CHAPTER V

THE FAIRY HALLS OF SCIENCE

1. THE IDOLS OF THE TRIBE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. SOME NEBULOUS MATTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. THE NEW PHYSICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There would, of course, never have been any controversy as to this had those who took the negative been honest enough to accept a rational definition of will and of freedom. Nobody ever claimed that the will is free in all respects. Nobody supposes that a man set upon by a mob can go his way as if nothing had interfered with him. He may be dragged to the stake or the scaffold. Physically, there are circumstances in which his movements are most certainly exteriorly determined. The most that he can do is to refuse his consent to those motions he is forced to perform, so that the resulting conduct is none of his.

But psychologists have assured us that the giving or withholding of this consent is automatic; that physical forces are still at work; that a man has a mob inside of his head even when there is no mob without; and that what he does seemingly of his own volition is but the net result of the pullings and haulings of this interior horde of instincts, desires and stimulators. Moreover, these forces themselves came either from parents or environment, and the man himself is but their sum--he is his own inner mob. Nor can it be denied that the law of the Conservation of Energy gave psychologists the right of the argument. Since Newton, only the very wisest of men have had any intellectual excuse for believing themselves either real or free.

“Analysis, in tracing down the sources of [physical action],” says Lillie, “seems always to restate determinism; it shows the will to be motivated; motives have their natural origins; actions not consciously motivated are either habitual and referable to past motivation, or are instinctive and determined by heredity. In either case we seem to have a mechanistic determination.”

Having thus fairly stated the enemy’s argument, he goes further and admits that “although voluntary action affects mechanical change and seems free, the ‘energy balance sheet’ of a man shows no conflict with the law of conservation, indicating that there is no creation of energy within the organism.... Classical physics thus seems definitely incompatible with the idea of freedom. Accordingly, scientific men--and somewhat curiously biologists in larger proportion than physicists--have commonly regarded freedom as a delusion. In so doing they have created more difficulties than they have resolved; certainly the inner conviction of freedom has not been abolished in the minds of most thinking men.”

There are one or two points to be noted here. “Somewhat curiously, biologists in larger proportion than physicists” have been willing to abandon the free-will hypothesis. He doubtless means comparatively recent biologists, men who have taken their foundation physics from the books regarded as authoritative in their school days. Or perhaps there is another reason. Following the Idol of the Tribe, they look below them for their models, and seem to feel obliged to make their subjects as much like the machinist’s subjects as possible. And when they deal with man they are shut off from the corrective influences of free experiment. Mistakes in speculative biology are not at once apparent. They are not immediately applied, and returns are slow in coming in. But I am willing that the enemy should take what comfort he can from the biologists. He may say, if he likes, that biologists are the ones who call life mechanical because biologists are the ones who work closest to life. Lillie happens to be a biologist himself--a biologist of details, not of generalities.

As to the “energy balance sheet” of the individual, I think he leans over backward in his endeavor to be fair. Considering the exceedingly minute quantities of energy involved, it cannot rightly be claimed that the energy balance sheet even of a wayside daisy has ever been experimentally worked out with an accuracy fit to be called conclusive. Only recently have we even begun to measure quantities of this order of magnitude. Only recently did we know how very little energy we needed at our disposal in order to rid our inner conduct of external compulsion--and it is inner conduct alone with which we are here concerned. We do not ask to be able to shake a physical leg at will, but merely to be capable of shifting our attention to legs if and when we chose, or to entertain the desire to shake.

But once more let us grant the point to the adversary. Let him prove the balance sheet of the individual if he can--it will avail him nothing. Lillie, in seeming to leave intact the Law of Conservation, is but planning a flank attack. For a curious reason soon to appear, the law may rule and yet leave us free. It will then cease to be of moral importance. Our biologist goes on: “We must regard it not as a coincidence but as highly significant that the only region where physical science gives evidence of ... externally uncontrolled, or individual, action, is in the field of ultra-microscopic phenomena.”

Nevertheless, there is a coincidence here. The field where Lillie has noted externally uncontrolled individual action is his own field. As a worker in a marine biological laboratory, the minutest forms of life are objects of his daily study.

If I wanted to settle the question by authority and a show of erudition, I could now quote from Jordan’s “The Philosophical Foundations of the Quantum Theory.”[104] While if it depends merely upon famous names I could cite Einstein and Smoluchowski, who have found that the second law of thermo-dynamics (according to which heat is said to pass from higher to lower temperatures in direct proportion to the energy which is extracted from it--another way of expressing our old friend, Conservation) does not hold true when the time and space involved are sufficiently small. And to this Svedberg, in his “Colloid Chemistry,” agrees by saying that in microscopic systems it is obvious that “fluctuations of entropy” (variations in the amount of a given energy which is found to be “available”) undoubtedly occur.

