Chapter I: Part 1

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
AND OTHER PLEAS AND DISCUSSIONS

BY

FRANCES POWER COBBE

AUTHOR OF “AN ESSAY ON INTUITIVE MORALS,” “RELIGIOUS DUTY,” “BROKEN
LIGHTS,” “THE HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,” “THE PEAK IN DARIEN,” “THE
DUTIES OF WOMEN,” “A FAITHLESS WORLD,” ETC.

BOSTON
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET
1888

CONTENTS.

ESSAY PAGE
PREFACE v

I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 1

II. THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 35

III. PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 69

IV. THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 111

V. TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 147

VI. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE 173

PREFACE.

We are all possessed of friends who, when any serious belief or matter of practical conduct is in question, take up at the outset a thesis of their own which they press on our acceptance with the best arguments at their disposal. It is a rarer privilege to enjoy the intercourse of one who does not invariably start with a ready-made opinion of what may be true, right, or expedient in the doubtful case on which we wish to consult him, but who will patiently turn over the matter with us, suggest and register the various “pros and cons,” refer to admitted principles and facts, and thus aid us to form a comprehensive judgment for ourselves rather than induce us to accept his own. The discourse of the first order of friends is an Argument, a Plea, a Contention; that of the second, a Discussion.

In the same way, of course, an Essay may be either a Plea or a Discussion. The author may take the position of Counsel for one side or other of the case before the reader, or else he may charge as Judge, and sum up the substance of such arguments as might have been used by two advocates on the opposite sides. Either style of writing is perfectly legitimate; and each has its particular fitness and utility. Misunderstanding and perplexity only occur when the hasty reader (newspaper critics being signally guilty in this matter) chooses to assume that an avowedly one-sided Plea is intended for a Judicial Discussion,[1] or treats a Discussion as a Plea for the side which the critic dislikes.

In the present little collection of Essays, written at various times and for various objects, it will be found that the first three belong to the class which I have described as Pleas, and the last three more or less to that of Discussions.

I plead that the Scientific Spirit of the Age, while it has given us many precious things, is, in its present exorbitant development, depriving us of things more precious still.

I plead that the Education of the Emotions (to be carried on chiefly through the contagion of good and noble sentiments) is an object of paramount importance, albeit nearly totally ignored in ordinary systems of education.

I plead that, in the present disintegration of all religious opinion, Judaism may yet become a progressive, and cease to be merely a tribal, faith; and that, if it absorb the moral and spiritual essence of Christianity, it may solve the great problem of combining a theology consonant to modern philosophy with a worship hallowed by the sacred associations of the remotest past.

In the last three Essays, I discuss the relation of Knowledge to Happiness; I discuss the real—as distinguished from the conventional—character of our common processes of Thought; and, finally, I discuss the respective claims of Town and Country Life to be esteemed most healthy and felicitous for body and mind.

I shall much rejoice if I win my readers to adopt the opinions which I have advocated in the first half of the book.

I shall remain altogether indifferent as to which of the alternative views put forth in the concluding Essays may seem to them most impressive, and only congratulate myself if I shall have succeeded in setting forth in due light and order the multitudinous points which together constitute the materials for forming a sound judgment upon them.

FRANCES POWER COBBE.

HENGWRT, DOLGELLY,
1888.

ESSAY I.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

That the present is pre-eminently the Age of Science is a fact equally recognized by the majority who hail it with triumph and by the minority who regard it with feelings wherein regret and apprehension have their place. As in Literature an age of production is ever followed by an age of criticism, so in the general history of human interests War, Religion, Art, start in early days and run their swift course, while Science creeps slowly after them, till at last she passes them on the way and comes foremost in the race. We still in our time have War; but it is no longer the conflict of valiant soldiers, but the game of scientific strategists. We still have Religion; but she no longer claims earth and heaven as her domain, but meekly goes to church by a path over which Science has notified, “On Sufferance Only.” We still have Art; but it is no longer the Art of Fancy, but the Art of the Intellect, wherein the Beautiful is indefinitely postponed to the technically True, as Truth is discerned by men who think _qu’il n’y a rien de vrai excepté le laid_. All our multiform activities, from agriculture down to dressmaking, are in these days nothing if not “scientific,” and to thousands of worthy people it is enough to say that Science teaches this or that, or that the interests of Science require such and such a sacrifice, to cause them to bow their heads, as pious men of old did at the message of a Prophet. “It is SCIENCE! Let it do what seemeth it good.” The claims of the æsthetic faculty, and even of the moral sense, to speak in arrest of judgment on matters entirely within their own spheres, are ruled out of court.

