Chapter XI: Part III: Holism and the Publicist Standpoint in Philosophy (2)

It must be admitted that Professor Eddington could claim the support of at least one eminent biologist who holds that the method of the biologist is different from the method of the physicist, and the method of the physicist can never be applied to the analysis of “conscious behaviour.” However stoutly Dr. Haldane may advocate the first proposition his many distinguished contributions to biological science are little calculated to illustrate its truth. He has made important additions to our knowledge of the physical chemistry of the blood by adopting the method of the physicist. When, if ever, he has departed from that method he has done so without the assent of his fellow physiologists. The practice of even the most exemplary persons not infrequently falls short of the loftiness of their professions, and it is perhaps unfair to criticize Dr. Haldane on this account. The weakness of Dr. Haldane’s philosophical position resides in the fact that he gives no consideration to the new issues raised by the physiology of the conditioned reflex. Pavlov’s work has shown us that even when he is dealing with “conscious behaviour,” the biologist can still approach the subject matter of his enquiries with the same attitude which the physicist adopts.

On the whole people are more interested in conscious behaviour than in anything else. Before science could attempt to tell us something about conscious behaviour, Poincaré’s outlook could never have a far-reaching appeal. The history of human thought again and again proves that people will always fall back on the language of magic, when the language of science provides them with no vocabulary in which to discuss the things that interest them most. Magical views of the world have declined not because science disproves them, but because science provides better ways of discussing the same issues. If we can usefully treat the characteristics of conscious behaviour without invoking a holistic or animistic concept of consciousness, the scope of introspective philosophy must in time dwindle to a vanishing point. Philosophy will then confine itself to examining the logical structure of scientific theories. It may seem more natural, more in keeping with common sense, to think of a wholeness defined by the term consciousness than to face the tremendous intellectual effort of envisaging the behaviour of an organism from an atomistic standpoint. If the latter contains within it the capacity of growth and of yielding verifiable conclusions which cannot be derived from the traditional point of view, consciousness must go as gravitation and action at a distance must go, however much Kant and common sense may urge the _a priori_ necessity of a Euclidean space and a measure of time that is independent of it. As scientific investigation invades the domain of conscious behaviour the way will be open for developing a new outlook in philosophy, one that is neither intrinsically monistic nor intrinsically pluralistic, since it makes no such claims to finality as the academic philosophies of the past have usually done.

§2

Professor Eddington, like Professor Whitehead, entertains the hope that science may eventually lead us to conclusions about the universe involving something more than practical utility on the one hand and mere intellectual satisfaction on the other. The reasons which they give are not sufficiently definite to criticize, as they would perhaps themselves admit. It is more easy to understand the point of view of Mr. Sullivan, an impenitent individualist, who is frankly resentful towards science, because science cannot serve the needs of theology or provide sanctions for his æsthetic predilections.

“The greater importance that men attach to art and religion,” he
maintains, “is not due simply to their ignorance of science. Art
and Religion satisfy deeper needs; the problems they deal with
are intrinsically more important.... Our æsthetic and religious
experiences need not lose the significance they appear to have
merely because they are not taken into account in the scientific
scheme....”[8]

The real significance of these remarks would be much clearer, if Mr. Sullivan had substituted the word _personally_ for _intrinsically_. Mr. Sullivan is by temperament an individualist philosopher. For him what is _true_ has a specially personal value. Scientific beliefs are only _convenient_. Thus in discussing the system of Copernicus he makes the comment, “it was convenient; the question of whether it was true or untrue was not explicitly discussed.”[9] Consistently with the individualistic standpoint in philosophy Mr. Sullivan does not divulge the inward revelation which empowers him to distinguish with such nicety between propositions that are “true” and propositions that are merely “convenient.”

It sounds very impressive to state that science leaves out of account man’s religious and artistic experiences, that religion and art satisfy deeper cravings and so forth; but religion and art are two words which are rarely used by any two people in the same sense or by any one person in the same sense on two successive occasions. Which religion does Mr. Sullivan mean? Is he a Buddhist, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Shintoist, or a Bahai? Is his religion an ethic or a cosmogony, or both? Until he has defined his position more explicitly, it is difficult to be quite sure what he is talking about. The terms art and religion are used in very different senses. That being so, to say that everybody has religious or æsthetic experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of any common plane of thoughtful intercourse other than the conceptual world of science. An expert social hostess recognizes this when she wisely refrains from asking Mr. A who is interested in Art to meet Mr. B who is interested in Art.

In seeking to transcendentalize his private world, Mr. Sullivan has not been altogether felicitous in coupling together Art and Religion. Although many people become very irritable in the course of a discussion on the merits of vorticism or free verse, most educated persons admit on reflection that such discussions owe their interest to the light they shed on differences of temperament in the disputants. It is true that professors of literature in Universities and rather youthful reviewers sometimes take a more pontifical view of their own powers of divination, but even our schools have got beyond the stage, when it was thought proper that children should be whipped into believing that Wordsworth’s _Idiot Boy_ is a _great_ poem. Whether Mr. Sullivan chooses to say that Van der Waal’s equation is true or merely convenient, it may be suggested that he would embark on a discussion of its truth or convenience with some hope of final agreement. I believe that Mr. Sullivan would embark upon an argument about a question of æsthetics with much less hope of changing his opponent’s attitude than if he were discussing Van der Waal’s equation. Mr. Sullivan has no need to appeal for a transcendental sanction for æsthetic experience. Æsthetics are questions about which sophisticated people agree to differ.