But there is no need to follow such a thorny path as this. Lillie sufficiently sums up the situation by declaring that “the universality of the rule of physical determination” as regards very minute, or “quantum” phenomena, is now subject to question; and that “in the highest manifestations of life, prediction [that is, the discovery of a mechanical law governing conduct] is not possible at all.” And he adds: “It follows that the regularity of macroscopic [or large] phenomena, in which determinism is for all practical purposes complete and trustworthy, is in reality a _statistical regularity_.”

What can he possibly mean?

Here is in reality a flash of light in darkness, the gist of the whole matter, the way out, the explanation of a thousand riddles. And he must put it in such language as this!

For a statistical regularity is of course nothing but the regularity to be observed in averages. Individuals vary in a way which groups do not. No one is compelled to commit suicide this year. If I do such a thing it will be because I am individually a fool. And nobody knows whether my good sense is going to last another twelvemonth or not. Yet every actuary in every life-insurance company’s office in the world knows how many people are going to commit suicide this year, and next year, and the year after; and the quota which each civilized country is going to furnish. Their knowledge may not be absolutely accurate as to the last digit. There is a very slight margin for mistake. But they are almost as certain of the figures as they are of the figures for last year, or the year before. Mass action is sufficiently regular to make calculations based upon a comparison of its future with its past exceedingly profitable. Groups, and groups alone, obey the Law of Conservation. It was group action observed among atoms which gave rise to the formulation of that law. Individuals behave capriciously, obeying the laws of their unique natures, laws known only to God.

But it will be objected: is not man a mass of atoms, or a mass of whatever ultimate particles science finally arrives at? And the answer is an emphatic _no_. His body is such a mass, but it is so formed as to be controlled, in so far as its movements are voluntary, by an individual self whose inner essence is single. The only way to make group action out of one man’s conduct is to observe him over a long period of time. His average may be guessed at. But nobody can say how he will act in a new and unusual circumstance.

5. CHANCE

Pious people have always been prone to declare that there is no such thing as chance. They have been afraid that belief in chance implied a disbelief in the omnipotence of God. Never were pious people more mistaken--or perhaps I should say misinformed. The doctrine of probabilities is one of those things belonging to mathematics which the pundits have decided it were better for us common people not to understand. So they have carefully refrained from stating it in interesting, or even human, language, pretending that we were barred from comprehension by the inadequacy of our intelligence and education.

Nevertheless we all inhabit a world upon the phenomena of which the doctrine of probabilities is founded. We are compelled to live every day surrounded by events “obeying” the Law of the Greatest Probability. And those of us who have made any success in life have become pretty good mathematicians, though we may know no mathematical symbols beyond the signs of addition, subtraction and division.

It is of course misleading to say that events _obey_ the law of the greatest probability. Events do not obey any of the laws which science has formulated. On the contrary, the laws were, in so far as they are laws and not mere errors, formulated in obedience to the events. But to say that there is no such thing as chance is to say that there is no such thing as ignorance, which to my mind is hardly a pious idea. For chance, rightly understood, is but the measure of our ignorance. Nothing more.

Given total ignorance, the chance of guessing right is too remote to be calculable and can be expressed only by the meaningless formula, “nothing to infinity.” Given total knowledge, certainty leaves no room for probability. In all other circumstances, chance is the balance in which we weigh what we know against what we do not know. Gambling is called a vice because nobody ever uses the word except to describe some form of chance-taking which he considers vicious--the vice usually consisting in a foolish attempt to get something for nothing. It is considered particularly immoral to lose. But in a broad sense, everyone gambles who lives. I hope I will be pardoned, then, if I take my illustrations from actual games.

If we know that a penny is a disk of equally weighted sides and is to be tossed in the air by an unknown amount of force which will cause it to turn over an unknown number of times, the chance of its falling head up is the same as that of its falling head down. We say the odds are even. If we do not know what a penny is, we cannot reckon the odds. If we know exactly what a penny is, know its present position in relation to the table-top, and know that it is going to turn over three times, say, there are no odds to calculate. Ignorance has been supplanted by knowledge.

But why do we say that an even-sided disk, thrown at hap-hazard, is as likely to fall head up as it is to fall tail up? Because observation in the past has taught us that such is the case. We may reason subsequently about momentum, gravity, and the like, but observation lies at the bottom of our knowledge. Very well. The sun rose this morning. I know that. What is the chance of its rising tomorrow morning?

