CHAPTER I

THE MODERN TEMPER

The past appears to be dead.

“If the world of poetry, mythology and religion represents the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it, we need only compare the two to realize how irreconcilable they appear,” says Joseph Wood Krutch, associate editor of _The Nation_ and the author of a biography of Poe, writing in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1927. “The romantic ideal of a world well lost for love, and the classic ideal of austere dignity seem equally ridiculous, equally meaningless when referred, not to the temper of the past, but the temper of the present.”

Hilaire Belloc is equally insistent as to the existence of this modern temper, for he remarks in the course of some “Cheerful Thoughts on Christmas.”[1]

“I think it foolish to disguise from ourselves the plain fact that, in the societies which abandoned the Faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the last supports of Christian doctrine are breaking down very rapidly indeed. Of the doctrines themselves there is little left ... while the minority, which still feel some attachment to some few of these doctrines, feel that attachment in a decreasing degree and more and more as a vague, dissolving sentiment; less and less as a principle.

“The old feeling that the doctrines were sacred and intangible, and that attack upon them was intolerable, has so utterly passed that the modern generation does not even understand it.... There has been hardly any defense, hardly any resistance; the last remainder of the creed ... has been allowed to slip away unnoticed like the last few coins of a fortune dissipated by a man so debauched as to have lost his memory.”

Both Belloc and Krutch, it will be observed, agree that the world has changed--that is, that the popular idea as to what life really is, has changed. They differ only as to the sentiment with which the mass of the population are supposed to regard the alterations which have taken place in the view. Belloc, who is a Catholic, believes that Protestants at least are quite satisfied to have lost the world of “poetry, mythology and religion”; have in fact “allowed it to slip away unnoticed.” Krutch, the radical editor, suggests that there has been a struggle, that science has forced man to give up the world as he would like to have it and to accept the world as he has gradually come to discover it--not by making the lost world undesirable, but by making it seem ridiculous and without actuality.

Krutch, I think, is right, in so far as the vast majority are concerned. They have resisted, Protestants as well as Catholics, and many who are neither Catholic nor Protestant but merely lovers of tradition and of the classic ideal of austere dignity and of the romantic ideal of a world well lost for love. They have struggled. They still struggle. But there is an ever increasing demand from some quarters that the struggle be given up in despair.

Now if science indeed represents the world as man gradually comes to discover it--that is, if science represents the world as it is; and if the testimony of scientists as to the nature of this reality be fairly uniform and uncontradictory, with a growing unanimity promising to bring an eventual unison out of such discords as may still exist, then the only thing for the sensible citizen to do is to let the dead past bury its dead, turn from the grave with as little moaning as possible, and adapt himself with all speed to changed conditions. The advice, “Do it now!” is being hurled at him. Why should he not heed it? Nobody wants to be a mere reactionary, still less to live in a fool’s paradise.

But does science represent the world as the world really is? Can we say that there is any likelihood of the scientific picture being more photographically perfect than is, or was, the romantic picture? Are scientists in agreement, so that there is little or no choice or opinion offered? Are their theories themselves logically consistent? What, precisely, is science? And finally, have its findings been faithfully reported to us?

These are some of the questions which this book attempts to answer. But before plunging merrily into such a task it may be well to pause and consider yet further the testimony of Belloc. He may be mistaken as to people in general, but he is almost incredibly correct in regard to a small but very influential body of conspicuous persons who may be described as the Materialistic Philosophers. Scientists some of them call themselves, and scientists they are--of a sort. But as they permit themselves to be perpetually hag-ridden by questions of eschatology--doctrines relating to that ultimate dim Thule towards which the whole creation does or does not move--philosophy is what they chiefly have to offer, no matter by what other name they seek to give it a more modern and therefore presumably sweeter odor.

The ultimate nature of things engrosses them, and just how little they struggle against the threatened loss of a world of poetry, mythology and religion may be seen by a quotation taken at random, or, to be more specific, from “The Mechanist Conception of Life,” by a veritable general in the materialistic army, Prof. Jacques Loeb, formerly of the University of California.

“Our wishes and hopes, disappointments and sufferings,” he says, “have their source in the instincts which are comparable to the light instincts of the heliotropic animals.”

A tropism, it should perhaps be explained for the benefit of the older generation, is a tendency to move toward or away from any external object, the operation being carried out by means of chemical and mechanical changes within the subject. Thus the heliotrope, which always strives to turn towards the sun, got its name. It is said to be positively tropic to light. Prof. Loeb, however, seems to be negatively tropic in this regard, for he continues:

“The need of the struggle for food, the sexual instinct with its poetry and its chain of consequences, the maternal instincts with the felicity and the suffering caused by them ... are the roots from which our inner life develops. For some of these instincts, the chemical basis is at least sufficiently indicated to arouse the hope that their analysis from the mechanistic point of view is only a question of time.”

“Hope,” he says. The second of the virtues, once set between Faith and Charity, is here involved to express the author’s reaction to the prospect that some day all the movements of the inner life may be reduced to the level of so many warping planks exposed to variations in humidity and to changing temperatures. The modern temper, as it exists in the minds of those who seek to create and control it, certainly seems to have become emotionally adjusted to an abandonment of the classic idea of dignity. Heretofore man has based his pride chiefly upon his intelligence, the freedom of his will, his possession of a soul, and his conviction that he was made in the image of God. But according to the materialists, no mind, no will, no soul exists, and God is merely the “behavior of the universe.”[2]

“There is no such thing as mind in the old sense of the word,” says J. B. Eggen.[3] And what is it in the new sense of the word? “It cannot be considered as ... separate from the body,” Mr. Eggen goes on. Is it the brain, then--the brain in the old sense of the word? By no means. “The mind is not a thing with which we react, it is a form of reaction. We do not think with our brain; there is nothing inside the brain but a lot of neurones.”