With religion it is different. Whereas a person can have very genuine artistic interests without claiming a universal, transcendental or _public_ sanction for his own preferences, religion ceases to be religion and becomes æsthetics or ethics, when it does not put forward such claims. A consideration of the following illustration will make this clear. A derives satisfaction from reciting Mr. Yeats’ poem, “The faeries dance in a place apart...” etc. B derives satisfaction from singing the evangelical hymn that contains the lines “Bright crowns there are, bright crowns laid up on high...” Inasmuch as the first form of satisfaction involves neither belief nor unbelief, it is properly described as artistic or _æsthetic_. Inasmuch as the second implies in addition the conviction that a certain ponderable object exists at a certain height from the earth’s surface, as in the cruder forms of evangelism it does, the satisfaction derived from singing it is _religious_.

The word religious is used in so many different senses that it is dangerous to employ it at all without examining it more closely. Cynical paradox-mongers not infrequently complain that materialists are “religious.” When so used, the term merely implies a sense of the importance of belief. In an unscientific age persons of this type would probably gravitate towards some form of religious organization. Looking at religious organizations as a whole one sees two sharply contrasted components in the majority: views about human conduct or the ethical aspect of religion and views about the nature of the universe or cosmogony. To-day, most educated people regard the latter as the proper sphere of science. We are told by modernists that the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis are to be cherished for the sublime ethical teaching they impart. What sublime ethical teaching is implied in the prohibition to eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge or in the story that woman was manufactured from a man’s rib as an afterthought of creation need not detain us. It is only partly true to say that liberal theologians have surrendered the sphere of cosmogony to science. They have surrendered the details, but they have not surrendered the prerogative of imposing upon whatever cosmogony the scientists supply a teleology of their own. This teleology is, it is true, so attenuated as to embarrass the advance of science far less than those more crude revivals of animism sometimes inappropriately classified under the generic heading New Thought. Its justification becomes less and less calculated to carry conviction, as the domain of scientific method is officially sanctioned by the Churches. The advance of scientific knowledge reinforces the suspicion that an attitude to experience which leads to misleading or sterile conclusions about the details of our cosmogony can hardly be expected to prove essential to the finished picture.

Just as the cosmological aspect of religion has become resolved into a _public_ component which has passed over into the province of science and a personal component for which the mystic seeks to formulate some ulterior transcendental sanction, the ethical side of religion consists of values which must be taken or left and prohibitions or admonitions which can be rationally discussed as instruments for promoting the acceptance of these values, if the latter are taken for granted. Here again the claims of liberal theologians become more modest with the advance of more complex methods of social organization. Sunday observance, fasting, prohibitions against dancing, smoking and theatricals become less and less fashionable. Even in the domain of sex, where animistic views of human conduct are more obtrusive, we find that Anglican deans are making the entertaining discovery that birth control is fully compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Most Christians will agree that war is contrary to the “spirit of Christ’s teachings.” When a war happens to be in progress, they give no objective evidence that this conviction differentiates their conduct in any way from that of people who are not in the least interested in the spirit of Christ’s teaching. An exception might here be made in favour of the Quakers. The Society of Friends, the only religious body which engaged the respect of Voltaire, have shown so little disposition to proselytize that they are hardly to be looked on as a religious body. They might with equal propriety be called an organization of persons interested in the art of living. Significantly enough they do not call themselves a Church.

In practice the hard and fast ethical claims of religious leaders tend with the advancement of civilization to become less pretentious. The details of regulating human conduct have been conceded to the politician and the educationist, just as cosmogony has been surrendered to the scientist. Religious organizations cling tenaciously to some obscure transcendental sanction for the fundamental assumptions on which the politician or educationist is expected to work, assumptions which, as earlier remarked, seem in actual practice curiously irrelevant to the behaviour of their devotees. The increasing vagueness which surrounds the nature of “revelation” in the teachings of Liberal Churchmen renders the task of making this sanction communicable one of overwhelming difficulty. In relation to human conduct there is obviously a large domain of questions on which rational discourse is possible, in so far as the fundamental assumptions are agreed upon by all parties. In this sense ethics belongs to the public world and ethics and politics are the same thing. There still remain private differences with regard to the premises. The Roundheads realized that transcendental ethics cannot be made the subject of argument. They acted intelligibly on the assumption that the only answer to the Divine Right of Kings was to make a spectacle of the head of Charles Stuart to Gods and men.