If I know nothing but what I have stated, the chance, from my point of view, is as one to one. The odds are even, nothing more. It is just as likely not to rise as it is to rise. From the standpoint of an Omnipotent God, this is not the case. He knows whether it is going to rise or not. To God there is indeed no chance.

But to mankind at large? Surely the chances of the sun rising tomorrow are better than even? To be sure they are. For mankind at large knows not only that the sun rose yesterday morning, but the morning before that, and on ever so many other mornings. How many? Upon the answer to this question rests the actual chance of its rising again, for the answer shows the amount of our knowledge. The more knowledge, the more certain the chance.

Let us say we know that the sun has risen for a billion mornings. Tomorrow, if there be a tomorrow, will mark a billion and one. Then there are a billion and one events, or sunrises, under consideration, and only one of them is still in doubt. The chances of the sun’s rising tomorrow are therefore a billion to one. If we know it has already risen a trillion times, they are a trillion to one. As knowledge increases, certainty approaches.

I have heard it objected that, according to this theory, the chance of a one-year-old child to live another year must be only even, while a man of 99 has 99 chances in a hundred of rounding out his century. This would indeed be true if we knew nothing about either babes or nonogenarians but their years. But we have a great deal of other information--statistics--bills of health. We must put all of our knowledge into the calculation.

Almost everybody is now willing to admit this method of reckoning probability when it is applied to dawns or to life insurance. It seems quite natural to say that we know the sun will rise again because, so far as we know, it always has risen; or to say that a baby has a longer prospect of life than has a very old man because we have observed that babies generally live, while very old men generally die. But when we apply the same method to the calculations of certain other things--the behavior of our penny, for instance--we shall meet, strangely enough, with a lot of heretics. If a penny has fallen heads for twenty times in succession, there are those who will say that the chances of heads coming on the next throw are much worse than one to one. “It is time for a change,” they will contend. And nothing can keep them, if sportingly inclined, from wagering their money on tails. But a mathematician will coldly bet on heads. _He knows that there is something the matter with that penny!_

So come what are known as “runs of luck,”--a subject apparently remote from that of free will, but not so remote as it seems. Runs of luck are the result of unknown influences; for if the influences are known we do not say “luck,” we use a harsher term. The oftener a thing has happened before, the more likely it is to happen again. Some large force must be at work, or there would not have been the run. This is such an important rule that anyone who doubts it would do well to convince himself of its validity. He will in that way not only improve his mind, he will save money be he never so little of a “gambler” in the vicious sense of the term. Losers are always playing the stock-market and the world for “reactions” that “must come.” Winners always “go with the trend.” They are vicious only when their prizes are evil.

“But what,” some will say, “of the change of luck which wipes out the winnings? What of those larger cycles which bring the smaller cycles to an end?” Just this. We know nothing of the larger cycles until we, or somebody whose word we can trust, has begun to experience them. Therefore our ignorance is complete in most cases, and we have no chance against the larger cycles or rhythms at all--which is why sensible people usually keep out of the stock-market. Doubtless there is some larger cycle in cosmic events which will some day put out the sun. But unless we have somehow been able to put our finger already upon its pulse, we must ignore it in our calculations. We cannot bring it to book. When any one cycle has kept up a faithful performance as long as the sun has kept on rising, it must be a rather large cycle and is pretty safe to depend on for our remaining days.

But I did not enter into this digression merely to give a few tips on gambling, or the advice not to gamble at all when gambling can be avoided. The calculation of probabilities is of vast utility in matters infinitely more important than markets or games. With it mathematicians have put mere telescopists to shame. Give a mathematician the past course of a planet, and he will calculate its future course without taking the trouble to find out a thing about the nature of planets. This is no chimera. It has been done. The vagaries of the motions of a heavenly body fall into series; into cycles; into cycles within cycles. Accuracy in prediction is determined by accuracy and amount of past observations, and by nothing else.

But what has this to do with the human will? Everything. The so-called “laws” of science, including the Law of Conservation, are the laws of chance, nothing more. They are founded upon the behavior of great masses of particles, or the behavior of one or a few particles (more accurately, _particulars_) over long periods of time. As Lillie phrases it, the regularity of nature is a “statistical regularity,” like the regularity of the statistics of suicide. It does not interfere with the freedom of the individual, of the particular. Here is the answer to Freud’s absurd statement that the attempt to reconcile human free will with divine omnipotence is always a failure. The actuary calculates the number of suicides that are going to take place--does he thereby compel you to kill yourself?

There is, of course, this difference between an actuary and Omniscience. The actuary only knows the total result. Omniscience must know the individuals who will help to make up that result. Omniscience knows just what we are, individually. Omniscience knows every Psyche, and knows what it will chose. I may know that a pair of dice are so loaded that they will always come up sixes. Is it my knowledge which compels them so to fall?

