CHAPTER IX

WHAT SCIENCE CAN DO AGAINST DISEASE

Formation of the experimental method—The intervention of religion in disease—Disease as a basis of pessimistic systems of philosophy—Advance of medical science in the war against disease—The revolution in medicine and surgery due to the discoveries of Pasteur—The beneficial results of Serum Therapy in the war against infectious diseases—Failure of science to cure tuberculosis and malignant tumours—Protests against the advance of science—Opposition of Rousseau, Tolstoi, and Brunetière—Proclamation of the fallibility of science—Return to religion and mysticism

Science, the youngest daughter of knowledge, has begun to investigate the great problems affecting humanity. The chief religions and many systems of philosophy had been long established before the spirit of scepticism dared to inquire whether or no these products of the human mind were really in harmony with fact. Scepticism gained ground little by little, and open war was declared between religious dogma and authority on the one side, and scientific reason on the other.

The great religions and the philosophy of Aristotle had ruled a majority of mankind for some twenty centuries before doubt was cast on the real value of these doctrines.

Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, asked why it was that all the systems of his time were so vague and so powerless to explain the phenomena of the world. The cause could not lie in nature herself, for without doubt she followed laws that were immutable and that could be subjected to exact observation; nor could it lie in any want of intelligence in those men who devoted themselves to solve the problems. The true cause of the failure lay in the falsity or insufficiency of the methods employed. Bacon, trying to provide a remedy for this condition of affairs, advised that makers of generalisations should proceed very slowly, passing only by the smallest stages from particular facts to conclusions only more general in the slightest degree, and so on, until the ultimate formula might be reached. By such a path it was possible to attain principles neither vague nor ambiguous, but clear and exact and that would not be denied by nature herself.

The first steps taken by science according to this method, which indeed had been suggested long ago, but which was first clearly laid down by Bacon, were slow and halting. Religious and philosophical doctrines still weighed heavily on inquiring minds, so that the new method was not followed with any great courage. None the less progress was achieved, until at length the great problems of humanity opened out. More than two thousand years before the birth of exact science, Buddha had given voice to the chief grievances of the human race. “Behold, O monks, the holy truth as to suffering,” he had proclaimed in the Sermon at Benares, “birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, and death is suffering.” Science, in its slow progress, passing from particular to general, reached first one of these four sorrows, the suffering due to disease.

In the Buddhist legend that I quoted in chap. vi., the sight of a sick man “whose senses were weakened, who drew his breath with difficulty, whose limbs were shrivelled, whose bowels were wrung with pain, and his body pitifully soiled with excrement,” suggested to Buddha the reflection that “health is no more than the idle vision of a dream while fear and disease are horrible realities. What wise man, having seen the thing that life is, can still think of joy or of pleasure? Woe upon health which is assailed by so many maladies.” When Buddha, who was a young prince, asked of his father the gift “that he might always remain full of health, and that he should be smitten by no disease,” his father, who was the king, replied: “You ask me what is impossible; in that my son, I can do nothing.”

From that day, every religion has busied itself with the cure and prevention of disease. They believed that the causes of these were the influence of evil spirits or the visitations of God; and as remedies they prescribed sacrifice and prayer and anything that might avert the anger of God. Even at the present day, similar medicine is used by primitive races. In Sumatra for instance, when it is impossible to arrest the flow of blood from a wound, the disaster is ascribed to an evil spirit (Polasièq) who is sucking the wound and making it incurable. In Nias, when bleeding from the nose occurs in children, it is supposed to be due to the father having killed a cock during the pregnancy of the mother. The indispensable remedy is to make sacrifice to the outraged deity.

No doubt there co-exist with such practices of primitive races, certain useful rules, based on correct observation or on experience. It is a common practice to try all manner of remedies on the sick; although most do harm, now and again something useful may be discovered. Such vulgar medicine has undoubted merit, but it cannot be compared with the results of scientific medicine, which are drawn from rigorous experiment.

Medical science has been slow in developing, but it has now reached a condition of which humanity may be proud. It is outside my purpose to give a long exposition of this subject; but it is necessary to my argument to set out a few facts from which the reader may judge of the present condition of medical science.