When Professor Eddington employs the term mystical experience indifferently for æsthetic and religious sentiments, he is perfectly justified in so far as the ultimate constituents of religion, those residues of religious belief which have survived the secularization of social life and the advancement of scientific knowledge, belong to the private worlds. From a purely individualistic standpoint the “religious” satisfaction that the Liberal theologian derives from the crude teleology of the Chaldæan mythos is difficult to distinguish from the artistic satisfaction sought by others in the vague teleology of Wordsworth’s _Tintern Abbey_. Regarded from a social angle there is a profound difference between the religious and the artistic experience. Because of that difference Professor Eddington’s conclusion that there is nothing in the outcome of scientific enquiry to prevent a reasonable man from entertaining religious beliefs is a profoundly misleading one. When Professor Eddington speaks of religious experience he clearly means something which belongs to himself privately. When the vast majority of people speak of religion, they mean a body of beliefs which can be transmitted through the medium of discourse like scientific beliefs. Far from being regarded like artistic preferences as a private affair of the individual, such beliefs are promoted by exceedingly powerful organizations which still exercise an immense effect on social behaviour. This influence takes the form of interference on the part of the Churches in every attempt to encourage birth control, to promote true information about sex among the young or to humanize the divorce laws. The scientific philosopher is entitled to his own private mythos with which no sensible people would wish to interfere, provided that he does not pester his fellows with it. It is still permissible to ask whether he is justified in employing language in such an equivocal manner that his words will be used, when he must know they will be used, to give all the weight of a distinguished reputation to those forces of social organization which in the past have exercised a constant restraint on the freedom of scientific enquiry and do at present exert a tremendous influence upon the shaping of human conduct.

That the distinction we have drawn above between the religious and the æsthetic is the significant one for the purpose of ordinary usage is easily seen by considering the dislike that some people entertain for pork. In a Gentile this is an æsthetic attitude. In the Jew it is a religious one. The thesis that artistic values, or more generally what Professor Eddington calls the mystical experience, belong to the private world requires an important qualification. It does not imply that Art cannot be made the subject of discussion. A mechanistic philosophical outlook is often stigmatized on account of its supposed dullness, and shunned because it seems to leave no place for after-dinner conversation. This is not so. The mechanistic outlook does not imply the end of æsthetic criticism. It merely insists that such criticism shall conform to the standards of the public world. There is abundance of fascinating problems dealing with the orientation of human interest to particular objects which come within the scope of æsthetic criticism. The theory of a public world which has been developed elsewhere leaves open the possibility that we may one day have genuinely scientific knowledge about these things. If that day comes, we shall be able to argue about art and ethics without losing our tempers. As the behaviouristic standpoint encroaches on the field of art criticism, it is probable that the nice distinction between those matters of taste which we call æsthetic values and those which we call ethical sanctions will seem more arbitrary than the advocates of Art for Art’s sake postulate.

The conflict between religion and science tends to be obscured by the circumstance that the official apologists of the former, if they are well-educated persons, state their case in such a way as to convey the impression that they only claim that their view of human destiny is a permissible one. This does not alter the fact that religious leaders both of the right and left wing _behave_ on the assumption that their views have a universal sanction. In very few parts of the English-speaking world is it possible for a child to go to school without being taught the tenets of some religious body. One does not notice that Liberal theologians who state their case on the frankly private basis of mystical experience are much more sympathetic than Fundamentalists to the legitimate claims of the agnostic parent who wishes his child to have a secular education. The term religion cannot be detached in its objective, or in the terminology of these essays its _public_, aspect from _organization_. Professor Eddington has justified his right to a “mystical experience.” He has not proved his claim to have a _religion_ as the average parent understands that term. If the scientist uses the term _religion_ for something different, knowing that his words will be used by religious leaders to reinforce their claims to a universal sanction for their own “mystical experiences,” the secularist parent may legitimately feel that the scientist is not giving him a square deal as a fellow citizen.

§3

We must attribute to its long association with theology the idea that philosophy deals with something mysteriously called _Reality_, lying outside the secular province of science. The term Reality has acquired the value of magical gesture in academic philosophy. Its everyday use as a measure of the intensity of one’s conviction throws a good deal of light on what is meant when it is used to define the goal of philosophy. To the introvert the private world is most _real_. To those who have a more socialized attitude to experience the public world of science is most _real_. The fundamental difference that exists between the introvert and the extrovert type of philosophy is not abolished by introducing the word reality into the language. It is partly because the term “external world” has been used with more emphasis on its “reality” than on its communicability that I have preferred to speak of a _public world_. The classification of different experiences as external or internal is less important than the recognition that some are communicable and others less so. In this nomenclature scientific beliefs are distinguished especially by their _publicity_. The fundamental distinction between the domain of intellectual public enterprise and intellectual private enterprise is just as valid, whether we approach the question from the frankly solipsistic standpoint adopted by Professor Eddington on p. 268 of his Gifford Lectures or the equally explicit objective idealism of p. 272 of the same work.

