Part 1

GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE

GALLIO OR The Tyranny of Science

BY J. W. N. SULLIVAN

[Illustration]

E. P. DUTTON & CO. :: NEW YORK

GALLIO, OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE COPYRIGHT 1928 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED :: PRINTED IN U.S.A.

GALLIO

GALLIO OR THE TYRANNY OF SCIENCE

1

There can be no doubt that the prestige of science has greatly increased of recent times. In the days when Dickens wrote _The Mudfog Papers_ the man of science, to the general reading public, was a purely comic figure. After the man of science had knocked the bottom out of the Victorian universe with his theory of Natural Selection he inspired the respect we accord to whatever is both powerful and sinister. He was observed, warily and acutely, as an enemy. This reaction was perfectly justified, for science, as expounded to the populace by such men as Huxley and Tyndall, deprived life of all that had hitherto made it worth living. The gravamen of their offence was not that they made man an integral part of the animal kingdom, but that they presented him with a universe that was entirely purposeless. Such a doctrine would probably come as a shock even to a disillusioned and emaciated Eastern Sage, but to the men of the Victorian age, almost every one of them brought up in an orthodox Christian household and filled with that belief in a wise Providence that comes of great material prosperity, it was nothing short of an outrage. Even the men of science themselves found their great discovery more than a little disconcerting. Nobody who reads them can fail to detect something strained, something occasionally almost frenzied, in their insistence on the duty of intellectual honesty. These men are, half the time, shouting aloud in order to hearten themselves. They were quite consciously martyrs to the truth. This is true, at any rate, of such men as Huxley and Clifford. There were many men of science, of course, who were not sufficiently alive to live in a universe of any description. Outside, their laboratories they had no perceptible existence. Many of them died simple Christians. But to all interested in such matters it became evident that the goal of science was the detailed explanation of man as the accidental outcome of “matter and motion”. Since the arguments of the man of science could not be met (for only science can cast out science) the only thing left was to abuse him. This was magnificently done by Nietzsche, and rather less magnificently by Dostoevsky and Tolstoi. Nietzsche pointed out that the man of science was not a human being. He was merely an instrument, the most costly, the most exquisite, the most easily tarnished of instruments. He was incapable of love; he was incapable of hate. His one purpose was to “reflect” such things as he was tuned to receive. The philosophy evolved by such a creature would be expressive of nothing but his own limitations. He would be incapable of understanding the problems that concerned a man. This was also the line taken, more or less, by Dostoevsky and Tolstoi, and it became very popular with artists of all kinds. Wordsworth’s scorn for the botanist became the general attitude towards all men of science. It must be admitted that, judging from biographies of scientific men, there is much to be said for this view. Their favourite authors appear to be Shakespeare and Ella Wheeler Wilcox: they are kind fathers and faithful husbands; in their social relations they are simple-minded snobs; and they are really amused by “lecture-room humour”. It seems unlikely that such people know much of the fierce vitality that sent Saints to rot on pillars and in dungeons, that sent martyrs to the stake, or even that weaker form of vitality that causes our Divorce Court judges to be overworked. That they can understand the universe, when it is obvious they do not understand Clapham, does not seem likely. That, briefly, was the case of the artist against the man of science. The artist was conscious of more things in heaven and earth, staring him in the face, than he believed the man of science had ever dreamt of in his philosophy.

It is evident that the position to-day is rather different. It has become different since the War. It is probable, as we shall see later, that the War itself is partly responsible for the increased attention paid by the artist to science. But the influence was not direct. The artist was not transported with admiration for the men who could make poison-gas,[1] although he may have been more inclined to believe their philosophy that existence is meaningless. No, the change was, I believe, due to Einstein: in this respect he must be likened to Newton and Darwin. The fact that his theory is completely unintelligible to the enormous majority of those who take an interest in it is not at all to its disadvantage. Rather the contrary. The artist is attracted by the theory, and respectful to it, not in the least because he understands it, but because he feels it is the result of a most unusual and most powerful _imaginative_ effort. It gives him a new conception of the power of the human consciousness. This theory, he is convinced, has come from the heights. It is probable, as a matter of fact, he thinks this because he believes the theory to be about that mathematical platitude, a fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is a phrase to which imaginative people respond with quite extraordinary intensity. Its popularity is like that of giant telescopes, as was proved when a thousand pounds was recently offered for a simple explanation of it. It seems to be the phrase which, to the non-mathematician, is most pregnant with the vast and liberating unknown. If its meaning is ever generally understood, we may anticipate that interest in Einstein’s theory will decline. This will be a pity, because the popular reaction to Einstein’s theory is perfectly justified. It _is_ the most profound and original scientific theory that has ever been invented, and it displays a kind of imagination almost[2] unprecedented in the history of science. The feeling of the artist about it is right――it is vastly important to him.