Without doubt the fear of disease has played a large part in the pessimistic conceptions of the universe. Not only the words of Buddha that I have quoted, but many of the systems of pessimistic philosophy attest this. I have already stated in chap. vi. that Schopenhauer in 1831 was driven from Berlin to Frankfurt by fear of cholera.

In his statement of the case against this universe, and as a chief argument for his proposition that “this is the worst of possible worlds” Schopenhauer adduced the spreading of epidemics. “An alteration of the atmosphere so slight that it cannot be detected by chemistry brings about cholera, or yellow fever, or the black death, diseases which number their victims by millions; an alteration slightly greater might destroy all life.”[265]

Hartmann, who has been one of the chief advocates of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, also had gloomy views on diseases and medicine. He was convinced that howsoever great the progress of humanity might come to be, there never would be an end or even a diminution of diseases. “It is no matter,” he said, “how many remedies may be discovered for diseases; new diseases, and particularly chronic affections which, although not serious are extremely painful, will continue to appear more rapidly than the discoveries of medicine.”[266]

Humanity will be fortunate if the pessimistic philosophers prove as wrong about their other grievances as they have proved about disease and medicine. To understand the vast progress made by medicine, it is necessary only to compare the complaint of Schopenhauer with the actual state of affairs. When he spoke of epidemics being due to slight changes of the atmosphere, Schopenhauer obviously was repeating the medical opinion current in his times. Experimental science has proved that he was quite wrong. It has been shown conclusively that two of the great affections of which he spoke, cholera and plague, are due not to chemical changes in the air, but to definite microbes, the natural history of which is known as well as that of any other plant. Cholera is produced by the vibrio, discovered by Koch, a minute organism that lives in water and that enters the human alimentary canal with food or drink. We do not yet know a definite cure for cholera, but we do know how to prevent infection. The most simple mode of guarding against infection is to swallow only material that has been boiled, and to prevent contamination of water or of vessels with fæcal matter containing the Koch’s vibrio. Moreover, in individual cases use may be made of anti-cholera serums. In 1831, if these discoveries had been made, philosophy would have taken a different course. Instead of trembling at the epidemic, and flying to Frankfurt, Schopenhauer would have remained quietly at Berlin, and Hegel would not have ceased to develop his idealism in the university of that town.

Schopenhauer enforced his argument by reference to the black death “capable of destroying millions of victims.” It is certain that the black death was no other than human plague, which made enormous ravages, in the fourteenth century, for instance, destroying nearly a third of the population of Europe. In those days, no one doubted but that it was a visitation of the Divine wrath, and people gathered in churches to make common supplication. Sacrifices were offered and flagellations took place in the hope of averting the terrible malady. Travellers who have been in the capital of Austria must have seen in one of the chief streets (Graben) a large and unlovely monument, erected in the seventeenth century to commemorate the interposition of Providence in staying one of the great epidemics of plague. Now that science has made known the true cause of plague, our ideas as to the causes of the appearance and disappearance of epidemics are very different. Plague is not the manifestation of the anger of God, but is a scourge due to invasion by a minute organism, discovered simultaneously by Kitasato and Yersin in 1894. The natural history of the microbe has been studied, and we know that it may live not only in human bodies but in the bodies of small rodents, such as rats and mice, which live in association with man. These animals are the source of human infection, and it is necessary to destroy them as completely as possible. There is no doubt but that the arrest of the plague in the seventeenth century was due to the fact that rats and mice had themselves been exterminated by the plague.

Plague, which formerly was the most terrible of epidemic diseases, has now become a misfortune against which it is simple to guard ourselves. To secure that end, however, we have not to pray or to scourge ourselves, but to take measures to destroy rats and mice. Moreover serums may be employed; and the use of these is not only prophylactic, but if the disease be not too advanced, is actually curative. The danger of which Schopenhauer spoke may be regarded as definitely averted, and this is due to the advance of medical knowledge. In such countries as British India in which plague still causes great losses, we have to blame the ignorance of the population. Instead of following the course prescribed by science, these people still prefer the rules laid down by the Brahmanistic religion. Their idea of cleanliness and purity is a religious idea, and not that of medicine and bacteriology. It is not surprising that plague still exists in India, but none the less no case is a better instance of the progress of knowledge.

