If this view seems at first sight disappointing, we may remind
ourselves that a similar change has been found necessary in all the
other sciences. The physicist or chemist is not now required to prove
the ethical importance of his ions or atoms; the biologist is not
expected to prove the utility of the plants or animals which he
dissects. In pre-scientific ages this was not the case.
Astronomy, for
example, was studied because men believed in astrology: it was thought
that the movements of the planets had the most direct and important
bearing upon the lives of human beings. Presumably, when this belief
decayed and the disinterested study of astronomy began, many who had
found astrology absorbingly interesting decided that astronomy had too
little human interest to be worthy of study. Physics, as it appears in
Plato's Timæus for example, is full of ethical notions: it is an
essential part of its purpose to show that the earth is worthy of
admiration. The modern physicist, on the contrary, though he has no
wish to deny that the earth is admirable, is not concerned, as
physicist, with its ethical attributes: he is merely concerned to find
out facts, not to consider whether they are good or bad.
In
psychology, the scientific attitude is even more recent and more
difficult than in the physical sciences: it is natural to consider
that human nature is either good or bad, and to suppose that the
difference between good and bad, so all-important in practice, must be
important in theory also. It is only during the last century that an
ethically neutral psychology has grown up; and here too, ethical
neutrality has been essential to scientific success.
In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and
hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes, and have
judged philosophies in relation to their wishes. Driven from the
particular sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must
afford a key to the understanding of the world has sought a refuge in
philosophy. But even from this last refuge, if philosophy is not to
remain a set of pleasing dreams, this belief must be driven forth. It
is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who
seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good.
In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only
to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view
the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
We are thus brought back to our seeming paradox, that a philosophy
which does not seek to impose upon the world its own conceptions of
good and evil is not only more likely to achieve truth, but is also
the outcome of a higher ethical standpoint than one which, like
evolutionism and most traditional systems, is perpetually appraising
the universe and seeking to find in it an embodiment of present
ideals. In religion, and in every deeply serious view of the world and
of human destiny, there is an element of submission, a realisation of
the limits of human power, which is somewhat lacking in the modern
world, with its quick material successes and its insolent belief in
the boundless possibilities of progress. "He that loveth his life
shall lose it"; and there is danger lest, through a too confident love
of life, life itself should lose much of what gives it its highest
worth. The submission which religion inculcates in action is
essentially the same in spirit as that which science teaches in
thought; and the ethical neutrality by which its victories have been
achieved is the outcome of that submission.
The good which it concerns us to remember is the good which it lies in
our power to create--the good in our own lives and in our attitude
towards the world. Insistence on belief in an external realisation of
the good is a form of self-assertion, which, while it cannot secure
the external good which it desires, can seriously impair the inward
good which lies within our power, and destroy that reverence towards
fact which constitutes both what is valuable in humility and what is
fruitful in the scientific temper.
Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature;
something subjective, if only the interest that determines the
direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But
scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human
pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most
intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve.
To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but
experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the
conceptions by which the world is to be understood.
Scientific
philosophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent condition,
a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific belief or
imagination, and, like every approach to self-transcendence, it brings
with it a rich reward in increase of scope and breadth and
comprehension. Evolutionism, in spite of its appeals to particular
scientific facts, fails to be a truly scientific philosophy because of
its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant
interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific
philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering
less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more
indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without
the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] All the above quotations are from Burnet's _Early Greek
Philosophy_, (2nd ed., 1908), pp. 146-156.
[2] _Republic_, 514, translated by Davies and Vaughan.
[3] This section, and also one or two pages in later sections, have
been printed in a course of Lowell lectures _On our knowledge of the
external world_, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. But I
have left them here, as this is the context for which they were
originally written.
[4] _Introduction to Metaphysics_, p. 1.
[5] Whinfield's translation of the _Masnavi_ (Trübner, 1887), p. 34.
[6] _Ethics_, Bk. IV, Prop. LXII.