By a paradoxical fatality, however, it would appear as if the obsession of the Scientific Spirit is likely to be a little lightened for us by an event which might have been expected to rivet the yoke on our necks. The recently published Life of the most illustrious and most amiable man of Science of this scientific age has suggested to many readers doubts of the all-sufficiency of Science to build up not theories, but men. Mr. Darwin’s admirably candid avowal of the gradual extinction in his mind of the æsthetic[2] and religious elements has proved startling to a generation which, even when it is ready to abandon Religion, would be direfully distressed to lose the pleasures afforded by Art and Nature, Poetry and Music. Instead of lifting the scientific vocation to the skies (as was probably anticipated), this epoch-making Biography seems to have gone far to throw a sort of dam across the stream, and to have arrested not a few Science-worshippers with the query: “What shall it profit a man if he discover the origin of species and know exactly how earth-worms and sun-dews conduct themselves, if all the while he grow blind to the loveliness of nature, deaf to music, insensible to poetry, and as unable to lift his soul to the Divine and Eternal as was the primeval Ape from whom he has descended? Is this all that Science can do for her devotee? Must he be shorn of the glory of humanity when he is ordained her Priest? Does he find his loftiest faculties atrophied when he has become a machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts”?[3]

While these reflections are passing through many minds, it may be permitted to me to review some features of the Scientific Spirit of the Age. Frankly, I shall do it from an adverse point of view. There were many years of my life during which I regarded it with profound, though always distant, admiration. Grown old, I have come to think that many spirits in the hierarchy are loftier and purer; that the noblest study of mankind is Man, rather than rock or insect; and that, even at its best, Knowledge is immeasurably less precious than Goodness and Love. Whether in these estimates I err or am justified, it would, in any case, be superfluous for me to add my feeble voice to the glorification of the Scientific Spirit. Diana of the Ephesians was never proclaimed so vociferously “Great”; and perhaps, like the worshippers of the elder goddess, it may be said of those of Science, “The most part know not wherefore they have come together.” It will suffice if I succeed in partially exhibiting how much we are in danger of losing by the Scientific Spirit, while others show us, more or less truly, what we gain thereby.

In speaking of “Science” in this paper, I must be understood to refer only to the Physical Sciences, not to the mathematical or metaphysical. The former (especially the Biological group) have of late years come so much to the front that the old application of the word to the exact sciences and to metaphysics and ethics has almost dropped out of popular use. I also desire to explain at starting that I am not so blind as to ignore the splendid achievements of modern physical science in its own realm, nor the benefits which many applications of the Scientific Spirit have brought in various other directions. It is the intrusiveness and oppression of the Scientific Spirit in regions where it has no proper work, and (still more often) its predominance in others where its place should be wholly subordinate, against which a protest appears to be needed. A score of causes have contributed in our generation to set Science up and to pull other things down. The levels need to be redressed. Time will not permit me to exhibit the results of the excessive share taken of late years by the Scientific Spirit in many practical matters wherein experience and common sense were safer guides, _e.g._, in Agriculture. This side of the question I must leave untouched, and limit myself to the discussion of the general influence of the Scientific Spirit in Education, in Art, in Morals, and in Religion.

Professor Tyndall, in the Preface to his great work on “Heat as a mode of Motion,” calls Science “the noblest growth of modern times,” and adds that “as a means of intellectual education its claims are still disputed, though, once properly organized, greater and more beneficent revolutions wait its employment here than those which have marked its application in the material world” (2d ed., p. x). Since the publication of this book, and indeed since the opening of the Age of Science, the relative claims of Science and Literature to form the basis of _intellectual_ instruction have been incessantly debated by men qualified by experience in tuition (which I cannot claim to be) to form a judgment on the subject. There has been, however, I think, too little attention given on either side to the relative _moral_ influences of the two studies.