In my undergraduate days there was a legend of an eminent philosopher and a Fellow of Trinity. Returning to his room in the early hours of the morning after a liberal potation of audit ale, he lay down upon the hearth-rug, covering himself with one of the large shallow footbaths which were still used by all classes of academic society. When his bedmaker arrived a little later, he explained that he was an oyster, and raised objections to any one tampering with his shell. I do not know whether the story is true, or whether the philosopher was a solipsist. I presume that in the course of the same day, he realized that his experience of the footbath had a more extended significance than his experience of the oyster shell. If he were a solipsist and decided to remain such after the incident in question, he was presumably forced to recognize from Audit eve onwards, that certain ingredients of his consciousness had a more permanent status than others. If human beings exist only in my own individual “consciousness,” they constitute necessary points of reference in classifying other types of experience. The distinction between _the_ public world and _my_ private world does not uniquely owe its usefulness or significance to any assumption concerning the existence of a reality external to my own consciousness. The important feature about the world construction of science is not its externality but its communicability. Communicability remains a perfectly definite basis for the classification of beliefs, even if I choose to deny that other human beings have an independent existence.

In secret the individualist is entitled to cherish the belief that his own private world is more “real” than the public world of science. One suspects that Mr. Sullivan does so. Professor Eddington is evidently worried because he finds himself doing so. Under the influence of love or alcohol we have all been solipsists at some time or other. As Professor Eddington has lucidly stated in a passage quoted earlier in this essay, so soon as we engage in public discourse we are compelled to seek for a neutral ground. We agree to leave our private world behind. To make discourse possible we accept the neutral ground as the real thing. This neutral ground is the public world of science. The idea that philosophy is more fundamental than science has arisen through the absent-mindedness of philosophers. This permits them to overlook the fact that there cannot be philosophy unless there are philosophers. As soon as more than one individual begins to philosophize the search for a neutral ground becomes a necessity of social intercourse. From a social point of view the neutral ground is the only thing which can be spoken of as real. Although philosophers often try to give the impression that human beings exist in virtue of the fact that there is such a thing as philosophy, it is more sensible to hold that philosophy exists in virtue of the fact that there are human beings. Because philosophers are themselves members of human society, the proper goal of philosophy must be the search for propositions that have the property of _publicity_ or socialized reality.

The recognition of this restores to philosophy an intelligible objective. From the point of view of the average person the philosopher is “a blind man in a dark room chasing a black cat that isn’t there.” The contempt of the plain man is partly justifiable, not because the plain man is entitled to a plain answer to every question he propounds, not because philosophers are blind, but because it is waste of time to chase the cat, if there is really no cat to chase. Traditional philosophy wedded to dogmatic theology has always assumed that the cat is there to chase. Of late years the cat of traditional philosophy, like the cat of _Alice in Wonderland_, has been gradually disappearing. For the purpose of apologetics there is little left of it but its smile. There have been philosophers who have been content to admit their blindness and refrain from putting forward any project to bell the cat. Of such was David Hume. It is now a hundred and fifty years since Hume was buried. This may be why he is recognized as an authentic philosopher. Those whose studies lead them to entertain views somewhat similar to those of Hume are more usually called anthropologists, physicists, physiologists, economists or generically experts, while they remain alive. The grudging benediction accorded to Hume’s remains by traditional philosophers is not wholly due to a conventional respect for those who have departed. Hume divested natural philosophy of some of the pretensions which it had imbibed from its association with scholasticism. Philosophers with an anti-scientific bias have chosen to regard this as an affront to science. The scientist looking back over a century and a half of unparalleled progress has no need to regard it as such. On the other hand the scope of “moral” philosophy has dwindled since Hume’s time. Psychology, until our own generation a branch of moral philosophy, is clamouring to be recognized as a science. Anthropology has undertaken the task of elucidating by painstaking observation those aspects of human behaviour which are _publicly_ connected with what Professor Eddington _privately_ speaks of as the “mystical experiences.” It may be true that scientists in our generation are less outspoken than Huxley and Tyndall in their criticism of traditional philosophy. It may be true that those scientists who enter the field of philosophical discussion often do so with the aim of reinforcing the beleaguered battalions of the apologists of dogma. It is doubtful whether there was ever a time in the history of western Europe when a secular outlook was more widespread, and when the hope of finding a rational basis for a universal religion was less forlorn.

When philosophers speak of a rational basis for scientific belief, they seem to imply that the word rational can only signify that which is evident independently of experience. It is profoundly doubtful whether we can form any judgment about such a question. If it is possible to arrive at a decision of this kind, I suspect that the solution will come from those who study the behaviour of infants and the history of science. There seems to be little hope of obtaining a solution from introspective philosophers. In the meantime science will continue to progress, whether the belief that relations between experience can be ascertained is a rational one or is itself an outcome of experience, whether the public world is the actual world or a shadow world, whether the conclusions of science appeal to common sense or seem more incredible than fairy tales. In a machine-made civilization however unpalatable to common sense the conclusions of science may prove, the future of science is assured.

In the philosophy of Hume we find the pragmatic justification of science first stated explicitly. “To philosophize,” according to Hume, “is nothing essentially different from reasoning on common life.” Kant’s anxiety to give scientific enquiry a “rational” sanction was based on the frank recognition that Hume’s scepticism threatened the future of moral philosophy more than the future of science. Yet Kant himself could not escape from the pragmatic criterion of publicity, in asserting the superiority of his own system to that of Plato, who “abandoning the world of sense, because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding... did not reflect that he made no real progress by all his efforts, for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support, as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers.”