Hartmann’s idea as to a progressive increase in the number of diseases rests on no exact grounds, and is in opposition to much that we know. As a matter of fact, as knowledge of hygiene advances and becomes spread among the peoples, diseases become less frequent and less fatal.

A great stimulus was given to medicine and surgery when there was applied to these the knowledge gained by Pasteur in his study of fermentation. Pasteur showed that fermentations were chemical alterations in organic matter, excited by the presence of minute organisms very common in the neighbourhood of man.

This discovery was applied in the first place to surgery. Lord Lister, then a surgeon in Scotland, showed that the festering of wounds was due to the entrance of minute organisms. Following this clue, he succeeded, by the use of dressings, in preventing the contamination of wounds and at once saw a vast reduction in deaths following surgical operations. Since the discovery of anæsthetics, such as ether, chloroform, and cocaine, and the use of germ-free dressings, surgery has been developed in a marvellous fashion. The varied and delicate feats of abdominal operation are known to all, and recently surgery of the heart has become possible.

A comparison of the mortality of the wounded in the different wars of the nineteenth century affords an excellent means of gauging the progress of surgical treatment of gunshot wounds. The mortality of the wounded among the English troops in the Crimean war reached 15.21 per cent.; in the French troops in Italy in 1859–1860, it was 17.36 per cent.; in the German army in 1870–1871, the years in which antiseptic surgery came into use, it fell to 11.07 per cent.; while in the Spanish-American war in 1898, in the most brilliant period of modern surgery, the percentage mortality of wounded had fallen to 6.64.[267] In the recent Transvaal war, the mortality was half what it had been in the Franco-German war.[268]

New medical knowledge, founded on the discovery of the nature of ferments and of the virus of infection, has reformed the practice of midwifery to such an extent that puerperal fever, formerly one of the great scourges of humanity, is now extremely rare.

Blindness acquired at birth, which formerly rendered many lives extremely miserable, is now practically completely prevented, by means of the precautions taken to hinder the child from being contaminated by the mother in the process of birth. The most successful method is that which was suggested by Credé,[269] a German physician, and consists in placing in the pupils of the infant a minute drop of nitrate of silver, which is an antiseptic, and prevents the occurrence of ocular blennorrhagia.

Appendicitis, a disease so common that I referred to it in chap. iv. as one of the most salient examples of disharmony in the human constitution, has been resolutely attacked by medical science. In some cases, surgical interference makes a definite end of the disease; in other cases medical treatment has been enough to subdue the symptoms without recourse to operation.

For a considerable period, those of a sceptical disposition asserted that the advance of bacteriological knowledge was of service only in surgical cases. But Pasteur showed that this was an erroneous view. Working with Chamberland and Roux, Pasteur demonstrated that many infectious diseases could be prevented by the use of attenuated virus; he succeeded in saving the lives of many animals and of men, bitten by rabid dogs and affected by hydrophobia, a disease formerly almost invariably fatal and among the most horrible to which man is liable.

In the latter direction, medical science is developing at an extraordinary rate, and is achieving results of a remarkable nature. Among recent discoveries, I may mention that of the curative properties of the blood serum of animals which have been subjected to the action either of microbes or of the soluble products of microbes. Von Behring, working with the Kitasato, a Japanese investigator, has shown that a serum of this nature, prepared with the poison produced by the microbe of diphtheria (the poison was discovered by Roux in collaboration with Yersin), is capable not only of protecting those in good health from diphtheria, but of curing those who have been attacked by the disease. The serum fails to act only when it is employed in advanced cases of diphtheria.

Anti-diphtheritic serum, introduced into medical practice about eight years ago, has been tried in every way and has been proved to possess both preventive and curative properties. If patients still die from diphtheria, it is only because the treatment has been applied too late or insufficiently.