In addressing the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching on March 3 last, Sir James Paget expressed his dissent from Professor Morley’s opinion (given on a similar occasion last year) that “Literature was an excellent, if not a better study than Science.” Sir James maintained, on the contrary, that “_nothing could better advance human prosperity than Science_,” and he elaborately set forth the specific benefits of a scientific education as he conceived them, as follows:—

There was first the teaching of the power of observing, then the
teaching of accuracy, then of the difficulty of attaining to a real
knowledge of the truth, and, lastly, the teaching of the methods by
which they could pass from that which was proved to the thinking of
what was probable.[4]

It would, of course, be unjust to hold Science to these definitions, as if they exhausted her claims as our instructress. It may, however, fairly be assumed that, in the view of one of the leading men of science of the day, they are _paramount_. If any much higher results than they were to be expected from scientific teaching, Sir James would scarcely have omitted to present them first or last. To what, then, do these four great lessons of Science amount? They teach—and, I think, teach only—Observation, Accuracy, Intellectual Caution, and the acquirement of a Method of advancing to the _thinking of what was probable_,—possibly the method commonly known as Induction.

I must confess that these “great truths” (as Sir James oddly calls them) represent to my mind only the culmination of the lower range of human faculties; or, more strictly speaking, the perfect application to human concerns of those faculties which are common to man and the lower animals. A fox may be an “_observer_,” and an exceedingly _accurate_ one—of hen-roosts. He may be deeply sensible of “_the difficulty of attaining to a real knowledge_”—of traps. Further than this, he may even “_pass from the proved_”—existence of a pack of hounds in his cover to “_thinking that it was probable_”—he would shortly be chased. To train a MAN, it is surely indispensable to develop in him a superior order of powers from these. His mind must be enriched with the culture of his own age and country, and of other lands and ages, and fortified by familiarity with the thoughts of great souls on the topics of loftiest interest. He must be accustomed to think on subjects above those to which his observation, or accuracy of description, or caution in accepting evidence can apply, and on which (it is to be hoped) he will reach some anchorage of faith more firm than Sir James Paget’s climax of scientific culture, “_the passing from that which was proved to the thinking of what was probable_.” He ought to handle the method of deductive reasoning at least as well as that of induction, and beyond these (purely intellectual) attainments a human education making claim to completeness should cultivate the imagination and poetic sentiment; should “soften manners,” as the _literae humaniores_ proverbially did of old; should widen the sympathies, dignify the character, inspire enthusiasm for noble actions, and chivalrous tenderness towards women and all who need defence; and thus send forth the accomplished student a _gentleman_ in the true sense of the word. The benefits attributed by Sir James Paget to Scientific education, and even those with which, in candor, we may credit it beyond his four “great truths,” fall, I venture to think, deplorably short of such a standard of culture as this.

The deficiencies of Scientific education do not exhaust the objections against it. There seem to be positive evils almost inseparable from such training when carried far with the young. One of the worst is the danger of the adoption by the student of materialistic views on all subjects. He need not become a theoretic or speculative Materialist: that is another risk, which may or may not be successfully eliminated. But he will almost inevitably fall into practical materialism. Of the two sides of human life, his scientific training will compel him to think always in the first place of the lower. The material (or, as our fathers would have called it, the _carnal_) fact will be uppermost in his mind, and the spiritual meaning thereof more or less out of sight. He will view his mother’s tears not as expressions of her sorrow, but as solutions of muriates and carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime; and he will reflect that they were caused not by his heartlessness, but by cerebral pressure on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he will “peep and botanize” on her grave,—not with the poet’s sense of the sacrilegiousness of such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate observation among the scientifically interesting “Flora” of a cemetery.

To this class of mind, thoroughly imbued with the Scientific Spirit, Disease is the most important of facts and the greatest of evils. Sin, on the other hand, is a thing on which neither microscope nor telescope nor spectroscope, nor even stethoscope, can afford instruction. Possibly the student will think it only a spectral illusion; or he will foresee that it may be explained by and by scientifically, as a form of disease. There may be discovered _bacilli_ of Hatred, Covetousness, and Lust, respectively responsible for Murder, Theft, and Adultery. Already hypocrisy is a recognized form of Hysteria. The state of opinion in “Erewhon” may be hopefully looked for in England, when the Scientific Spirit altogether prevails.

Besides its materializing tendency, a Scientific Education involves other evils, among which may be counted the fostering of a callous and irreverent spirit. To this I shall return presently. Of course every tendency of a pursuit, good or bad, affects the young who are engaged in it much more than the old, whose characters may have been moulded under quite opposite influences. We must wait for a generation to see the Scientific Spirit in its full development.

As to the instruction of young men and women in Physiological Science in particular, I am exonerated from treating the subject by being privileged to cite the opinions of two of the most eminent and experienced members of the scholastic profession. I do so with great thankfulness, believing that it will be a revelation to many parents, blindly caught by scientific claptrap, to learn that such are the views of men among the best qualified in England to pronounce judgment on the subject.