[1] He ought to have been. See _Callinicus_, by J. B. S. Haldane.

Being convinced that the mathematician, at any rate, might be a poet, the respect of imaginative people for science in general has greatly increased. Many of them have decided that science is worth looking into. Unfortunately mathematical physics, the master science of the present day and the one which has furnished ideals for the other sciences, is hopelessly technical. It is agreed that a modern intelligent man, conscious of his responsibilities as an inhabitant of the twentieth century, should be familiar with “the scientific outlook”. But to acquire this outlook by brooding over the teachings and implications of modern physics is not easy. Thus although it is the recent astonishing development in physics which is responsible for the renewed public interest in science, it is other sciences that reap the benefit. We have poets and painters who study anthropology and literary critics who read books on the nervous system. The result appears to have been disastrous. At a time when the physicists are abandoning materialism the artists are accepting it. They are accepting, as the last word of science, a picture of the world that belongs to the early bad manner of physics. Again we hear, but this time from our literary men, that slightly hysterical insistence on the duty of intellectual honesty. It must be admitted that they have been predisposed to accept this view by the War. It is a curious but indisputable psychological fact, perhaps first noted by Tolstoi, that the sight of a large number of naked human bodies makes it difficult to believe that they are animated by immortal spirits possessing an eternal destiny. The sight of the “wastage” that occurred during the War, for those who saw any of it, produced the same curious effect. Also, a psychological fact that cannot be denied, it was difficult to preserve belief in the essential nobility of man when listening to patriotic non-combatants. There can be no doubt that the War, for a large number of those connected with it, has made the acceptance of materialism easier. Even the creative artists, at one time great champions of the spiritual nature of man, are now sufficiently dubious about his nature to be reduced to impotence.

[2] I say “almost” because there was Bernhard Riemann and his disciple W. K. Clifford.

2

The notion that we live in a purposeless universe is so opposed to the mental habits we have inherited that it is a matter of the greatest difficulty to bear it constantly in mind. Most of the people who hold this belief to-day would not do so but for three reasons: the disillusionment caused by the War, their respect for science, and their belief that science preaches materialism. As for the War, that is an experience to which we must accommodate ourselves as best we may. It is consistent with the belief that man is a developing spirit, but it is certainly a proof that he is not very far developed. The respect for science is, I believe, on the whole rather overdone. The respect is a little excessive even when it relates to mathematical physics, but it becomes almost absurd when it relates to some other branches of science. I believe, for instance, that Freud’s form of psycho-analysis, some forms of behaviourism, and many of the statements of the eugenists really are as silly as they look. All that they have in common with such first-class mental activities as physics and chemistry is the name “science.” It is this name that secures for them such attention as they get from intelligent people who are not cranks. But even physics is a more provisional and more human thing than some romantic references to it would lead one to suppose. Even the tower of the mathematician, which Mr Bernard Shaw imagines to have been always unshaken, has been seriously disturbed on more than one occasion. The student of the history of science will not be too confident even of the “indubitable certainties” of physics when he reflects on the universal passion of belief that attached to the notion of a mechanical ether, for whose present absence from the universe some men of science are still inconsolable, and when he reflects on the fate that has overtaken that “most perfect and perfectly established law”, Newton’s law of gravitation. There are no indubitable certainties in science, a fact that we who are contemporary with the destruction of the Newtonian system are not likely to forget. There are only provisional hypotheses. It may even be, as Mr J. B. S. Haldane prophesies, that physiology will one day invade and destroy mathematical physics, by which somewhat dark saying I suppose phenomena mathematically may be given up. Whether he means that or not, it is a possibility, as Professor Eddington has hinted. The scientific practitioner usually treats his hypotheses as tools, but to the layman they become dogmas. One is led to believe this by seeing that many of those who accept materialism on what they suppose to be scientific evidence are rendered acutely unhappy by their belief. A truer knowledge of the status of scientific theories would render this agony unnecessary. There are people with a natural leaning towards materialism, and science, preferably somewhat old-fashioned science, will give them quite sufficient grounds to indulge their propensity with complete intellectual honesty. But science does not, and never has, brought forward sufficient evidence to justify a man turning materialist against his will. And perhaps no man has ever done so. Perhaps one can take the agonies of modern poets too seriously. Many artists, not only small ones, have no real indwelling force such as a man like Beethoven obviously possessed. They are merely very impressionable and _adopt_ an attitude towards life, and this attitude is accepted and maintained, not because they really think it is true, but because they derive strength from it. It gives them a centre from which they can work; it gives them a feeling of strength and completeness. The maintenance of their attitude towards life may become the condition that they exist and function as artists at all. Nevertheless, the attitude is maintained only by a constant effort of will, although, since the motive is self-preservation, the artist will nearly always think himself perfectly sincere. But I shall, without going into these refinements, take the unhappiness of our modern literary men at its face-value, those, that is, who believe that the universe is purposeless and think this belief is founded on scientific evidence.