The use of the anti-diphtheritic serum has reduced the mortality in cases of diphtheria from 50 or even 60 per cent. to 12 or 14 per cent. The number of infant lives that have been saved by this method must be enormous.

The beneficent discovery of the curative value of serums has been applied to other diseases and is giving very encouraging results. I cannot go into details here, but it is enough to say that in the last quarter of a century medicine has entered a new epoch, and has taken its place among other exact sciences based on the experimental method. Although it is not surprising that in so short a space of time science has not yet conquered all the ills affecting humanity, this failure has provoked the most severe criticism.

“Indeed,” one of the critics has said, “you vaunt the progress of medical science at a time when you have to confess that it has failed to cure tuberculosis, one of the gravest of the infectious diseases, which alone causes the death of a sixth part of the human race.” It is true that the infectious nature of this scourge was announced by Villemin more than forty years ago. Twenty years have passed since Koch, the German bacteriologist, discovered the microbe that produces not only the ordinary form of pulmonary consumption but all other varieties of tuberculosis. And we are still ignorant of any remedy for the disease. In all the bacteriological institutes and laboratories search is being made for some vaccine or serum or medicament which will arrest a disease that in many cases nature herself cures. But the results amount practically to nothing.

This is certainly a good example of the failure of science. None the less a closer examination shows that even with the knowledge already gained we could deal with tuberculosis in a manner more efficacious than is the existing practice. When the infectious nature of the disease had been made known, before waiting for the discovery by Koch of the actual bacillus, we should have employed all the known modes of destroying infectious matter. In spite of all that has been said and written on the subject, people still spit on the floors of omnibuses and cars and on street pavements. Tuberculosis is propagated not because of the failure of science, but because of the ignorance and stupidity of the population. To diminish the spread of tuberculosis, of typhoid fever, of dysentery, and of many other diseases, it is necessary only to follow the rules of scientific hygiene, without waiting for specific remedies.

Although the science of to-day is sufficiently armed against the diseases commonly known as infectious, the case is very different with some other affections, among which the chief place is taken by malignant tumours, or cancers, in the most general sense of the word.

There are few maladies more terrible, for they practically never disappear spontaneously, and surgery can remove them successfully only if they have been recognised at an early stage. Every year a number of persons, old and young, die victims of malignant tumours, and it is even possible that cancer is more prevalent now than in former times. It has been suggested that the increase of cancer is due to the greater longevity among modern races, and as malignant tumours are most common in old persons, it may well be that the prolongation of life has given this disease a larger field. However, even allowing for this, it is probable that there is a real increase of cancer.

Unquestionably the malignant tumours are the diseases most disappointing to medicine and surgery, and these sciences are as much at a loss with regard to them as in the case of infectious diseases before the discovery of pathogenic organisms. Science is perhaps even in worse case with regard to cancer than it formerly was with regard to infectious diseases, for, before the discovery of microbes, something was known of the virus which produces infection. Thus the virus of smallpox was known, and was used, by the method of inoculation, to prevent more serious attacks of the disease. Nearly a century before the discoveries of Pasteur, Jenner had been able to be of the greatest service to mankind by his discovery that the virus of cow-pox could be used as a preventive of infection by smallpox.

In the case of malignant tumours, we do not even know their real nature; we are ignorant as to whether or no they are infectious, and whether they are caused by a microbe coming from without or are due to internal changes of the tissues. Our ignorance, however, affords no ground for despair. It is probable that the malignant tumours will soon come to be ranged with infectious diseases due to invasions by specific microbes. Experiments on the cancers in rats and mice have shown that these can be inoculated in the same manner as in the case of the recognised infectious diseases. Hanau has shown that this occurs in the case of epithelioma of old rats; Morau[270] has succeeded in transferring the cancers of white mice, and his results have been confirmed by Jensen[271] and Borr[272], in the Institut Pasteur. These investigations mark the beginning of a new stage in the knowledge of tumours. I am unable to see, therefore that the malignant tumours provide a satisfactory argument in favour of a pessimistic conception of the universe.

