reasons.

Abstractions are other imaginary no-things which cannot be imagined. A mathematical point has, by hypothesis, neither length, breadth nor thickness. We always think of it as a very small dot, having all three. Yet in dealing with it, mathematically, we ignore these dimensions in the result. A line has length, but no breadth or thickness. We think of it as something long and very slender. It is the edge of a solid. A plane has length and breadth but no thickness, theoretically speaking. We think of it as a very thin slice of a solid. Try to think of the surface of a solid without thinking of the solid! Abstractions are conveniences when we wish to travel light without carrying all the mystery of material reality about with us. They are like Bohr’s model atoms. And like all other unreal things, they have a danger of their own.

The practical man, especially if he be a physicist or a chemist, a worker in those domains where our greatest scientific triumphs have been won, has experience always at his elbow ready to correct his errors whenever they pass beyond a certain point. Invent a machine, or a shaving soap, and you are immediately compelled to prove that your invention will work. And the only proof which those who invest in such things will accept is the sort of proof which we require of a pudding when we eat it.

Experience has shown that not even the best calculations ever quite verify themselves when put to the test of novel circumstances. A small model may run smoothly, yet a large machine made in the same way will develop unexpected flaws. Even increased size is sufficient to upset the forecast. A machine may run for a week, yet become cantankerous if we try to make it run for a year. Time adds a new element. So does speed. Chemical compounds which cannot be made to explode in minute quantities--coal dust, for example--sometimes work havoc in large quantities.

Now the physical sciences, like chemistry and astronomy, deal with the simplest and most tangible things of which we have any knowledge. Yet those who make them their study confess themselves baffled at every turn. In these dreadful regions, Science, the real Simon Pure, humble, beautiful and courageous, tries to maintain itself under the pitiless bombardment of facts, smoky with the infinite mystery from which they come, that rain every year more violently upon its defenseless head.

What has become of the Sunday-supplement, positive, dogmatic, you-are-a-fool-if-you-do-not-agree-with-what-I-say attitude? These men, who do not wish to be mystics, engage in more ghostly talk than did the delegates to the Meta-Physic Congress which met last year at the Sorbonne in Paris to discuss telepathy, haunted houses, and kindred matters. Gone is the cocksure vanity of the closing nineteenth century. Gone is the God-defying materialistic impiety, the arrogance, the hard-heartedness of an older and more ignorant day. In this ultimate dim Thule where the higher syntheses are born, kissing the dust is today the only permitted posture. Hypotheses hardly dare to call themselves even hypotheses any more. They are content to be known as assumptions, postulations, fancies, guesses, and thankful if they may be allowed to live their unreal existences from the time of the publication of one pamphlet to that of the next. Early modern science was drunk with victory. New science is dizzy with awe.

How comes it, then, that our Dr. Watsons can say that there is no mystery in the building of a man? A man! Ah, that is different. We have as yet hardly touched upon those positively certain “sciences” which deal with human nature, with love, life and destiny.

3. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES

Hans Driesch, at Jena, working in the very laboratory of Ernst Haeckel shortly after the death of that master argument-maker for the mechanist conception of life, inadvertently broke a fertile egg in two--and thereby broke not in two but into smithereens the whole mechanism of the mechanist which he had been taught to defend. For the egg hatched, each half producing a perfect creature as if nothing had happened.

Driesch then reduced a fertile egg fairly to hash--and still each fragment functioned like a whole egg. As long as the egg was not killed--and the eggs of primitive creatures are tough eggs except where temperature and certain poisons are concerned--hashing merely multiplied the hatch.

The biologist was much disturbed. For it seemed fairly obvious that if the design which growth was to follow lay anywhere in the material of the eggs, division of said eggs would--if it did not bring the whole vital process to an end--result at least in the division of the incubated organisms. One half of an egg should, if it hatched at all, hatch a head; the other half a tail--and so on. But this not being what happened, design could no longer be located in egg material. Any part of the material was ready to develop into either head, or tail, or wing, or antennæ, or what not, according to the direction of something beyond the dividing process--something which remained whole in each part.