The point of view has been well put recently by Mr I. A. Richards,[3] a literary critic who thinks it possible that poetry may be destroyed by science. He speaks of the “neutralization of nature” which has been effected by science, and contrasts this with the “magical view” of the world that has hitherto been accepted by artists. What he means by this is that science reveals to us a universe quite indifferent to all human aspirations, whereas artists have hitherto assumed that man is of cosmic significance. The poet must learn to accept the scientific universe and give up believing in things like “inspiration”, “a reality deeper than the reality of science”, and so on. “Experience”, says Mr Richards, “is its own justification”, by which he appears to mean that experience just happens to be what it is by some kind of accident. It points to nothing beyond itself. The ground for this belief is not, in Mr Richards’ case, old-fashioned materialism. “It is not what the universe is made of but how it works, the law it follows, which makes knowledge of it incapable of spurring on our emotional responses.” This reminds one of the “iron laws” of the Victorian age, which many people found so depressing, although the logical connection between existence having conditions and existence being purposeless is a little hard to follow. But although the particular iron laws of the Victorians have gone, Mr Richards finds the theory of relativity no more cheering. “A god voluntarily or involuntarily subject to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity does not make an emotional appeal and physics does not find it necessary to mention him.” Apparently it is the existence of any law at all that is resented: the poet can feel happy only in a world of pure miracle. I strongly doubt the correctness of Mr Richards’ diagnosis.[4] I am certain that not all poets have been as childish as that. No――the essential element in this general outlook is not that phenomena occur in an orderly way, but that man’s existence is not regarded as forming part of some universal purpose. The essential element is the same as in old-fashioned materialism, the “accidental collocations of atoms” theory. The emphasis was on the “accidental” not on the “atoms”. This becomes clear when Mr Richards describes the appropriate emotional reaction to his view. “A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in consciousness of this necessary reorganization of our lives.” It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the ground. But if Mr Richards is right, I suggest that the poets who are so depressed by law and order should study, besides the theory of relativity, Quantum Theory. They will find there much that is, at present, agreeably miraculous. But one need not fly to miracles to get rid of the bug-bear of “unalterable law”. It is only necessary to understand the true status of the unalterable laws, and this is just what relativity theory enables us to do.

[3] _Science and Poetry_, 1926.

[4] But possibly Mr Richards means that the scientific description does not include values. See Section 5 of this essay.