Dr. Boas, of Berlin,[273] in a recent publication, has laid stress on the fact that most patients affected with cancer do not seek medical aid until the disease is far advanced. For instance, in 80 per cent. of the cases of cancer of the rectum that he had attended, the patients presented themselves too late for operation. Boas advised that the attention of the public should be drawn, by means of widespread publication, to the earliest symptoms of cancerous disease. He thought that such a course might save many lives by making possible operation in early stages.

The prevention and treatment of disease, which for long was in the hands of religious authorities, is now passing into the care of those who employ the methods of scientific medicine. It is now only in the case of certain nervous maladies, which can be treated by suggestion, that religion has any important part to play. I have not thought it necessary to expound at length the work of science in the struggle against disease, because the evidence on this point is extremely clear and precise. Every one must accept it, and even the passionate enemies of science have to bow before the fact.

However, the problem has been changed. Science they now admit, is capable, no doubt, of assuaging humanity in its sufferings from this or the other disease. But there is another question. Disease is only an episode in human life, and the great problems remain unsolved by science. It is not enough to cure a man of diphtheria or intermittent fever; it is necessary to explain what the destiny of man is, and why he must grow old and die at a time when his desire to live is strongest. Here, plainly, all science must fail, and here must begin the beneficent work of religion and philosophy. But as science is constantly casting doubt on the dogmas of religion, and criticising adversely the systems of philosophy, it is plain, that so far from being of service, science is actually harmful to mankind.

The campaign against science was opened long ago. In the eighteenth century Rousseau[274] opened it with brilliancy and zest worthy of his reputation. He defended his theme with vigour and eloquence and the following quotations may serve as an example, “Know O people,” he wrote, “that nature has desired to preserve you from science as a mother tries to snatch a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child; that the secrets which she has hidden from you are evils from which she would preserve you, and that one of her greatest gifts is the difficulty with which knowledge is acquired. Human beings are perverse, but they would have been worse had they had the misfortune to be born learned men.[275] Our sciences are futile in so far as they fail to attain their objects, but they are worse than futile in the results that they bring about. Born of idleness, they cherish their mother—Tell me, illustrious philosophers, you from whom we know why matter attracts matter, the relations of the orbits traced by revolving planets, the mathematical properties of curves, what stars may be inhabited, what insects exhibit curious modes of reproduction; tell me, I say, you from whom we have gained such marvellous information, if you had never learned of these things, should we have been less numerous, less well governed, less flourishing, or worse disposed?”[276]

Such words were capable of impressing men because of their eloquence and sincerity, but they could not arrest the continued and triumphant advance of science, which indeed, precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, began its modern and lasting progress. For it was then that Laplace described the system of the heavens and that Lavoisier laid the foundation of modern chemistry and of our knowledge of the indestructibility of matter.

In the nineteenth century, science has made a revolution in life by its application of steam and by its other triumphs. None the less it has not satisfied many distinguished persons. And to-day we find a writer of genius, in the manner of Rousseau, raising his voice against the science of the nineteenth century.

Tolstoi, in an essay of which the title is, “On the Aim of Science and Art,” has attempted to show the incompetence of science with regard to the great problems that occupy humanity. The task set himself by the Russian writer was much harder than that of Rousseau, for with the passing of a century science has become much more powerful.

Tolstoi is convinced that theoretical investigations into the origin of life, the intimate structure of living matter and so forth, are of no importance to human beings, and serve no other purpose than to flatter the pretensions of the learned. “All that we call culture,” he affirmed, “our sciences, our arts, improvements in the amenity of life, are no other than attempts to deceive the moral cravings of mankind; all that we call hygiene and medicine are no other than attempts to deceive the physical and natural cravings of mankind.”[277]

The whole progress of science “up to the present time, has not only not improved the lot of the majority of mankind, that is to say of the labourers, but has made it worse.”[278]

Tolstoi thinks that the epithet “true science” could be given only to “knowledge of the right aim and true happiness of each individual and of mankind as a whole. Such a science would serve as a guiding thread in determining the proper sphere of all knowledge”; “without knowledge of the proper aim of life and of the real good of humanity, all other knowledge and every art become merely amusements idle or even harmful.”[279]

The chief grievance of the great Russian writer against knowledge, culture, and progress can be resolved into the powerlessness of these to explain the most difficult problems of humanity, that is to say the real aim of human life, and what really constitutes true happiness.