In accepting Hume’s critique of traditional rationalism and attempting to reinstate moral philosophy on the same footing of social convenience as natural science, the modern pragmatists have proved more than they intended. By insisting on the temperamental basis of philosophical belief, pragmatism has robbed moral philosophy of all claim to universality; and implicitly relegated it to the status of an art. James believed that the doctrine of immortality is a physiological necessity for some people. For others it is evidently not. Some people anticipate with gratification an eternity of hymn singing. Others shudder at the fate of the Struldbrugs. Both those who do find it necessary to believe in immortality, and those who do not, live to-day as citizens of a society whose amenities are the fruit of scientific knowledge. In a machine-made civilization the amenities provided by science are a necessity to every one. It is necessary to live in order to philosophize. When the philosopher has finished all that he has to say about the Nature of Life, it is the biologist who is called in by his relatives to certify that he is legally dead. The universality of science transcends in a very practical sense those differences of temperament which determine the predilections of moral philosophers. Scientific hypothesis makes social activity possible.

XI. PRIVACY, PUBLICITY, AND EDUCATION

“Nothing does more harm in unnerving men for their duties in the
present, than the attention devoted to the points of excellence
in the past as compared with the average failure of the present
day.”--Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_

§1

Two conclusions, it seems to me, can now be drawn from the progress of science. One is that, since we can never know everything we should like to know, every individual has a right to his own private world. The other is that there is no excuse for the sophisticated person refusing to recognize where his private world ends and the domain of social knowledge or the public world begins. From the first it follows that there is no necessary antagonism between the claims of science and art in a modern theory of education. From the second it follows that true education is necessarily secular. It is generally agreed that education includes something more than vocational training. Modern industry offers to the majority of people the prospect of more opportunities for cultivated leisure. It is arguable on the other hand that as time goes on work may become more rather than less monotonous for most people. Training of the individual to use his leisure in ways which will not bring him into conflict with his neighbours provides a possible basis for the public discussion of cultural education in what may be called its æsthetic aspect. The Theory of the Public World does not necessarily imply that such discussion is valueless. It does not lead to the conclusion that the æsthetic side of education is unimportant. It does necessitate a reconsideration of the attitude which the teacher should be encouraged to adopt. A modern theory of education should begin by defining the respective spheres of _privacy_ and _publicity_.

I shall illustrate what I mean by privacy with special reference to the teaching of poetry in the school. I can see no good reason why a child should be expected to like Keats’ _Ode to a Nightingale_. I can see excellent reasons why he should know that it was written, and where to find it. One of the characters in a play by Eugene O’Neill is made to say: “I love dynamos. I love to hear them sing. They’re singing all the time about everything in the world.” Mrs. Fife was an American. She had almost certainly never heard a nightingale sing. In England, where the nightingale is an indigenous species, its overrated vocal performances are hardly less familiar to the average child. To the majority of people brought up from childhood in urban surroundings dynamos are closer to Nature. They are things that they can see and hear. Churchyard owls and beds of asphodel belong to books rather than to life. For the average citizen it may be valuable to know that the word Hippocrene does not mean the same thing as hippopotamus. From every point of view enlarging the vocabulary is an important part of education. Enlarging the vocabulary and developing an interest in literature as a means to cultivated leisure in adult life are entirely separate issues.

I once asked a friend who is a biologist whether he was interested in modern poetry. He hesitated and replied that he quite liked _Evangeline_. I am almost certain that he had not opened Longfellow’s works since he was a schoolboy, unless he had received from an aunt one of those editions which are bound in mauve suède and sold for Christmas and birthday gifts. He was no less truthful than most of us. He displayed a motor reaction which can be evoked from many people who have been educated on the assumption that the teacher’s business is to cultivate “good taste.” If one of our leading dailies were to make favourite English poets the subject of a prize competition, it is safe to predict that Wordsworth would receive many more votes than William Blake. It would be interesting to ascertain the number of hours devoted after school age to the perusal of the works of Wordsworth and Blake by those who would vote for one or the other. I know of no one who has undertaken this task as a thesis for the Ph.D. degree; but I would hazard the surmise that the aggregate would favour Blake rather than Wordsworth. The modern teacher has abandoned the exegetical method in favour of the “play way.” But the advocate of the play way is no less certain that if he likes Shakespeare, his pupils ought also to like Shakespeare. If he is really interested in Shakespeare, and has an engaging personality, he may succeed so long as they remain under his influence. It does not follow that the pupil will carry into adult life the means of enjoying his leisure in a way that will not be a nuisance to his neighbours.