3

The idea that there is a conflict between science and art, which is at bottom the idea that there is a conflict between science and mysticism, rests, I have suggested, upon an old-fashioned conception of the status of physics. The first duty of a man who bases his conclusions on science is to make sure that his science is up-to-date. The science that leads to the depressing conclusions I have just sketched is not up-to-date. Until a few years ago the physicist thought that the material universe he dealt with was a real, objectively existing universe in the sense that, in the absence of consciousness, it would be very much the same as it appeared to be. This universe was subject to laws, and these laws might conceivably have been different. There was no _a priori_ reason, for instance, why the force of gravitation should not vary as the inverse cube of the distance. There was no _a priori_ reason why matter and energy should be conserved. These were laws of governance of the material universe; their discovery had required much effort and the rejection of alternatives. Man was in no sense responsible for them: he happened to live in a universe governed by them. These were the iron laws of the Victorians and are the laws, apparently, that depress modern poets. One of the great discoveries of relativity theory is that these laws need be no more depressing than the laws of Euclidean geometry. No artist has felt his aspirations baseless because he cannot draw a circle whose circumference is six times its radius. He has no more right to despair because there is an inexorable law of gravitation. This has been made clear by Professor Eddington, whose mathematical development of relativity theory is of great philosophical importance, and would, in a more adequately educated community, be given more newspaper headlines than Tutankhamen. The real universe, according to relativity theory, is a four-dimensional world of point-events. Of the nature of point-events we know nothing. All that we require to know, for the purposes of physics, is that it takes four numbers to specify a point-event uniquely, and that some kind of structure――a minimum amount of structure――may be postulated of the world of point-events. We then find, purely by mathematical processes, that certain characteristics of this world will have the quality of permanence. The mind, faced with this world of evanescent point-events, selects those characteristics that are permanent as being of special interest. This is merely because the mind happens to be that kind of thing. As a consequence of this predilection of the mind there arises space and time, matter, and the laws of nature. There arises, in fact, the “objective universe”. The real world of point-events has many other characteristics to which the mind pays no attention. A different principle of selection, exercised on the same total world of point-events, would result in an utterly different universe, a universe that is, for us, quite unimaginable. And the universe that the mind has selected and constructed from the world of point-events does not in the least depend on what the point-events _are_. All that is necessary is that a certain minimum amount of structure should be attributed to the world of point-events. It is from the relations between the point-events, quite independent of their substance, that the mind has created the material universe and its laws. These laws, it must be emphasized, are _necessary_ consequences of the mind’s selective action. They are necessary in the same sense that the sum of the three interior angles of a Euclidean triangle must be two right angles. Of the underlying reality deduced by physics we can say almost nothing. It may be what Newton called the “sensorium” of God, and the point-events may be his thoughts. They do not succeed one another in time for, at this stage of analysis, space and time are “merged in one”. This perfectly gratuitous hypothesis may appeal to some mystics, for our thoughts, considered as belonging to the world of point-events, would be part of the thoughts of God. It would be indeed true that in him we lived and moved and had our being. We see, then, the limitations of physics. All that depends on the _structure_ of reality belongs to physics, including other universes than ours. All that depends upon the _substance_ of reality for ever lies outside physics. As to the actual universe we live in, why we should regard it as actual is a problem for psychology. The difference between the actual and the non-actual is a distinction conferred by our minds. It is very probable that the whole movement of the universe in time is also contributed by our minds. It seems to be true that events do not take place――we come across them. Why we do not know the future is again a question of psychology. Ignorance of the future, like the existence of the material universe, is a clue to the constitution of our minds. This has a bearing on the question of “purpose” in the universe. The conception of purpose seems to suppose a process in time, and therefore may be a totally irrelevant idea when applied to reality.

The philosophical implications of relativity theory will doubtless take a long time to work out. The four-dimensional universe of point-events is something that can be argued about but it is, to use an old-fashioned phrase, “inconceivable”. Mankind, excepting professional logicians, never remains content with the inconceivable. A purely logical conclusion is not enough; it has to be grasped imaginatively, by which I do not necessarily mean that it has to be pictured. To become familiar with a theory does not merely mean that one is able, as a form of mental wire-walking, to slip nimbly back and forth over the logical connections of the structure. It means taking it into oneself in some indefinable manner――becoming “intimate” with it. Only when a theory is “realized”, as we say, do we feel that we truly understand it. Ideas, points of view, that we were able to see only in flashes, become part of our normal intellectual equipment. The process may well be called a growth of consciousness. There are ideas which our consciousness, when it first approaches them is, as it were, too flabby to grasp. We first have to exercise our mental muscles. Every student of a line of thought such as mathematics, which is rather outside our normal preoccupations, becomes aware of an actual change in his mental powers. Notions so abstract that at first they seemed almost meaningless gradually become perfectly clear and permanent additions to one’s mental resources. Students of musical composition find that their capacity for mentally hearing a number of parts rapidly increases. In some cases it is almost as if a new faculty of the mind were born and developed.