The late lamented Mr. Thring, of Uppingham, wrote to me, Sept. 6, 1886:—

My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly I feel on
the subject of a literary education, or rather how confident I am in
the judgment that there can be no worthy education which is not
based on the study of the highest thoughts of the highest men in the
best shape. As for Science (most of it falsely so called), if a few
leading minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull
worker, to no more than a kind of upper shop work, weighing out and
labelling and learning alphabetical formulæ,—a superior grocer
assistant’s work, and has not a single element of higher mental
training in it. Not to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of
men and life, and therefore—is eminently fitted for life and its
struggle! Physiology in its worse sense adds to this a brutalizing
of the average practitioner, or rather a devilish combination of
intellect worship and cruelty at the expense of feeling and
character. For my part, if it were true that Vivisection had
wonderfully relieved bodily disease for men, if it was at the cost
of lost spirits, then let the body perish. And it is at the cost of
lost spirits. I do not say that under no circumstances should an
experiment take place, but I do say that under no circumstances
should an experiment take place for teaching purposes. You will see
how decided my judgments are on this matter.

The Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Head Master of Harrow, has been good enough to write to me as follows:—

I am most willing to let you quote my words, whether what I said
before or what I say now. You command my full sympathy in the
crusade which you have so nobly declared against cruelty. I say this
frankly, although I know that there is some difference between us in
regard to the practice of Vivisection. But even if it be necessary
that in some cases, and under strict conditions, vivisectional
experiments should be made upon animals, I cannot doubt that the use
of such experiments tends to exercise a demoralizing influence upon
any person who may be called to make them. I hold, therefore, that
the educational effect of Vivisection is always injurious. Knowledge
is dearly purchased at the cost of tenderness, and I cannot believe
that any morally-minded person could desire to familiarize the young
with the sight of animal suffering. For my part, I look upon the
hardness of heart with which some distinguished physiologists have
met the protest raised against Vivisection as one of many signs that
materialism means at the last an inversion of the ethical law;
_i.e._, a preference of knowledge to goodness, of mind to spirit,
or, in a word, of human things to divine. Surely it is a paradox
that they who minimize the specific distinction between man and the
animals should be the least tender in their views of animal
sufferings, and that Christians who accentuate that distinction
should be willing to spare animals pain at the cost of enhancing
their own. I conceive it then to be a primary duty of a modern
educator, at School or at College, to cultivate in his pupils, by
all the means in his power, the sympathetic sentiment towards the
animal world.

To turn to a less painful part of our subject.

Science and Art are constantly coupled together in common parlance and in grants of public money; but, if ever incompatibility of temper formed a just ground of divorce, it is surely in their case. When Science—like Poverty—comes in at the door, Art—like Love—flies out at the window. They move in different planes, and touch different parts of human nature. Science appeals to the Intellect, Art to the Emotions; and we are so constituted that our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in a well. When our Intellects are in the ascendant, our Emotions sink out of sight; when our Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry of Science which could make intelligent men overlook the fact that she and Art resemble two leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways, and never running together unless there be some game (shall we surmise an endowment of public money?) in view. The synthetic, reverential, sympathizing spirit of Art is opposed, as the different poles of the magnet, to the analytic, self-asserting, critical spirit of Science. The artist seeks Beauty; finds likenesses; discerns the Ideal through the Real. The man of Science seeks Facts; draws distinctions; strips the Real to the skin and the bones.

A great light of the Scientific Age has been heard to say that when he first visited the Vatican he “sat down before Raphael’s Transfiguration and filled three pages of his note-book with its faults.” It was the most natural thing in the world for him to do! How should a Physicist approve of three figures suspended in the air in defiance of the laws of gravitation? Or what could a Zoölogist say to an angel outrageously combining in his person the wings exclusively belonging to the Order _Aves_ with the arms and legs of _Bimana_? Worst of all, what must be the feelings of a Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a Centaur with two stomachs, or of a Cherub with none?

Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to see what Science can do for it, let us take a typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,—say Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” for example. We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly unscientific statements; _e.g._, that the lily of the valley grows pale with passion, that the hyacinth rings peals of music from its bells, and that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe how the garden has been thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and sewage. After this the flowers may be mentioned under their proper classes, as monandria and polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such would be the result of bringing the Scientific Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artistic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute realism of “A Mummer’s Wife” and “La Joie de Vivre.” The distance between Walter Scott and Zola measures that between Art and Science in Fiction.