In discussing the æsthetic aspect of education, it is difficult to exclude the intrusion of one’s private values. I am aware of this difficulty. Anything which I proffer to the discussion is of a very tentative nature. The cultivation of taste involves two separate issues. Conventionally it signifies the existence of some fixed standard of correct enjoyment. The cultivation of good taste in this sense is only justifiable if we have satisfied ourselves that philosophy can provide a rational sanction for the affirmations of æsthetic experience. If we have reached the conviction that the affirmations of æsthetic experience have no status in the Public World, we have no justification for interfering with another person who reads John Oxenham’s _Bees in Amber_ in preference to Conrad Aiken’s _Punch the Immortal Liar_, or the works of Miss Ella Wheeler Willcocks in preference to the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think experience would sustain the statement that people who habitually read Coventry Patmore or Francis Thompson are temperamentally different from people who prefer to read Osbert Sitwell or Carl Sandburg. I suspect too that such temperamental differences exist even in early childhood. They are therefore outside the realm of argument or education. On the other hand, experience convinces me that many would read poetry in adult life, if they had not been repelled in childhood by the sickly romanticism or pedantic archaicism of those writers who are usually exhibited as models of good taste. Possibly a number of people who read Mr. Kipling would not do so if they had access to more sophisticated forms of entertainment. Many others do not read poetry and rather despise those who do, because they have never realized that the subject matter of poetry is not necessarily circumscribed by a holistic view of sex or confined to the domestic affairs of the minor Greek deities. There is a legitimate sense in which taste can be cultivated. We may go through life impoverished, because we have never been introduced to sources of satisfaction which might enrich our experience. It is the proper function of the educationist to acquaint us in early life with a great variety of opportunities of socially agreeable behaviour. Having done this, he or she must leave us to select what is most appropriate to our temperamental peculiarities.

The technique of education in its æsthetic aspect has received less thoughtful attention than its more practical problems. After a succession of ludicrous experiments, educationists now realize that the attendance of art galleries is not increased by forcing children to draw one white cone, a pyramid and two cubes piled up on a drawing-board. It is also recognized that a weekly period devoted to the tonic sol-fa notation does not make a nation musical. I would suggest that the disappointing results of æsthetic education are pre-eminently due to the fact that educationists have never recognized that æsthetic values do not belong to the public world. I would go further and suggest that more positive results might be achieved, if our educational practice were founded on a recognition that æsthetic preferences come within the proper domain of what I have called _privacy_. Education has too long been dominated by the æsthete who regards his own values as having some final and transcendental sanction. Because temperaments differ, æsthetic education can never leave a permanent impress on the majority of people, so long as it is dominated by a school of private opinion, whether that school is Shakespearian or Shavian, Realist or Vorticist. The rising influence of science, if it checks the influence of pontifical æstheticism is calculated to reinforce rather than curtail the æsthetic aspect of modern education.

In _Science and the Modern World_, Dr. Whitehead has maintained the contrary view. He affirms that “in regard to the æsthetic needs of civilized society the reactions of science have so far been unfortunate.” I do not think that there is any historical justification for this assertion. During the Renaissance there was a very intimate connexion between the progress of biological science and the development of painting and engraving. Human beings and horses had been represented with some measure of biological fidelity in Greek plastic art. But realistic treatment of animals and plants in general was a late development of the Art of the Renaissance. Most of the descriptive biology of Aristotle, of Theophrastus, and of the Arabs was a dead letter when it filtered into modern Europe. The descriptions in the Greek and Arabic herbals were too indefinite to be adequate for purposes of identifying species without the aid of good illustrations. Anyone who will take the trouble to refer to the originals of Conrad Gesner’s _Natural History_ or Gerrard’s _Herbal_ will appreciate the statement that Dürer initiated a new epoch in biology by depicting a recognizable rabbit. It was no fortuitous circumstance that Leonardo da Vinci was both a distinguished anatomist and a distinguished painter. The naturalist of the Renaissance had to be an artist. There were no cameras. The tradition of Realism in Art developed side by side with the progress of medicine to meet a need which no longer exists.

To-day we have cameras, and Realism in Art is declining. I venture to suggest that the invention of cinematography, though still in its infancy, is unfolding new artistic horizons. It is still common to find that educated people disregard its latent possibilities as Puritan England despised the stage. It is unwise to assume that Victorian ideas of Art have more finality than future generations will in all probability ascribe to them. Silas Marner, who had never seen a skyscraper or a dynamo, could not be expected to like the _Cabinet of Dr. Caligari_ or Capek’s _R.U.R._ For the same reason we should not expect Whitechapel school-children to enjoy Landseer and the Lake poets. To the Victorian æsthete a machine and a factory were necessarily ugly. The Immortal Stagyrite had settled the criteria of beauty two thousand years before. It is worthy of note that American industrialism rarely impresses the visitor with that drab monotony which is so characteristic of the English town. This may be partly because American education has been less dominated by the æsthetic predilections of a pre-scientific era in human history. The increasing importance of science in education need not react unfavourably on its artistic function. If it has done so, it is not because science has at any time dominated our conception of a cultural education. The cultural value of science has hardly been recognized as yet.

§2

However defined, education includes fitting the individual for some kind of productive activity. On this account the place of science as a part of vocational training is now securely entrenched in our educational system. The hard logic of economic necessity has forced us to make more and more concessions to natural science. It is doubtful if more than a handful of educationists see clearly that those changes in the structure of civilization which have necessitated such concessions have made scientific study of paramount importance in cultural education. The terms cultural and vocational are, by many people, still used coextensively with literary and scientific. It is true that science is not directly concerned with the æsthetic side of education. If in addition our definition of culture includes an intelligent orientation to human society, ignorance of science is incompatible with a cultured outlook in the present age. The special features of modern civilization depend on the extent to which scientific knowledge has been applied to the conquest of Nature by mankind. The picture of the physical universe which science offers for our contemplation is therefore the nucleus of what is socially most vital in our time.