Perhaps the experiment was not conclusive. In these days of model atoms no doubt somebody can construct a model egg, each atom of which is, potentially, a complete chicken. But what troubled Driesch was the immediate necessity of violating a primary principle and being compelled to be extravagant in the matter of hypotheses. Even a model egg required a great many changes in Haeckelianism.

Now if Driesch had been of an older generation or of a different persuasion, he would have found the ideas of Haeckel, not the idea of exterior design, extravagant. For one of the most ancient hypotheses in the world assumes that the design for everything lies outside of its material self. And I sometimes wonder if the principle of economy should not have been earlier applied, before so many of us abandoned this grand old major synthesis which found its highest expression in a belief in God. If it did not explain everything, it at least left room for the explanation of everything. All we had to do was to struggle for a truer and clearer conception of what it meant. Astronomers, for instance, would not now be so hard put to it in the matter of inventing Big Star theories, nor physicists in making model atoms which neither work nor exist, if they were at liberty to suppose that a forceful spirit lay behind phenomena, lending a guiding hand to all. Intellectually that would be at least as satisfactory as points of force surrounded by highly abstract hairs.

But the idea of God as it emerged from the nineteenth century presented itself to many minds as the idea of a rather ridiculous monster--the monster that Sinclair Lewis dared to strike dead,--the monster that Stephen Crane once fancied as lying “dead in heaven,” and at another time warned not to shake its bloody spears at him if its “sublime ears” did not wish to “hear curses.” Neither Crane nor Lewis need have shocked anybody. They had each seen a straw man set up, and were but proceeding to knock it down. The only shocking thing was the idea, the deformity, which had been presented to them. Where it came from it is not my present purpose to enquire.

Astronomers and physicists have now gone far beyond Crane and Lewis and are looping back--saving their faces (i.e., hypotheses) as much as possible--and picking up ever more and more of the ancient belief thrown away in the hour of materialistic extravagance. Chemists, too, are beginning to realize that there is no use going on and pretending that our thoughts, our feelings, our every manifestation, can be reduced to a mechanical basis, since not even a sea-urchin or a pismire can be so reduced.

This something which we call life shows itself, ordinarily at least, only when certain physical elements are present. But it shows sufficient independence of these elements to make it impossible for any rational, unprejudiced being with the facts before him to continue to confound life with matter.

Yet many learned professors do continue to confound them. Why? In some cases it is, perhaps, not too much to say that the holder of a university degree is not necessarily in possession of all the facts. And very few of us, professors or not, are without prejudice. We must remember the Idol of the Tribe, the capacity of the mind to become so clouded by passion and biased zeal that it sheds unwelcome evidence as readily as a duck’s back sheds water.

It was Herbert Spencer who first popularized the notion that materialistic science could explain everything. It had not been invented with an eye to explaining everything--only a few things, with the hope of getting hold of them in a way that might be useful. But so great was the success of the early applications of the method that the temptation to turn it into a synthetic philosophy was too great for mortal to resist. Spencer had the advantage of not knowing very much. His early education had been neglected. And his powers of invention were practically without limit.

It is always easier to explain when not burdened with too much first-hand knowledge. Hearsay, and what we learn from books, is the stuff for theories. But the facts which have entered intimately into our own lives are stubborn. We are too familiar with their edges to fancy that they fit into whatever space may be contrived for them. Ignorance is satisfied with almost any account. Those who deal a good deal with retorts and crucibles may speak of men and women as retorts and crucibles. This is impossible to those whose knowledge of human nature has made them distinguished in affairs. The books of a closet economist satisfy everybody but business men.

If you have spent much of your time in observing, say, the behavior of rats on inclined planes, you may come to think of animals as machines. One such investigator has recently discovered that rats are “negatively geotropic.” That is, they are afraid of falling; and when the plane is tipped will scramble away from the lower edge. A pet rat would have taught him not only this, but that, under kind treatment, the rat is one of the cleverest and most affectionate four-footed creatures in existence. A scientist bores holes in a dog’s cheek to measure his autocoid secretion; or he removes part of a dog’s brain, scratches the animal’s leg, notes that a kick results, and comes out of the laboratory convinced that we all walk--not with a desire to get anywhere, but because of the irritating effects of the ground on the soles of the feet. Go tell that story to a man who knows dogs!