In this connection, Tolstoi gives expression to a view which is shared by many thinkers. Some years later, Brunetière,[280] a well-known French writer and public man, under the influence of a recent journey to Rome and visit to the Pope, made public a similar opinion, and proclaimed aloud the fallibility of science.

Brunetière made his criticism as follows: “For the last two or three centuries, science has promised to change the face of the earth, to dispel every mystery; she has not done so. She is powerless to resolve the sole problems that are essential, that concern the origin of man, the rules for his conduct, and his future destiny. We know now that natural science can teach us none of these matters. Thus, in the battle between science and religion, science has been defeated, because she has had to admit her powerlessness precisely where religion is most strong. For religion gives the solutions that science has failed to supply. Religion teaches us what we can learn neither from anatomy nor from physiology, that is to say, what we are, whither we are going, and how we ought to act. Religion and science supplement each other; and, as science can do nothing for morality, it becomes the duty of religion to take her place.”

It has been replied to Brunetière, that his recriminations are unfounded, first, because science has never undertaken to solve the great problems of the aim of life and the proper basis of morality; next, because it is probable that these problems will never be solved by the human understanding. Charles Richet, a well-known French physiologist, made a vain effort to find any written evidence that science had promised to solve the great problems which have absorbed the attention of Tolstoi and Brunetière as well as of quite a large section of humanity. “In what standard works has science made the astonishing promises that M. Brunetière recalls with so much bitterness?” asked Richet.[281] “I have now before me,” he proceeded, “the Manuel du baccalauréat ès sciences (Guide to a Degree in Science). It is a summary of contemporary scientific ideas. I have looked through it in vain for promises—it contains no promises.”[282]

The promises referred to must be looked for in scientific treatises that deal in generalisations. It is not to be disputed that, since the renaissance in Europe of the rational and sceptical spirit, that is to say, in the last two or three centuries, the view has been proclaimed that all human life may be regulated by natural laws without the interposition of dogmas, either metaphysical or religious. Attempts of this kind have been numerous. Büchner, in his treatise on “Force and Matter,” in which he tried to give a general conception of the universe based on the scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century, made very plain statements on this point. “We must seek the foundation of morality,” said the German populariser, “elsewhere than in the timeworn and fantastic belief in the supernatural. Science must replace religion; belief in the real existence of a natural and immutable order in things must displace belief in spirits and ghosts; natural moral law must take the place of artificial or dogmatic morality.”[283] Büchner even tried to indicate what natural morality is. According to him it is “the law of mutual consideration of the equal rights of each person, both from the general and the individual point of view, so as to assure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Everything that damages or destroys the common good is ‘evil;’ everything that favours it is ‘good.’”

The other question, as to whither we are going, finds an answer in the materialistic and scientific breviary of Büchner. He disputes the idea of immortality, which has been supported by nearly all the religions, and comes to the conclusion that there is nothing appalling to a man, “imbued with the principles of philosophy, in the conception of the annihilation of the individual life.” “Annihilation is perfect rest; it is freedom from all pain and escape from the sensations that torture the body and the mind—as was explained so clearly in the great religion of Buddha; it is not to be feared, but rather to be coveted when life has reached its normal term and when old age has come with its inevitable assemblage of infirmities.”

I do not wish to suggest that the views I have just quoted are peculiar to Büchner. That writer has served to a large extent as the mouthpiece of ideas current among the materialistic and positivist men of science of his time. In Haeckel’s book, “The Riddle of the Universe,” which appeared nearly half a century after the first edition of “Force and Matter,” the same ideas are to be found. He also has found answers to the questions that absorb mankind. In his opinion also, as I have shown in chap. v. the problem of natural morality resolves itself into the social instincts of man, and has nothing to do with religious dogma. As for the destiny of man, he concludes as follows: “The best end we can desire after a courageous life, spent in doing good according to our light, is the eternal peace of the grave.”[284]

There is a very close resemblance between the views of the two great popularisers of the nineteenth century. Just as Büchner, to show the stupidity of the idea of eternal life, repeated the legend of the “Wandering Jew,” so Haeckel, with the same object, related the legend of the unhappy “Ahasuerus” who sought death vainly, finding his eternal life intolerable. “However gloriously we may depict this eternal life in paradise, in the end it would be a fearful burden to the best of men.”