[7] Ib., Pt. IV, Df. I.
[8] _Ethics_. Pt. II. Df. VI.
II
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN A LIBERAL EDUCATION
I
Science, to the ordinary reader of newspapers, is represented by a
varying selection of sensational triumphs, such as wireless telegraphy
and aeroplanes, radio-activity and the marvels of modern alchemy. It is
not of this aspect of science that I wish to speak.
Science, in this
aspect, consists of detached up-to-date fragments, interesting only
until they are replaced by something newer and more up-to-date,
displaying nothing of the systems of patiently constructed knowledge
out of which, almost as a casual incident, have come the practically
useful results which interest the man in the street. The increased
command over the forces of nature which is derived from science is
undoubtedly an amply sufficient reason for encouraging scientific
research, but this reason has been so often urged and is so easily
appreciated that other reasons, to my mind quite as important, are apt
to be overlooked. It is with these other reasons, especially with the
intrinsic value of a scientific habit of mind in forming our outlook
on the world, that I shall be concerned in what follows.
The instance of wireless telegraphy will serve to illustrate the
difference between the two points of view. Almost all the serious
intellectual labour required for the possibility of this invention is
due to three men--Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz. In alternating layers
of experiment and theory these three men built up the modern theory of
electromagnetism, and demonstrated the identity of light with
electromagnetic waves. The system which they discovered is one of
profound intellectual interest, bringing together and unifying an
endless variety of apparently detached phenomena, and displaying a
cumulative mental power which cannot but afford delight to every
generous spirit. The mechanical details which remained to be adjusted
in order to utilise their discoveries for a practical system of
telegraphy demanded, no doubt, very considerable ingenuity, but had
not that broad sweep and that universality which could give them
intrinsic interest as an object of disinterested contemplation.
From the point of view of training the mind, of giving that
well-informed, impersonal outlook which constitutes culture in the
good sense of this much-misused word, it seems to be generally held
indisputable that a literary education is superior to one based on
science. Even the warmest advocates of science are apt to rest their
claims on the contention that culture ought to be sacrificed to
utility. Those men of science who respect culture, when they associate
with men learned in the classics, are apt to admit, not merely
politely, but sincerely, a certain inferiority on their side,
compensated doubtless by the services which science renders to
humanity, but none the less real. And so long as this attitude exists
among men of science, it tends to verify itself: the intrinsically
valuable aspects of science tend to be sacrificed to the merely
useful, and little attempt is made to preserve that leisurely,
systematic survey by which the finer quality of mind is formed and
nourished.
But even if there be, in present fact, any such inferiority as is
supposed in the educational value of science, this is, I believe, not
the fault of science itself, but the fault of the spirit in which
science is taught. If its full possibilities were realised by those
who teach it, I believe that its capacity of producing those habits of
mind which constitute the highest mental excellence would be at least
as great as that of literature, and more particularly of Greek and
Latin literature. In saying this I have no wish whatever to disparage
a classical education. I have not myself enjoyed its benefits, and my
knowledge of Greek and Latin authors is derived almost wholly from
translations. But I am firmly persuaded that the Greeks fully deserve
all the admiration that is bestowed upon them, and that it is a very
great and serious loss to be unacquainted with their writings. It is
not by attacking them, but by drawing attention to neglected
excellences in science, that I wish to conduct my argument.
One defect, however, does seem inherent in a purely classical
education--namely, a too exclusive emphasis on the past.
By the study
of what is absolutely ended and can never be renewed, a habit of
criticism towards the present and the future is engendered. The
qualities in which the present excels are qualities to which the study
of the past does not direct attention, and to which, therefore, the
student of Greek civilisation may easily become blind.
In what is new
and growing there is apt to be something crude, insolent, even a
little vulgar, which is shocking to the man of sensitive taste;
quivering from the rough contact, he retires to the trim gardens of a
polished past, forgetting that they were reclaimed from the wilderness
by men as rough and earth-soiled as those from whom he shrinks in his
own day. The habit of being unable to recognise merit until it is
dead is too apt to be the result of a purely bookish life, and a
culture based wholly on the past will seldom be able to pierce through
everyday surroundings to the essential splendour of contemporary
things, or to the hope of still greater splendour in the future.