To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it indeed _Truth_, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan,—if this be indeed to arrive at “Truth,” modern Science may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in other days Truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant, and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s till he cried in rapture, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, Science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in the _Wirthschaft_ at the bottom, would have no better right to complain than those who fondly expected Science to bring them to God, and are informed that she now never proceeds above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivulets of laws traced by Science flowed freshly onward towards the sea, our souls drank of them with thankfulness. Now that they lose themselves in the sands, they have become mere stagnant pools of knowledge.

We now turn to the influence of the Scientific Spirit on Morals.

Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-Scientific Spirit has almost necessarily been from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental. To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed the suggestion that moral intuitions are only results of hereditary experiences. “I believe,” he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, “that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” Mr. Darwin took up the doctrine at this stage, and in his “Descent of Man” linked on the human conscience to the instincts of the lower animals, from whence he held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he taught, would have grown up in any other animal as well endowed as we are, but those other animals would not necessarily attach their ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct. “If, for instance, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers.” (_Descent of Man_, vol. i. p. 73.)

These two doctrines—that Conscience is only the “capitalized experience of the human tribe” (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr. Spencer) and that there is no such thing as absolute or immutable Morality, but only a convenient Rule for each particular class of intelligent animals—have between them revolutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imperilled, so far as they are accepted, the existence of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is often entered on the side of faith that, after all, Darwin only showed _how_ Conscience has been evolved, perhaps by Divine prearrangement, and that we may allow its old authority all the same. He has done much more than this. He has destroyed the possibility of retaining the same reverence for the dictates of conscience. As he himself asks, “_Would any of us trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind?_... The doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of _any value_.” (_Life_, vol. i. p. 316.) Who, indeed, can attach the same solemn authority to the monitions of the

“Stern daughter of the Voice of God”

and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring for indulgence or want pining for relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will they find henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary experiences of utility?

Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of Morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such origin. The universal human expectation of Justice, to which all literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or rather such large experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of history can have known. Nor can “the set of our (modern) brains” against the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the consolidated experience of past generations, since the “utility” is all on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of Hereditary Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a stream to rise above its source. The lofty ideal of Goodness, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which have been the mainspring of heroic and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good nature and a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes, and distract him from his pursuits; but he has no longing to enthrone in their place a positive virtue, demanding his heart and life’s devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a “torpedo touch to aspiration.”

An obvious practical result of the present influence of Science on Morals has been the elevation of Bodily Health into the _summum bonum_, and the consequent accommodation of the standard of right and wrong to that new aim. An immense proportion of the arguments employed in Parliament and elsewhere, when any question touching public health is under discussion, rest on the unexpressed major premise “that any action which in the opinion of experts conduces to the bodily health of the individual or of the community is _ipso facto_ lawful and right.” I cannot here indicate the conclusions to which this principle leads. Much that the Christian conscience now holds to be Vice must be transferred to the category of Virtue; while the medical profession will acquire a Power of the Keys which it is perhaps even less qualified to use than the Successors of St. Peter.

Another threatening evil from the side of Science is the growth of a hard and pitiless temper. From whatsoever cause it arise, it seems certain that, with some noteworthy exceptions, the Scientific Spirit is callous. In the mass of its literature, the expressions of sympathy with civilized or savage, healthy or diseased mankind, or with the races below us, are few and far between. Men and beasts are, in scientific language, alike “specimens” (wretched word!); and, if the men be ill or dying, they become “clinical material.” The light of Science is a “dry” one. She leaves no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere. Nor has she more pity than Nature for the weak who fall in the struggle for existence. There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite _sui generis_ for the “poor in spirit,” the simple, the devoutly believing,—in short, for all the humble and the weak,—which constitutes of the Scientific Spirit of the Age a kind of Neo-Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity. I may add that it is no less the antithesis of Theism, which, while abandoning the Apocalyptic side of Christianity, holds (perhaps with added consciousness of its supreme value) to the spiritual part of the old faith, and would build the Religion of the future on Christ’s lessons of love to God and Man, of self-sacrifice and self-consecration.

Prior to experience it might have been confidently expected that the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of Man would have called forth a fresh burst of sympathy towards all races of men and towards the lower animals. Every biologist now knows tenfold better reasons than Saint Francis for calling the birds and beasts “little brothers and sisters.” But, instead of instilling the tenderness of the Saint of Assisi, Science has taught her devotees to regard the world as a scene of universal struggle, wherein the rule must be, “Every one for himself, and no God for any one.”