Those who love and understand animals cannot be made to believe that animals are devoid of sense and feeling, or act blindly in response to stimuli. Why then should we listen only to those who know nothing of animals and care less? Lovers of flowers will even go so far as to attribute a sort of sentience to vegetation. Are they necessarily wrong because their opinions are contradicted by teachers in flowerless school-rooms?

J. C. Bose, the great Hindu scientist, has lately intrigued the whole world by writing a book in which he shows that trees have eyes, nerves, veins, something which corresponds to a heart; are capable of pain; of fatigue; can be poisoned; and to a certain extent seem to remember what has happened to them. What is the result? Why, our mechanists have hurried to invert the Bose philosophy and to describe it with its heels in the air. It is “_la fin du mythe de la force vitale_,” cries Pierre Guitet-Vauquelin.[103] Bose, according to this ingenious writer, has discovered “_l’unité de la matière vivante et non vivante_,” and the conclusion is drawn that said unity has been arrived at by making the _non vivante_ universal.

The Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses, has become a Procrustean bed, to which everything must be stretched or cut to fit. But unfortunately this particular bed was made by chemists and physicists in Newton’s time to fit certain facts and approximations to truth in which they were dealing for the moment. It was then a convenient bit of furniture. Now it is very awkward. We cling to it only for old time’s sake.

The modern experimental method as at first developed has proven woefully inadequate when universally applied. Even the study of outward behavior is very difficult, especially if the subject be human, for we cannot duplicate in the laboratory the exact circumstances of real life--and every variation is fatal to accuracy, especially as its influence is often unsuspected and totally unknown. We cannot control our own species, because we are not placed above it--though many of us would like to be.

This entails another difficulty. As we are not above it in power, so we are not above it in intelligence. The mind in attempting to study itself has the disadvantage of being both the eye and the picture. No wonder the so-called social sciences have failed to duplicate the triumphs of physical science. They have tried to steal a prestige which they have not earned, to work with borrowed tools instead of developing proper tools of their own.

But since it is the habit of the age to look below for its sanctions, let us look a little more intently--at the findings of the new science.

4. THE NEW PHYSICS

Unfortunately, the new physics is difficult, or at least can be made to seem difficult. Few lay readers have any first-hand knowledge of it; few lay readers have ever read a book of science in their lives, new or old. In fact science does not publish itself directly in books, but in short monographs, editions limited to two or three hundred copies. At best these papers make their appearance in small, specialist magazines. And they are couched almost entirely in mathematical symbols interspersed with long words barbarously derived from the Greek and Latin. True scientists have not yet learned to advertise.

We are therefore at the mercy of the popularizer, and the popularizer is under every temptation to bolster up popular prejudices and misconceptions. There is also the “story interest” which he must consider.

These are times when government is not by reason, by principle, by expedience, or by experience. We are governed by story interest--the thrill such as we get from a good detective yarn. Most of us must get the bulk of our information from the newspapers, magazines, and the most accessible and widely distributed of books. These depend upon story interest for their sales. We buy those periodicals and those volumes which promise to thrill us most; it is so much more pleasant to be thrilled than not to be thrilled. Thus it becomes to the interest of editors to see that we are thrilled as much as possible, without regard to ultimate consequences. Fiction tends ever more and more to become the moulder of public opinion.

It is of course a better story if Voronoff’s transplantations of goat and monkey glands result in prolonged life than if they do not so result. To say that chemicals will take the place of male sperm in the fertilization of sea-urchins’ eggs (as Loeb, a few years ago, used to claim) produces a greater thrill than to say that this consummation so devoutly wished by some has yet to materialize. It is even thrilling to be told that life is mechanical, for that gives man the flattering idea that some day he will be able to create life in his own workshops and set up an independent business as a god. We do not stop to think of all the implications of such a theory--and we buy the paper. We go further, and enact laws which take the truth of the articles in the paper for granted.