The task of giving science a place in our conception of cultural education presupposes a good deal more than the addition of obligatory science subjects to the curriculum. Chemistry is usually taught in universities so as to ensure that the student will be able to discharge with competence the work of an analyst in the public service. It is also possible to teach the same subject in such a way that the student gets some glimpse of the adventure of scientific knowledge, some insight into the method of science as a way of dealing with human experience, some apprehension of the challenge which throughout the ages science has issued to comfortable beliefs and established traditions. This attitude to the study of science is still rare among those who have been educated on exclusively scientific lines. The classically educated person can at least be said to have something which was once a culture. He has a more or less consistent attitude to the world around him. In spite of all that is said about the menace of scientific materialism, a consistent mental attitude is very rare in scientific men. They usually have two attitudes, one for the laboratory, one for Sundays and the domestic circle. This is partly because scientific education has been almost entirely vocational in its emphasis.

That it is still necessary to emphasize the place of science in cultural education is a heritage of the humanistic revival. Until comparatively recent times the leading educationists of western Europe were agreed that the cultural side of education is satisfactorily accommodated by a study of two dead languages. The founders of the Grammar Schools were men who after a life-long devotion to Latin and Greek had found in the classical authors a link with the living past and a real source of æsthetic delight. Their pupils rarely progressed sufficiently far with the rules of accidence and syntax to acquire any genuine knowledge of classical literature or ancient history. The number of modern Englishmen who enjoy Scandinavian drama or Russian fiction through the medium of translated works is certainly greater than the number who deliberately read the classical tragedians in the original. Leaving out of account professional historians, the number of people who have been inspired to learn more about ancient history through dipping into Mr. Wells’ _Outline_ is probably greater than the number of those who as schoolboys acquired a taste for history from construing Xenophon, Thucydides, Cæsar and Quintus Curtius Rufus. The grammarians, in the words of Mr. Wells, were fumbling with the keys of the past to open the doors of a ransacked treasure chamber. It is now widely recognized that the results of classical education have been disappointing. In relation to the æsthetic side of education, it cannot be said to have promoted the growth of what Dr. Whitehead calls “a living art which moves on and yet leaves its permanent mark.” Socially it started at the wrong end. An intelligent orientation towards society presupposes a knowledge of the history of human society. It also presupposes on the part of the individual a vital appreciation of his own surroundings. Unfortunately, the obsolescence of classical education is not the result of a reasoned conviction of its cultural inadequacy. The influence of the grammarians declined because they could not meet the practical requirements of our age.

Science came to occupy its present status in the school curriculum as part of a comprehensive change in educational outlook associated with the rise of the manufacturing class to political power. The aristocratic tradition in education, with its humanistic bias towards formal logic, Latin and Greek, sufficed so long as the Church and Law were the principal professions which attracted the sons of the well-to-do. The coming of the machine age opened up new horizons of professional activity necessitating prolonged and highly specialized training. With the development of new international communications came a greater demand for acquaintance with the living languages of a nation’s customers abroad. Initially the demand for science in education was justified on purely vocational grounds, a fact which has given scientific education on every step of the educational ladder a fundamentally utilitarian tendency. In our own time the demand for biological instruction as a school subject has been very largely motivated by a utilitarian objective. The public is told how important it is that our future citizens should realize that by studying the domestic habits of the mosquito biologists have made it possible for engineers to construct the Panama Canal. It is further argued that if our future citizens were brought up to entertain a more lively respect for them, in short, to give them a greater measure of financial support, biologists would very shortly eradicate house-flies, idiot children, bean-weevils and bed-bugs; make it possible for anxious parents to have a family of twelve girls at will and keep the working classes alive exclusively on tinned food.

The tremendous development of scientific knowledge which followed the coming of the machine was a phenomenon whose social consequences could hardly be envisaged by those who put forward the plea for scientific instruction in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. To-day we can look back over the last century and a half on the growth of a form of civilization which owes its special characteristics to the power over nature which scientific knowledge has conferred. It is now possible to realize that an appreciation, not merely of the conclusions of science, but of the experimental temper of scientific reasoning, has become essential to the intelligent orientation of the individual to an environment more and more determined by the creative thought of science. The classical ideal which is compatible with the view that a man may rightly be considered educated and remain ignorant of man’s place in the physical universe, as depicted by science for our imaginative reflection, is an arrogant and impertinent pretension which thinking people will soon cease to countenance. Those who have pressed the claims of scientific education have concerned themselves very little with providing a substitute for what the advocates of classical humanism honestly attempted to achieve. The influence of the Utilitarian School of educationists has superseded what might be called the School of Grammatical Paleontology. One result is that education has been made accessible to a much greater proportion of people. There has grown up a generation of educationists who recognize that heaven does not necessarily lie about us in our infancy. On all sides we see the determination that children shall enjoy school. We now have in our midst the Aimiably Maternal School. There is a danger that the Aimiably Maternal educationists will encourage children to regard childhood as an end in itself; but it is to them that we must look for the development of the æsthetic side of education. They are replacing the cultivation of “good taste” by the aim of self-realization. They are giving _privacy_ its proper place in the theory of education. The domain of publicity--the task of emphasizing the cultural importance of science--still lies with the future. There are, it seems to me, two outstanding pre-requisites for the execution of this task, a recognition of the importance of biological instruction in the school and a closer relation between the teaching of science and of history in the university.