Ten years ago an eminent American physician remarked to me: “In my country the ardor of scientific research is rapidly overriding the proper benevolent objects of my profession. The cure of disease is becoming quite a secondary consideration to the achievement of a correct diagnosis, to be verified by a successful _post mortem_.” How true this now holds of the state of things in English hospitals, that remarkable book, “St. Bernard’s,” and its still more important key, “Dying Scientifically,” have just come in time to testify.[5] No one who has read these books will deny that the purely Scientific Spirit is (at all events sometimes) a merciless spirit; and that Dr. Draper’s famous boast, so often repeated, that “Science has never subjected any one to physical torture” (Preface to “Conflict,” p. xi), is untrue.

Irreverence appears to be another “note” of the Scientific Spirit. Literature always holds a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings will never be dethroned. But Science is essentially Jacobin. The one thing certain about a great man of science is that in a few years his theories and books, like French Constitutions, will be laid on the shelf. Like coral insects, the scientists of yesterday, who built the foundations of the science of to-day, are all dead from the moment that their successors have raised over them another inch of the interminable reef. The student of Literature, dealing with human life, cannot forget for a moment the existence of such things as goodness which he must honor, and wickedness which he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons to her votaries. There is nothing to revere even in a well-balanced solar system, and nothing to despise in a microbe. Taking this into consideration, it might have been foreseen that the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have been deficient in reverence; and, as a matter of fact, I think it will be conceded that so it is. It is a spirit to which the terms “imperious” and “arrogant” may not unfitly be applied, and sometimes we may add “overbearing,” when a man of science thinks fit to rebuke a theologian for trespassing on _his_ ground after he has been trampling all over the ground of theology. Perhaps the difference between the new “bumptious” Spirit of Science and the old exquisitely modest and reverent tone of Newton and Herschel, Faraday and Lyell, is only due to the causes which distinguish everywhere a Church Triumphant from a Church Militant. But, whatever they may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be in an age of Science that the prophecy will be fulfilled that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”[6]

Among the delicate and beautiful things which Science brushes away from life, I cannot omit to number a certain modesty which has hitherto prevailed among educated people. The decline of decency in England, apparent to every one old enough to recall earlier manners and topics of conversation, is due in great measure, I think, to the scientific (medical) spirit. Who would have thought thirty years ago of seeing young men in public reading-rooms snatching at the _Lancet_ and the _British Medical Journal_ from layers of what ought to be more attractive literature, and poring over hideous diagrams and revolting details of disease and monstrosity? It is perfectly right, no doubt, for these professional journals to deal plainly with these horrors, and with the thrice abominable records of “gynæcology.” But, being so, it follows that it is _not_ proper that they should form the furniture of a reading-table at which young men and young women sit for general—not medical—instruction. Nor is it only in the medical journals that disease-mongering now obtains. The political press has adopted the practice of reporting the details of illness of every eminent man who falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords those gentlemen an opportunity of advertising themselves as his advisers. The last recollection which the present generation will retain of many an illustrious statesman, poet, and soldier, will not be that he died like a hero or a saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed such and such a medicine, and, perhaps, was sick in his stomach. Death-beds are desecrated that doctors may be puffed and public inquisitiveness assuaged.

So far does the materialist spirit penetrate into literature that in criticising books and men the most exaggerated importance is attached by numberless writers to the physical conditions and “environments” of the personages with whom they are concerned, till we could almost suppose that—given his ancestry and circumstances—we could scientifically construct the Man, with all his gifts and passions. As if, forsooth, a dozen brothers were alike in character, or even all the kittens in a litter! It is refreshing to read the brisk _persiflage_ on this kind of thing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ for March 1. The writer, reviewing Mr. Lecky’s books, states that but little of that splendid historian’s private life has been published, and adds:—

“Je ne me plains pas de cette sécheresse, je la bénis. C’est un
plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd’hui, de pouvoir lire un livre sans
en connaître l’auteur: de juger une œuvre directement et en
elle-même, sans avoir à étudier ce composé d’organes et de tissus,
de nerfs et de muscles, d’où elle est sortie: sans la commenter à
l’aide de la physiologie, de l’ethnographie, et de la climatologie:
sans mettre en jeu l’atavisme et les diathèses héréditaires!”[7]

Turn we lastly to the influences of the Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion.[8] Judging from Darwin’s experience, as that of a typical man of science, just as such a one becomes an embodiment of the Scientific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion” experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years, when Science had made him all her own: “_Now_ the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colorblind” (_Life_, vol. i. p. 311). Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his “Life” in the _Spectator_ wrote: “No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience.”