So, when the modern popularizer deigns to give his attention to modern physics, he has a single eye to the “story.” The difficult parts, the parts expressing doubt, the parts which do not fit with the pet fads of his readers, he can omit. Or he can take an entire theory and stand it on its head. The effect will be exciting--and marvelous.

There are those who are becoming tired of this childish procedure, those who would really like to know what is going on without having to perfect their Greek and Latin or master the higher mathematics. They would even like to know if it be true, as has been claimed, that the attempt to reconcile the omnipotence of God with human free will and responsibility has always been found scientifically impossible--to know if belief in either will or God be in itself unscientific and contrary to mathematics. Probably they will go on believing in God and free-will anyway--for those who do not have not yet become tired of childish procedures. But it will be with a certain sadness. The man who must hide his faith from his reason in fear of attack, is not a complete or a happy man. Few of us realize how much depends upon our conception of the fundamental truths of physics, how we lean upon what we understand to be the laws underlying the material world.

The Scholastics claimed that the existence of God--even the great truths of Christianity--could be demonstrated by reason alone; but few have sufficient philosophical training or inclination to follow such arguments to their end. Science, while it has often claimed to be able to disprove religion, has never claimed to be able to establish either religion in general or any one religion in particular. The most that can be asked of it, I think, is the removal of those barriers which, some time since, it erected in the way of belief in the supernatural.

Science has always had its Mendels, its Voltas, its Galvanis, its Ampères, its Pasteurs--men who believed as heartily in God as they believed in his works. But I do not wish to discuss the religion of scientists. It will be enough to show the bearings of recent science upon an antiquated but still pretendedly scientific materialism. So let us chose a single paper by a modern worker--a man comparatively obscure.

He will of necessity be comparatively obscure, for no one can be a scientist pure and simple and be widely known unless he has invented a popular mechanical appliance, advertised a cure for some common disease, wandered into a foreign province as a prophet, or had the luck to say something startling--such as, “Man descended from a monkey,” or “Everybody can live to be a hundred years old,”--and even then fame usually takes time to accumulate.

Ralph S. Lillie has as yet written no good story. But he has an interesting article, entitled “Physical Indeterminism and Vital Action,” in _Science_ for August 12, 1927.

Mr. Lillie, a worker in the Marine Biological Laboratory, is the author of “Protoplasmic Action and Nervous Action,” and his very occupation shows that he is engaged in the business of wrestling knowledge rather than thrills from the phenomena of the world. What he says, however, is much more thrilling than the most incestuous dreams ever dreamed by a Freudian, or all the discoveries ever made by dropping babies upon pillows in the laboratories of Dr. Watson.

For he says that we are free; that there has been observed under the microscope certain actions which look much like the veritable finger of God, glimpsed for an instant through the screen of matter behind which His power forever works--a power that we so often fail to recognize because, from our infinitesimal observation of it, it acts according to laws--laws we have for the most part made ourselves and to which we almost invariably give a personality and an omnipotence we would feign deny to the Deity whose doings they so imperfectly record.

But how does Lillie say all this? In the most lamentable manner--in Scientese. You will not wonder why I called him obscure after you read the following sample paragraph:

“Science and philosophy, but especially science, have found great difficulty in reconciling the apparent indeterminism of many vital manifestations, particularly voluntary action, with the strict determinism of physical science. The traditional problem of freedom, with all its implications, is the classical expression of the difficulty.”

True, this is by no means as cloudy as Freud when Freud plays schoolmaster and propounds incomprehensible metaphysics intended to inspire our awe. It contains no confusion of thought. But it is sufficiently cold and forbidding. Lillie totally lacks the literary ability of Freud, the raconteur of spicy stories. It is evident, however, that he means to point out the difficulty which science has found in reconciling the doctrine of blind reaction with that appearance of choice which is often to be noted in the conduct of the higher forms of matter. Living matter, apparently, does not respond to external stimuli as mechanists think it ought to. It is inclined to behave as if it had some force, some will of its own. In other words, it seems to a certain extent to be interiorly determined.