"My eyes saw not the men of old;
And now their age away has rolled.
I weep--to think I shall not see
The heroes of posterity."
So says the Chinese poet; but such impartiality is rare in the more
pugnacious atmosphere of the West, where the champions of past and
future fight a never-ending battle, instead of combining to seek out
the merits of both.
This consideration, which militates not only against the exclusive
study of the classics, but against every form of culture which has
become static, traditional, and academic, leads inevitably to the
fundamental question: What is the true end of education?
But before
attempting to answer this question it will be well to define the sense
in which we are to use the word "education." For this purpose I shall
distinguish the sense in which I mean to use it from two others, both
perfectly legitimate, the one broader and the other narrower than the
sense in which I mean to use the word.
In the broader sense, education will include not only what we learn
through instruction, but all that we learn through personal
experience--the formation of character through the education of life.
Of this aspect of education, vitally important as it is, I will say
nothing, since its consideration would introduce topics quite foreign
to the question with which we are concerned.
In the narrower sense, education may be confined to instruction, the
imparting of definite information on various subjects, because such
information, in and for itself, is useful in daily life.
Elementary
education--reading, writing, and arithmetic--is almost wholly of this
kind. But instruction, necessary as it is, does not _per se_
constitute education in the sense in which I wish to consider it.
Education, in the sense in which I mean it, may be defined as _the
formation, by means of instruction, of certain mental habits and a
certain outlook on life and the world_. It remains to ask ourselves,
what mental habits, and what sort of outlook, can be hoped for as the
result of instruction? When we have answered this question we can
attempt to decide what science has to contribute to the formation of
the habits and outlook which we desire.
Our whole life is built about a certain number--not a very small
number--of primary instincts and impulses. Only what is in some way
connected with these instincts and impulses appears to us desirable or
important; there is no faculty, whether "reason" or
"virtue" or
whatever it may be called, that can take our active life and our hopes
and fears outside the region controlled by these first movers of all
desire. Each of them is like a queen-bee, aided by a hive of workers
gathering honey; but when the queen is gone the workers languish and
die, and the cells remain empty of their expected sweetness. So with
each primary impulse in civilised man: it is surrounded and protected
by a busy swarm of attendant derivative desires, which store up in its
service whatever honey the surrounding world affords.
But if the
queen-impulse dies, the death-dealing influence, though retarded a
little by habit, spreads slowly through all the subsidiary impulses,
and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was
formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no
questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of
disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that
all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can _compel_ an
inner response must always be disappointed: all
"meaning" must be at
bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no
miracle can restore to the world the value which they reflected upon
it.
The purpose of education, therefore, cannot be to create any primary
impulse which is lacking in the uneducated; the purpose can only be to
enlarge the scope of those that human nature provides, by increasing
the number and variety of attendant thoughts, and by showing where the
most permanent satisfaction is to be found. Under the impulse of a
Calvinistic horror of the "natural man," this obvious truth has been
too often misconceived in the training of the young;
"nature" has been
falsely regarded as excluding all that is best in what is natural, and
the endeavour to teach virtue has led to the production of stunted and
contorted hypocrites instead of full-grown human beings.
From such
mistakes in education a better psychology or a kinder heart is
beginning to preserve the present generation; we need, therefore,
waste no more words on the theory that the purpose of education is to
thwart or eradicate nature.
But although nature must supply the initial force of desire, nature is
not, in the civilised man, the spasmodic, fragmentary, and yet violent
set of impulses that it is in the savage. Each impulse has its
constitutional ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection,
through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, and
temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying impulse which may be
called wisdom. In this way education destroys the crudity of
instinct, and increases through knowledge the wealth and variety of
the individual's contacts with the outside world, making him no longer
an isolated fighting unit, but a citizen of the universe, embracing
distant countries, remote regions of space, and vast stretches of past
and future within the circle of his interests. It is this simultaneous
softening in the insistence of desire and enlargement of its scope
that is the chief moral end of education.