The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be found, I believe: 1st, in the closing up of that “Gate called Beautiful,” through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple; 2d, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual inquiry; and, 3d, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern Scientific and the Religious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings of critical or philosophical researches on the doctrines of either natural or traditional religion. Had Science inspired her votaries with religious _sentiment_, they would have broken their way through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a highway of Faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable things to anticipate now in the world is a Scientific Religious Reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism; namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of the Age has reached this point. It is contented to be Agnostic, not Atheistic. It says aloud, “I don’t know.” It mutters to those who listen, “I don’t care.”

The Scientific Spirit has undoubtedly performed prodigies in the realms of physical discovery. Its inventions have brought enormous contributions to the material well-being of man, and it has widened to a magnificent horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it only foster our lower mental faculties while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle in its shadow; if Art and Poetry shrink at its touch; if Morality be undermined and perverted by it; and if Religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before the frost,—then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget’s assertion, that “_nothing can advance human prosperity so much as science_.” She has given us many precious things; but she takes away things more precious still.

ESSAY II.
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS.

Human Emotions—the most largely effective springs of human conduct—arise either at first hand on the pressure of their natural stimuli, or at second hand by the contagion of sympathy with the emotions of other men. This last source of emotion has not, I conceive, received sufficient attention in practical systems of education, and to the consideration of it the present paper will be chiefly devoted.

Every human emotion appears to be transmissible by contagion, and to be also more often so developed than it is solitarily evolved. For once that Courage or Terror, Admiration or Contempt, or even Good-will and Ill-will, spring of themselves in the breast of man, woman, or child, each is many times _caught_ from another mind possessed of the same feeling. By a subtle sympathy, not unshared by the lower animals, a sympathy which sometimes works slowly and imperceptibly and is sometimes communicated with electric velocity, one man conveys to another, as if it were a flame, the emotion which burns in his own soul. Thenceforth the recipient becomes a fresh propagator of the emotion to those with whom he in his turn comes into physical contact. A few instances may be named to make clear my meaning.

The most familiar example of the contagiousness of the emotions, as the reader will instantly recall, is that of Fear, which has often spread through whole armies with such inexplicable celerity and fatal results that the ancients were fain to attribute the frenzy to the malevolence of a god, and called such terrors “Panic.” The disasters which have occurred during the last few years in so many European and American theatres and churches afford sad evidence that, though “great Pan is dead,” our liability to succumb to such waves of fear has not been diminished by modern civilization. The proof of the special power of the contagion lies in this: that there is every reason to believe that the majority of the persons constituting the terror-stricken crowd would, _if alone_, have met the danger with reasonable composure. There is also happily, we may remember, such a thing as the contagion of Courage as well as that of Terror. And many a time and oft in our history the captain of a sinking ship, the commander of a retreating regiment, has, by his individual intrepidity, restored the _morale_ of his men. Again, a remarkable instance of the contagiousness of emotion is afforded by the Popularity of the men who become in any country the idols of the hour. The fact is very well known to the organizers of _claques_ and _réclames_ in theatres, and of ovations in political life, that it is enough for a small band of friends in an assembly to cheer and clap hands, to induce hundreds, who had previously little interest in the work or person praised, to join the hosannas. When a statesman has succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for himself (possibly by persuading scores of people and associations that “all his sympathies are with their”—totally opposite aims), he may then safely disappoint each in turn and veer round to the opposite point of the political and theological compass from which he sailed with flowing canvas. His popularity will not be forfeited or even lessened; for it is a mere contagion of sentiment, not a rational or critical judgment. Herein lies the special peril of democracies, that this kind of contagion of personal enthusiasm rapidly becomes the largest factor in their politics. From the nature of things, the masses cannot form judgments on questions of state, referring, perhaps, to countries of which the very names are unknown to them; and, therefore, they must of necessity choose Men, not Measures. When we further examine who are the Men so chosen and why, we arrive at the startling discovery that it is exclusively _by rhetoric_ that the contagious admiration and sympathy of the masses can be roused. Not sound statesmanship, not wise patriotism, not incorruptible fidelity, not dignified consistency, not, in short, any one quality fitting a man to be a safe or able minister, attracts the enthusiasm of the multitude, or is even estimated at all by them. The only gift they can appreciate is that which they themselves would designate “_the Gift of the Gab_.” The lesson is a grave one for all free countries. By such popular idolatry of great talkers were all the old republics of Greece and Magna Graecia brought to destruction; and the men who by such means acquired a bastard royalty over them so exercised it as to make the name of “Tyrant” for ever abominable.