While there is no doubt but that such ideas are shared by many men who rely on scientific arguments, there are others to whom the problem presents itself differently. The German physiologist, Du Bois Reymond, after reflecting on the general problems of knowledge and the universe, proclaimed an “Ignorabimus” as a warning that a whole series of problems of the highest importance to humanity were outside the range of human knowledge and incapable of solution. These problems were precisely the seven “riddles of the universe” that Haeckel claimed to have solved in his book.

Many learned men think that the great problems, those, according to Tolstoi, that constitute the only true science, can never be solved. “Every day there comes a new conquest,” said Richet,[285] “but we are no nearer solution of the ultimate enigma, the destiny of human life, an enigma probably never to be solved.” Philosophers have taken the same view. “It cannot be from science,” said Guyau, “that personality is to require the proofs of its own durability.”[286]

The answers given by science as it exists to-day, have failed to console the spirits that have applied to her. When Richet, in the discussion on the “bankruptcy of science” recalled the discovery of treatment of diphtheria by specific serums as an instance of the value of scientific research, Brunetière replied, “Serum therapy cannot prevent us from dying, nor tell us why we must die.” The problem of death always recurs. What is the use of saving the life of a child smitten by diphtheria only that it may grow up, and by learning the inevitability of death become filled with terror?

If science be really powerless before the gravest problems that torture mankind, if she has to excuse herself by admitting her incompetence, if she can do no better than to extol the silent annihilation of the grave, it is not surprising that many minds and these not the least capable, turn from her. The desire to find some consolation in the miseries of a purposeless existence throws them into the arms of religion or metaphysics. Here lies the explanation of the actual return in these days to faith. People plunge into mysticism hoping to find there something more comforting than the annihilation offered by science.

In all ranks of modern society there are signs of this craving for the supernatural. It is therefore extremely interesting to follow the intimate steps of such an abandonment of science and return to faith. The “Confessions” of Tolstoi gave one of the best examples of the metamorphosis.

Having reached the conclusion that life is meaningless because it cannot be harmonised with the fear of death and the prospect of absolute annihilation, Tolstoi (see chap. vi.) asked if it were not possible to solve the great problem of human existence by means of the facts of science. “I searched in all the sciences,” he said, “and not only found nothing myself, but became convinced that all who sought would find nothing. Not only would they find nothing, but they would see clearly precisely what had driven me to despair, the fact that the absurdity of life is the sole indisputable bit of knowledge open to man.” “For a long time, observing the grave and solemn tones of the exact sciences, which indeed, hardly touched the problem of life, it seemed to me that they must be concealing something that I did not understand.”

All the while, the question that Tolstoi put to himself seemed simple enough: “Why am I to keep alive? Why am I to do anything?” or, in another way: “Has life any object that is not destroyed by the inevitable death that awaits me? To the one question, put in many ways, I sought an answer in human knowledge.” “From my earliest youth the speculative sciences interested me deeply. Later on, the mathematical and physical sciences attracted me, and until my question rose up clearly before me, day by day growing larger, and imperatively demanding an answer, until then I was satisfied with the semblance of an answer given by science.” “I said to myself; everything is evolving, differentiating, moving towards complexity and amelioration, and the progress is under the guidance of law. You, you yourself are part of this whole.” “Although I am deeply ashamed to confess it, there was a time when I thought myself content with these things. My muscles grew and became stronger. My memory added to its stores. My ability for thinking and understanding increased. I grew and developed, and feeling the growth within me, it seemed natural to believe that the solution of my own life was given by the law of the whole universe. But the time came when I stopped growing. I felt that I was no longer developing and even that I was slipping back. My muscles weakened; my teeth dropped out; and I felt that this law not only explained nothing, not only had never explained anything, but had not been a law at all; that in fact I had taken for a law what I found in myself at a particular stage of my life.”