Closely connected with this moral end is the more purely intellectual
aim of education, the endeavour to make us see and imagine the world
in an objective manner, as far as possible as it is in itself, and not
merely through the distorting medium of personal desire.
The complete
attainment of such an objective view is no doubt an ideal,
indefinitely approachable, but not actually and fully realisable.
Education, considered as a process of forming our mental habits and
our outlook on the world, is to be judged successful in proportion as
its outcome approximates to this ideal; in proportion, that is to say,
as it gives us a true view of our place in society, of the relation of
the whole human society to its non-human environment, and of the
nature of the non-human world as it is in itself apart from our
desires and interests. If this standard is admitted, we can return to
the consideration of science, inquiring how far science contributes to
such an aim, and whether it is in any respect superior to its rivals
in educational practice.
II
Two opposite and at first sight conflicting merits belong to science
as against literature and art. The one, which is not inherently
necessary, but is certainly true at the present day, is hopefulness
as to the future of human achievement, and in particular as to the
useful work that may be accomplished by any intelligent student. This
merit and the cheerful outlook which it engenders prevent what might
otherwise be the depressing effect of another aspect of science, to my
mind also a merit, and perhaps its greatest merit--I mean the
irrelevance of human passions and of the whole subjective apparatus
where scientific truth is concerned. Each of these reasons for
preferring the study of science requires some amplification. Let us
begin with the first.
In the study of literature or art our attention is perpetually riveted
upon the past: the men of Greece or of the Renaissance did better than
any men do now; the triumphs of former ages, so far from facilitating
fresh triumphs in our own age, actually increase the difficulty of
fresh triumphs by rendering originality harder of attainment; not only
is artistic achievement not cumulative, but it seems even to depend
upon a certain freshness and _naïveté_ of impulse and vision which
civilisation tends to destroy. Hence comes, to those who have been
nourished on the literary and artistic productions of former ages, a
certain peevishness and undue fastidiousness towards the present, from
which there seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism which
ignores tradition and in the search after originality achieves only
the eccentric. But in such vandalism there is none of the simplicity
and spontaneity out of which great art springs: theory is still the
canker in its core, and insincerity destroys the advantages of a
merely pretended ignorance.
The despair thus arising from an education which suggests no
pre-eminent mental activity except that of artistic creation is wholly
absent from an education which gives the knowledge of scientific
method. The discovery of scientific method, except in pure
mathematics, is a thing of yesterday; speaking broadly, we may say
that it dates from Galileo. Yet already it has transformed the world,
and its success proceeds with ever-accelerating velocity. In science
men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which
they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the
appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the
successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one
man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can
apply it. No transcendent ability is required in order to make useful
discoveries in science; the edifice of science needs its masons,
bricklayers, and common labourers as well as its foremen,
master-builders, and architects. In art nothing worth doing can be
done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can
contribute to a supreme achievement.
In science the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method.
The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can
apply the method with fresh vigour, unimpaired by the previous labour
of perfecting it; but the mental calibre of the thought required for
their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the
first inventor of the method. There are in science immense numbers of
different methods, appropriate to different classes of problems; but
over and above them all, there is something not easily definable,
which may be called _the_ method of science. It was formerly customary
to identify this with the inductive method, and to associate it with
the name of Bacon. But the true inductive method was not discovered by
Bacon, and the true method of science is something which includes
deduction as much as induction, logic and mathematics as much as
botany and geology. I shall not attempt the difficult task of stating
what the scientific method is, but I will try to indicate the temper
of mind out of which the scientific method grows, which is the second
of the two merits that were mentioned above as belonging to a
scientific education.
The kernel of the scientific outlook is a thing so simple, so obvious,
so seemingly trivial, that the mention of it may almost excite
derision. The kernel of the