As concerns emotions connected with Religion, the contagion of them has been notorious in all ages, for good or evil, according to the character of the religion in question. The intoxication of the dances of old Mænads and the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self-woundings of the priests of Baal and Cybele, the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch and the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples will occur to every reader. Probably those on the largest scale of all recorded in history were the first Crusades, when “Europe precipitated itself on Asia” in a delirium of religious enthusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the Anabaptists, the Flagellants and Prophets of the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem fanatics under Prophets and Mahdis (of which we have probably by no means heard the last), and finally the Revivals of various sects in England and America, and the triumphs of the Salvation Army, are all instances of the part played by the contagion of emotion in the religion of the community at large. I shall speak hereafter of its share in personal religious experience.

In much smaller matters than religion, and where no explosion reveals the contagion of sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one individual of a family or village to all the other members or inhabitants. It suffices for some spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old woman a witch, or to express hatred of some foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat prejudices which end in something approaching to persecution of the victims, who may be thankful they did not live two hundred years ago, when, instead of being boycotted, they would have been burned. A child in a school or large household who has the misfortune to be lame or ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity physical or mental, may, without any fault on its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike of a stupid servant or jealous step-mother, and then—the contagion spreading and intensifying as it extends—to the common hatred of the little community,—a hatred justifying itself by the sullenness or deceptions to which the poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic animals suffer from this kind of contagious dislike, and benefit on the other hand by contagious admiration and fondness.[9] “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” is true in more senses than one.

We need not pursue this part of the subject further. Every day’s experience may supply fresh illustrations of the immense influence of contagion in the development of all human emotions. Nor is it by any means to be set down as a weakness peculiar to or characteristic of a feeble mind to be blindly susceptible of such contagion. Even the strongest wills are bent and warped by the winds of other men’s passions, persistently blowing in given directions. Original minds, gifted with what the French call _l’esprit primesautier_, are perhaps, indeed, affected rather more than less than commonplace people by the emotions of those around them, because their larger natures are more open to the sympathetic shock. Like ships with all sails set, they are caught by every breeze. It is a question of degree how _much_ each man receives of influence from his neighbors; but (to use the new medical barbarism) we are never “immune” altogether from the contagion.

We may now approach our proper subject of the Education of the Emotions, carrying with us the important fact that no means are so efficacious in promoting good ones as the wise employment of the great agency of Contagion; and, further, that this contagion works only by exhibiting the genuine emotion to the person we desire to influence. Only by being brave can we inspire courage. Only by reverencing holy things can we communicate veneration. Only by being tender and loving can we move other hearts to pity and affection.

Let us glance over the variety of circumstances wherein great good might be effected by systematic attention to the natural laws of the development of the emotions. We may begin by considering those connected with the education of the young.

In the first place, parents duly impressed with the importance of the subject would carefully suppress, or at least conceal, such of their own emotions as they would regret to see caught up by their children. At present, numberless sufficiently conscientious fathers and mothers, who would be horrified at the suggestion of placing books teaching bad lessons in the hands of their sons and daughters, yet carelessly allow them to witness (and of course to receive the contagion of) all manner of angry, envious, cowardly, and scornful emotions, just as they chance to be called out in themselves. It would be to revolutionize many homes to induce parents to revise their own sentiments, with a view to deciding which they should communicate to their children. In one way in particular, the result of such self-questioning might be startling. Every good father desires his son to respect his mother, and would be sorry to teach him only the half of the Fifth Commandment—_in words_. Yet how do scores of such well-meaning men set about conveying the sentiment of reverence which they recognize will be invaluable to their sons? They treat those same mothers, in the presence of those same sons, with such rudeness, dismiss their opinions with such levity, and perhaps exhibit such actual contempt for their wishes that it is not in nature but that the boy will receive a lesson of disrespect. His father’s feelings, backed up as they are by the disabilities under which the Constitution places women, can scarcely fail to impress the young mind with that contempt for women in general, and for his mother in particular, which is precisely the reverse of chivalry and filial piety.