But some will say that if our human dice are loaded, it must have been God who loaded them, and that beneath that load free will disappears.

It might have been that way, I will admit. Omniscience, being also Omnipotence, might have loaded the dice, beyond question. Omnipotence was under no compulsion to grant free will to anything. But by the same reasoning, Omnipotence was free to withhold Its hand, and to let us determine to a certain extent our actions for ourselves. Even the finite mind has been able to see how this can be without interfering at all with that regular march of events which characterizes a cosmos in distinction from a chaos. A cosmos of free particulars will still have a “statistical regularity.”

As a matter of fact, this system of delegated authority, of limited grants of real power, seems to run through all nature. The Commander-in-Chief leaves certain details to his generals; the generals leave certain details to their captains, the captains to their lieutenants. The private soldier has his particular duty to perform. And each one is held responsible for the performance of his own duty within his own limited sphere of action--a duty which he is free to perform or to leave undone. Whenever an individual is rewarded or punished for something which he was not free to do or not to do, our natures recoil from what we term an “injustice.” With no free will at all, any reward or punishment would be unjust. And it is to this sort of a world our materialistic psychologists and philosophers have been trying to introduce us. No wonder they shied away from the conception of consciousness. Sentience without freedom seems unjust. Even with limited freedom, it seems unjust. Man’s sense of justice, therefore, has compelled him to regard this life as a fragment; to say that only willfully endured or provoked pains and privations are deserved, to believe in another life beyond the grave without waiting for further proof of it. Thus Dante was constrained to write even over the gates of Hell, “_Giustizia mosse ’l mio Alto Fattore_.”[105]

If we return now to the doctrine of probabilities and to Lillie we shall find him nodding, for he says: “It already seems clear that many of the physical laws with which we are familiar in the realm of microscopic phenomena cease to apply on the scale where events are determined by the ‘chance’ fluctuations of molecular movement.”

Chance here is clearly not the proper word. It contradicts his whole argument. Obviously he is using it in a very loose sense--much as behaviorists use it when they say that the first synapse between dendrite and axone in the brain is chance-determined. As a mathematician he must know that these isolated phenomena of the exceedingly minute are precisely those to which the law of probabilities cannot be applied. As much cannot be said of the behaviorists. Their attaching of the word “chance” to the word “synapse” is due to no slip of the pen, but rather to some regrettable individual action behind the synapse itself.

“Ultra-microscopic phenomena,” Lillie goes on, in a way which quite confirms the foregoing explanation of his lapse, “thus give evidence ... of control by individual action rather than by statistical or mass action. The laws relating to such [microscopic] action ... assuming such laws to exist ... are as yet imperfectly known. But they are certainly entirely different from physical laws.”

This may seem remarkable, but after all it is only what we should have expected. In the ultra-microscopic world we are approaching individual action and leaving mass action, the average action of many individuals, behind. The illusion of bondage begins to disappear.

What makes this so important is the fact that we are so built that the minutest imaginable interior events may determine our largest actions. I lift a pound weight, but it was the movement of the all but impalpable particles of the brain which decided what the movement was to be. A touch upon the trigger fires the gun. And the force at the disposal of will needs to be only enough to move these tiny particles in the vital field. The trigger-touch, the precipitating circumstance, is traceable, says Lillie, “to ultra-microscopic events in the nerve cells.” And it is precisely this fact, with the opportunity it offers for central control, which makes a man’s behavior, even as to his body, something other than the result of a struggle of blind forces. Man is not a mass of particles like a dumb-bell.

There is, Lillie contends (and he is supported by Maxwell and Boltzman), “a smoothing off, or obliteration of detail” in “effects controlled by mass action.” So we say that we lose ourselves in a crowd. “Mass action” represents the “sum of numerous fluctuating minutiæ.” What we see is like a composite picture, with individual traits more or less obliterated. Excess in one unit is off-set by deficiency in another, so to our sight the individual is obscured. “The relation between a smoothed curve and the distribution of the points showing the individual data is a relation of a similar kind,” he adds for the mathematically minded. And then he throws an almost literal bombshell into the determinist camp, with these words:

“Every now and then an unexplained catastrophe occurs in stores of high explosives. We know from observation ... as well as from theoretical considerations of probability, that at infrequent intervals an internal molecular movement of unusual amplitude occurs. Such a movement may exceed the critical minimum below which no chemical reaction results,”--and so blow up the whole mass.