The mind cannot be considered as separate from the body, neither do we think without brain. With what, then, do we think? Obviously we do not think at all in the old sense of the word. Thinking, we are about to be told, is only a collection of motions. And he who “thinks” the theory cannot be made plausible has yet to read Eggen’s illustrious masters. But is this science? That same science which has transformed the appearance of the world and given us the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the electric light, the air-plane, radio, and television? We shall see.

“The Approaching Crisis” would seem to be well named, and in it Mr. Wieman, who is also the author of “Religious Experience and the Scientific Method,” informs us that the decline of religion has been largely due to its “inadequate adjustment to scientific method and discovery.” Adding, “At the present time it is research in the field of psychology and sociology which is demanding a transformation in our thinking,”--that is, in our notions. Psychology is unquestionably the most popular form of that “challenge to fundamental beliefs” of which so much is heard. And Dr. John B. Watson, editor of the _Journal of Experimental Psychology_, and formerly Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins, makes all former challenges seem weak, for he says--in the first chapter of his “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist”:

“Psychology, up to very recent times, has been held so rigidly under the dominance both of traditional religion and of philosophy--the two great bulwarks of medievalism--that it has never been able to free itself and become a science.... In the late sixties an attempt was made” to make it such. “The boast was voiced that psychology ... had become a science without a soul--that is, a natural science.” But “notwithstanding the many laboratories here and abroad, it has never been able to substantiate this claim.... The psychology begun by Wundt has failed to become a science,”--apparently because some remnants of soul still cling to it. And Dr. Watson concludes, “Before progress could be made in astronomy, it had to bury astrology; neurology had to bury phrenology; and chemistry had to bury alchemy. But the social sciences, psychology, sociology, political science and economics, will not bury their medicine men.”

He is speaking, of course, of psychology prior to Dr. Watson, of the psychology of Wundt, which resulted in the Binet intelligence tests. This in its day was considered a very materialistic psychology indeed, superseding the psychology of the William James or the Herbert Spencer type, which also in its day voiced the boast that it was a science, tough, and without bowels of compassion. How rapidly we progress. James lived until 1910, Spencer until 1903. It was not until 1912, when, according to Dr. Watson, “behaviorism first showed its head,” that the burying of the medicine men began. And two years later came the War! The boast can now be voiced without fear of contradiction that psychology has no soul.

Still if it be true science, and if science be but another name for reality, I for one am going to get at the burying of my own medicine men without further delay. I notice a considerable amount of such burying going on about me. Men are hurrying with the work as if afraid of being caught with a corpse or two on their hands and undisposed of. A sort of terror is stalking through the land, afflicting especially the writers of books and magazine articles--the terror of not being able to keep up with the Joneses in their employment of the undertaker. The famous Experimental Method, but late a fugitive, hounded from hole to corner and from corner to hole, has found influence and capital. It wields a big stick, or at least a big stick is being wielded in its name.

It was once said, “Wisdom crieth in the streets, How long ye simple ones will ye love simplicity?” And now a voice, still purporting to be Wisdom’s, fairly yells: “Bring us your dead!” One would think that a pestilence was abroad. Possibly there is. Formerly men bowed down to the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up, or cast their babes before the car of Juggernaut. Today they would rather die, some of them, than be found obstructing the wheels of progress. Science, grown rich, has acquired such prestige as was once accorded only to Cæsar.

And no wonder. It has given us Copernicus, Galileo, Galvani, Volta, Faraday, Pasteur, the Curies, Edison, Marconi, Westinghouse, Burbank, and thousands of others--men for the most part personally poor, but adding without measure to the material wealth of the world. If all these men are back of the big stick; if it be they who bid us give up our God, our souls, wills and even our minds, ordering us to become accustomed to the idea that we are but machines--and if in doing so they are sticking to their business and not wandering off into fields they have failed to make their own, it might (perhaps) be folly to disobey.

But let us first make certain as to whose voice is on the air. We have, all of us, a few more or less cherished beliefs. We have grown up leaning upon--call them props and crutches if you will. Some of us have even been riveted to moral scruples which, when we try to go in a direction they forbid, dog us with the clanking hinderance of a ball and chain. We doubt if we could continue to be good citizens without them. We do not even know if good citizens, in the old sense of the word, are any longer desired. Without our props we are likely simply to fall--and we have never yet seen people walking upright without props of some sort. We actually doubt the advisability of trying to progress on all fours.

There are new props, better than the old? Good! Let us see them. Let us test them, and make sure that they be indeed from science’s own workshop. And having mentioned the Watson brand of artificial limb, we may as well begin by experimenting with that, finding out by what still waters and into what green pastures we may wander with its aid.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _America_, December, 4, 1926.

[2] “The Approaching Crisis,” by Henry Nelson Wieman, teacher of philosophy at Occidental College, Los Angeles, _Century Magazine_, November, 1926.

[3] _Current History_, September, 1926.