§3

A broader conception of the human significance of science will never be achieved until biology occupies a position of greater importance in the school curriculum. Biology contains within its province a point of contact with human life on the one hand, and the methods of an exact and experimental science on the other. Fortunately the educational value of biology is beginning to be recognized. The fact that biology has so recently been added to the school curriculum and that, by no means universally as yet, offers a singular opportunity for educational experiment. It is an opportunity which physics and chemistry, hampered by a heavy load of conservative tradition operating through cut-and-dried syllabuses and stereotyped textbooks, cannot provide. It is an opportunity which carries with it both responsibilities and dangers. The teaching of biology is in one way, and here lies the special opportunity, most fitted to initiate the pupil into the implications of the scientific outlook in human life. Biology handles the kind of matter, living matter, of which human beings are to us the most fascinating, entertaining and familiar varieties. On the other hand, and in this lies the chief source of danger, biology being a young science with a far greater diversity and complexity of subject matter, is less fitted to demonstrate the essentials of scientific reasoning than a more firmly grounded, older and more exact branch such as physics. We must face our task with a clear recognition of the danger that biological teaching will be made an excuse for supplanting the mental discipline of physics and chemistry by a miscellany of easily memorizable facts which illustrate no conclusions that can properly be dignified by the name of scientific principles. This is certainly what will occur if the Utilitarian school, with its emphasis on where house-flies go in winter, is given full scope in constructing our school syllabuses.

In the early stages of the development of any branch of knowledge there is a period when it is necessary to amass facts indiscriminately, because the significance of particular classes of facts is not as yet apparent. For the study of living organisms in particular an enormous amount of detailed observation was essential before it was possible to formulate the mechanical problems which living matter presents for solution. In such an early stage it is a frequent and fruitful source of misunderstanding to dignify by the name of laws and theories, generalizations which are not scientific principles, but merely mnemonics. Biological textbooks are to this day full of architectural mnemonics. A pertinent instance is the germ layer theory. These have no relation to the generalizations of an exact science such as the Kinetic theory of gases or what is even more modestly called Avogadro’s Hypothesis. Biology in our generation has ceased to be merely an encyclopædia of descriptive information. It has to-day attained the status of an exact and experimental science. As such it is a child of the machine age. The realization of its new status is by no means universal even among biologists. This fact renders the danger to which I have alluded especially formidable.

The birth of the doctrine of organic evolution, before the growth of the modern quantitative study of inheritance and variation, provided it with an experimental basis as a scientific theory, set biologists to the task of tracing hypothetical pedigrees. The amassing of an enormous volume of purely descriptive information acquired the reflected glory of those profound cosmological consequences which the concept of evolution implied. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the study of structure and activity became completely divorced. As a separate subject, focused to a large extent on clinical aspects of its subject matter, physiology branched off independently. Zoology ceased to be the scientific study of living animals, and became the architectural study of corpses and corpses malodorously mutilated in formalin. This development was not without consequences of some purely practical value. Increased knowledge of the life histories of many pests and parasites demonstrated the economic value of biological study to a parsimonious public. Without doubt such studies should continue to receive the financial support that their immense economic utility merits. They should be encouraged as technical developments of biology in the university. Their value is culturally irrelevant to our attitude towards the scope of biological teaching in the school. In the school the scope of biological teaching should be based upon the candid recognition that biology is primarily concerned with the Nature of Life.

This will affect our practice in several ways, which can only be indicated here in very general terms. Elementary textbooks of zoology are written in such a way as to conceal the fact that anatomy was originally an experimental science. Galen had to ligate the ureters to convince the disciples of Erasistratus that the kidneys are the source of the urine. In textbooks of animal biology for beginners it is usual to describe the path of nervous impulse from the skin to the spinal cord and thence to the muscles, as if the reflex arc were something which is evident to inspection. A century and a half of continuous experimental enquiry elapsed between the work of Whyte, who first located the spinal cord as the meeting-place of “sensory” and motor impulses, and that of Waller, who completed the accepted schematization of reflex activity. It is of no educational value to be familiar with a textbook diagram of the reflex arc, unless the experimental evidence on which it is based is clearly understood. The teaching of biology can be as helpful as the teaching of chemistry to illustrate the methods of an experimental science. This implies that the teaching of animal biology must be emancipated from the shackles of the Darwinian tradition of pure morphology. Practical work must include dissection and microscopic observation; but dissection and microscopic observation must be supplemented by ample demonstrations of an experimental kind.