But what we are here interested in is that unexplained molecular movement of unusual amplitude. It is almost like coming upon the creative spark itself, and--as is frequently the case with creative sparks--the immediate result is destructive to existing conditions.

Not that I think that here is actually the naked finger of God. I am no Monist. So far as human experience, at least, is concerned, I believe that however far we pursue matter, either into its minute or its starry depths, it remains matter; and that spirit is separate and apart from it. The ultimate knot cannot be untied. The seamless veil has been drawn too tightly across the face of Deity for it ever to be penetrated by physical science.

Call matter but force, if you will. Admit that even material force is of a spiritual nature, that its materiality consists in what we call its material effects. Nevertheless there is a gulf between those locked forces and spirit properly so-called. Saying that everything is God is only an indirect way of saying that there is no God--no God but what is locked up.

If all be matter, how can we, who too must then be matter, manage to contemplate the universe? We must conclude with Dr. Watson that we do not contemplate it. The same thing cannot at once be both subject and object. If all be spirit, then what separates us from the Great Spirit? Why is not our knowledge and comprehension, our power and our duration of days infinite and commensurate with ourselves here and now? For in the case supposed, we would ourselves be God. There would be nothing to come between.

Spinoza, who claimed that all is God, contradicted himself by calling his philosophy a philosophy, a search for truth. Were his theory true, we should not have to search. We would be already one with the All. Nor could any of the diverse phenomena of creation exist. There could be no separation between part and part, even in our sense perceptions. With nothing but spirit, out of what could those shadows, those lapses, those ignorances between this and that be made? Of nothing? But nothing is nothing. It is not even empty space, nor darkness, nor a shadow. Even the Vedantic philosophers had the wit to see that there must be a gulf between Brahma on the one hand and Vishnu and Siva on the other. They had no explanation to offer. Modern would-be Brahmins have assumed that there is no inexplicable. Instead of rising to the Gospels, they have fallen below the Vedas.

Lillie seems not to have fallen into this error, for he says that “microscopic events” are determined by “sub-microscopic events”; that “behind or internal to the sub-microscopic events, we must assume a series of ultra-microscopic events reaching back by convergence into the field where the known types of physical determination are replaced by another type of determination, the special conditions of which we do not know.” But as the action of the brain-cell determines the motion of the arm, so the action of something yet more minute determines the action of the cell, and so on until we come to the ultimate physical basis of the series. In this field of the physically ultimate, events are self-determined. They occur through no compulsion from without.

“If by free we mean externally uncontrolled, it would appear that the ultimate local centers or units of action should be independent of one another, i. e., a radical discontinuity should exist at the base of physical reality. Something of the kind seems to be indicated by quantum phenomena,”--phenomena of an ultra-minute variety. Men have often spoken of the eternal loneliness of the soul. Here we see that in this very loneliness lies its freedom. If it chooses to surrender this, for good or for evil, its surrender is still a choice.

And in conclusion, Lillie most rightly adds that one may “hesitate to call [this ultimate physical field]” the “metaphysical field,” or the field beyond matter. Our author makes no attempt to taper his matter off into spirit merely by subdividing it. And he goes on:

“If would seem, however, that there must be some final support or substratum of the physical to which only the term metaphysical can be applied.” Which I take to mean that he believes in a substratum which is not physical. And having thus shown that back of matter experimental science feels that there is something else, and that we in our inner selves are quite free from external control, whatever compulsion may be put upon the actual motions of our bodies by things beyond our power, he rounds out his argument by saying:

“There is also the general philosophical position that the universe, considered in its totality, must be the expression of free action, since an all-inclusive whole cannot be determined externally, i. e., by conditions outside of itself,”--there being nothing outside of itself. In other words, not only are we free, but God is omnipotent; and the two facts, instead of being contradictory, are found to be but the different ends of the same chain of reasoning. Freud’s dictum proves to be not quite so final as it seemed. Lillie has torn it to bits in a single article.

And had we not gone to Lillie we might have gone to Cassier, LeBon, Claude Bernard, Lucien Poincaré, or to any of a multitude of clear-headed scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. They may not give us all we seek, but they at least give us this. Let behaviorists and psychoanalysts say what they will, reason has not yet vanished from the world. Neither has unreason, for that matter--as the next chapter will show.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] “The Descent of Man,” p. 780.

[99] “The _Novum Organum_,” i. 63.

[100] _Op. cit._, i. 45.

[101] _Vide Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to 304, for the year 1925.

[102] _Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to 304, 1925.

[103] In the Paris _Matin_, September 4, 1927.

[104] _Nature_, vol. 119, 1927, p. 566.

[105] “Justice moved my High Maker,” Dante’s “_Inferno_,” canto III, line 4.