Part 2

The physics of recent years has made heavy demands upon our capacity for realization. The electron theory, with its analysis of matter into “disembodied charges of electricity” required, for its understanding, the breaking up of old habits of thought. To young students the idea was, at first, extremely baffling――almost nonsense. To realize it one had to make more abstract one’s idea of matter until the notion of “substance” was replaced by the notion of “behaviour”. Anything that behaved in the way characteristic of matter was matter. The central idea of the restricted principle of relativity, the idea of different time-systems, was still more difficult to grasp. In this case we had to become convinced that our ordinary idea of simultaneity, an idea which seemed perfectly clear, was really a bogus idea. The attacks on the theory of relativity show, for the most part, merely that their authors are unable to abandon old habits of thought. With the complete theory of relativity, as we have it now, the task of adjustment has become enormous. There cannot be, even now, more than very few scientific men who naturally approach a problem from the point of view of relativity theory. In most cases a conscious effort of mental preparation is required, such as occurs when a novelist, sitting down to continue his work, deliberately thinks himself into the appropriate frame of mind. Yet doubtless the next generation or so will think in terms of relativity theory as naturally as we thought in terms of the Newtonian system. I would not hold it as impossible that the human mind may come to realize, imaginatively as well as logically, the four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it seems that the mind of the physicist, at any rate, will have to do more than become familiar with relativity theory. It will have to accommodate itself somehow to the quantum theory for, although we can write down the laws which govern sub-atomic phenomena and make deductions from them, these laws are, at present, unintelligible. An electron behaves as if it had foreknowledge of what it was about to do and could make the mathematical calculations necessary to achieve its end. We cannot admit this to be possible, and we can only suppose that the difficulty arises from the way we think about things. We must learn to think in a different way, and what the consequences of that new way of thinking will be no one can say. We know very little of the possibilities of the development of the human consciousness.

The proper attitude to-day in which the problem of man’s place in nature should be approached is one of bewilderment and humility. Both the material universe and the mind of man are very mysterious things. At the present time it is only an inadequate mind which is confident that it knows what is impossible. There was never a time when hearty dogmatism and loud confidence were more out of place. We must think as best we can, of course. The next step upward in the development of the human consciousness will not be achieved by either slovenly credulity or slovenly scepticism, but only by a terrifying mental travail. I see a human mind as some multiple plant, here in full flower, there still in the bud. Different minds have flowered in different ways. Beethoven’s _Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit_ points to the complete development in him of something which those of us who understand him have only in embryo. In those who do not understand him it is non-existent. And the great mystics ought at least to make us doubt whether it is we who are not deficient rather than they who are mad. It is rash to dismiss our exceptional moods, our strange flashes of what seems like insight, as mere whimsies without significance. They may be faint stirrings of the next thing that is destined to become fully alive. All that we can say is that the mind lives in a universe largely of its own creation, and that the universe, together with the mind, will change in ways we cannot foresee.

4

We have seen that the philosophy that regards man as a meaningless accident in an alien universe receives no support from modern physics. The true ground of that philosophy is now, as it always has been, the apparently meaningless misery that forms part of life. It is not by mistaking matter for an ultimate reality or by pondering on the fact that laws of nature exist that we can conclude that man is of no cosmic significance. That conclusion can be reached logically only on the basis of arbitrary assumptions. But the conclusion is not, in fact, reached in that way: it is reached through feeling. And it cannot be transcended by a logical process, but only in virtue of a mystic experience.

The old materialistic outlook, although it no longer has any scientific justification, is still active in many branches of science. It has made popular certain types of explanation and is the cause of the direction pursued by certain researches. In particular it has led to a great deal of useless or misleading work being done in the attempt to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences.

A good deal of what passes for scientific work amongst eugenists and psychologists consists of attempts to match things which are qualitatively different. This is the favourite procedure of that kind of psycho-analysis which reduces everything to sex. Discrimination is fatiguing; also, it makes appeal to sensibilities which many earnest “scientific workers” do not possess. It is much easier to make measurements than to know exactly what you are measuring.