“As I found no explanation in science,” Tolstoi went on, in his poignant narrative, “I began to look for the answer in life, hoping to find it in the men around me.” “My intellect was at work, but also something else, something that I can call only the consciousness of life, like some strong force that compelled my intellect to turn in another direction and to rescue me from my desperate condition.”

The new direction was the feeling of faith. “However I might put to myself the question: how must I live? the answer was—by the law of God. Whither tends my present life? To eternal pain or to blessedness everlasting. How is my life not destroyed by death? By eternal union with God, by heaven. And thus I was led inevitably to see that quite independently of human knowledge, which formerly seemed to me the only guide, mankind had another guide, a guide that is irrational; faith which makes life possible. Faith seemed to be as irrational as ever, but I could not but recognise that faith alone gave mankind an answer to the problem of life, and in consequence made life possible. Reason had led me to the conviction that life was absurd, and so, there being no longer a reason to live, I had wished to kill myself. Looking at mankind as a whole, I saw that men kept alive by assuring themselves that they saw a meaning in life. I myself came back to that point of view. I had reached a time when there seemed to me to be no meaning in life. But as to other men, so to me, life and the possibility of living were offered by faith.”

Driven in the direction of faith, Tolstoi reached the following conclusion: “The object of a man’s life is the salvation of his soul; for that, we must live in God, and to live in God it is necessary to give up the pleasures of life, to work, to submit, to suffer and to be charitable.” And this conclusion led to the other that “a faith has value in so far as it gives a meaning to life which is not destroyed by death.”

It is plain then that all this evolution, the beginning of which was the fear of death, ended in belief in something beyond death. And it is also plain why Tolstoi should have been as bitter against science as I have shown him to be. Tolstoi does not afford the only example of a case where the failure of science to solve the problem of death has led to the abandonment of science in favour of religion. Brunetière, if it is possible to judge from his published writings, traversed similar paths in his journey to the Catholic religion.

However, even an intellect so positive and so sceptical as that of Zola has been unable to resist the lures of faith. There is a very interesting note on this subject in the _Journal_ of de Goncourt, dated February 20, 1883. “To-night, after dinner, at the foot of the bedstead of carved wood, where coffee was served, Zola began to talk of death, on which his thoughts have been fixed more than ever since the death of his mother. After a short silence, he said that death had made an in-road on the nihilism of his religious convictions, as he could not face the possibility of an eternal separation.”

In strata of society less impregnated with rational and scientific thought, it is plain that the return to religion must be more common. I recall the case of a woman of the people, a workwoman, who declared that she formerly had had no belief, but that, since the birth of her son, she had begun to believe in the good God, as she was convinced that it was only by such a belief that she could guard the life of her child from the evils of the world.

As things are, it is not wonderful that many people decline to educate their children in an exclusively scientific spirit, which is destructive to faith, as they cannot substitute for faith something equally consoling. Perhaps ideas of this kind lie behind the story of the apple of the Garden of Eden and the invention of the words of Jahveh: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis ii. 17). The legend of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, and was chained to a rock, is in the same category.

Solomon gave voice to the same idea, in the clearest way, in his words: “I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.

“And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes, i. 16).

Much later, Shakespeare offered to us in _Hamlet_, the type of a man very highly cultivated, in whom reason and reflection had arrested action. As he could not solve by reason the problems that haunted him, he asked if it were worth while to remain alive. Then followed the famous lines:

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

As so many men of genius have taken the same point of view, it becomes necessary to inquire carefully as to whether or no too much knowledge be harmful to human happiness. If science do no more than to destroy faith and to teach us that the whole living world is moving towards a knowledge of inevitable old age and death, it becomes necessary to ask if the perilous march of science should not be stayed. Is it that the attraction of mankind to knowledge is as dangerous to the race, as the attraction of moths to the light is fatal to these wretched insects? The question demands an exact answer. But before giving the verdict, the facts of the case must be examined. I shall proceed to this in the chapters to follow.