To give up the ideal of measurability would be equivalent, to many people, to abandoning “science” altogether. “Science is measurement”, we are informed. This ideal is borrowed from physics, the science whose aim it is to give mathematical descriptions of phenomena. But we may have branches of knowledge that may fairly be called science although they are not mathematical. We may find it necessary to use concepts that cannot be mathematically defined. It may not be mere lack of knowledge which prevents biology, for instance, from being a mathematical science. It may be impossible in the nature of things ever to give the equation to a chicken. But the bias towards measurability is very strong and has led to measurements being made, particularly in psychology, where we really have no clear idea at all as to what is being measured. When, for instance, Professor Karl Pearson compares fraternal resemblances in such things as stature and arm-length with fraternal resemblances in intelligence and conscientiousness, what exactly is he doing? A great deal of what is called experimental psychology impresses one as being nothing but the application of an inappropriate technique by exceptionally innocent and unworldly “scientists”. The methods found so successful in physics are applied to everything under the sun. It is pretty obvious that this is not due to some mystic, Pythagorean conviction that number is the principle of all things, but merely to mental inertia. Many “intelligence tests” and many of the statistical results obtained by the eugenists impress the ordinary person as being laughably superficial. In their eagerness to “measure” something our researcher seem to lose their ordinary common sense, whereas their subject really requires the subtlety and sympathy of a very good novelist. It is amazing the number of dull, unimaginative people who find a congenial life work in prosecuting researches in pseudo-science. The ordinary public, unfortunately, does not discriminate between one kind of science and another, with the result that the contempt they rightly feel for some so-called men of science is apt to be extended to all scientific men. Thus Mr G. K. Chesterton, having heard that some “scientists” explain the shape of a church spire as symbolical of phallic worship, begins to doubt the whole Royal Society. It must be remembered that in science real insight and imagination are as rare as in any other human activity. In the clear-cut sciences, such as physics and chemistry, where the right way of attacking problems is known and where an elaborate technique has been built up, there is plenty of room for valuable routine work. All the difficult preliminary work of getting right conceptions and principles has been done. The routine worker can measure the electric capacities of different condensers because the difficult notion of electric capacity has been made clear by his masters. But the routine worker in psychology who measures “intelligence” is not doing anything definite at all. His subject is not yet ripe for the application of such exact methods. In this way the prestige of physics has exerted a harmful influence on the study of psychology. It is true that some experimental psychologists are becoming aware of the fact that they do not always know what they are measuring. There are controversies as to what a given set of measurements has measured, and some measurements seem to be undertaken on the off-chance that a meaning will some day be found for them. It is not suggested that all experimental psychology is of this kind, but it is certainly true that many psychological papers, complete with correlation coefficients and “curves” of all kinds, wear an air of precision to which they have no real claim.

A more definitely materialistic bias is observable in the attempts to explain psychological happenings in terms of physiology. The result is that learned and acute men, caught in the jungle of neurology, painfully fight their way out with some such epoch-making discovery as that one learns a subject more rapidly if one is interested in it. This result, which is supposed to be incompatible with the purely physiological theory of the mind, owes all its difficulty to that in compatibility. Otherwise it is a perfectly obvious fact of experience. If it were not for the prestige achieved by materialism in the Victorian age it is probable that psychology would be very much further advanced than it is. But the side-tracking influence of that philosophy has meant that psychologists have had painfully to discover the obvious. But if materialism, in small doses, delays the recognition of the obvious, it does, when fully developed, deny the obvious. This is what the behaviourists do. They deny that we think or that we can form images in our minds. The only possible answer to this theory is a satire, as when Voltaire answered the theory that in this world everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds by writing _Candide_. But in this queer modern world behaviourism, instead of being greeted with laughter, is answered carefully and politely, apparently in the spirit in which Monsieur Bergeret shook hands with the _vers libriste_ poet, “for fear of wronging beauty in disguise”. The position of the ordinary man in face of these theories is, nevertheless, a difficult one. Behaviourism may sound to him nonsense, but so does non-Euclidean geometry. His natural reaction would be to class both of them with the theory that the English are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. Nevertheless, non-Euclidean geometry is not nonsense. In these circumstances it is probably fortunate that there are people patient enough to prepare careful and reasoned refutations of any whimsy that anybody cares to put forth. The extraordinary predisposition of the learned towards concocting merely silly theories must always be borne in mind. Studious persons often have a very small range of experience of life; they have nothing like so broadly based a sense of probability as the ordinary man of the world possesses, which is why so many of them seem curiously innocent and gullible. The beaming and genial professor expounding his theory often seems curiously like a child playing with toys. The mixture of amusement and respect with which the world watches him is, on the whole, the correct reaction. As long as he is dealing with the incomprehensible one may grant him authority. Nobody dreams of questioning astronomical pronouncements about forthcoming eclipses. But when he is talking about the very stuff of our ordinary experience, as in psychology, we do wrong to accept the obviously absurd for fear that it cannot be as silly as it looks. A great deal of what is called psycho-analysis, for instance, is merely silly. Only people singularly deficient in common-sense and completely lacking in a sense of humour could have invented anything so preposterous. Undoubtedly some pathological states are of sexual origin, but the lengths to which the theory has been carried and the kind of interpretations that are given make the development of psycho-analysis one of the greatest psychological curiosities of our time. Whole-hearted belief in psycho-analysis certainly points to the existence of a complex. As with any other complex, it is defended by arguments to which none except those who are similarly afflicted can attach the slightest validity. The complex is strongly materialistic, not in the sense that everything is reduced to “matter and motion”, but in the sense that the lowest human activities are made explanatory of all the rest. One often finds, associated with a belief in materialism, a desire to deny any form of spiritual excellence. The ostensible motive is simplification, as when material substances are reduced to a small number of chemical elements; but it is usually obvious, from the forced explanations that are attempted, that the real motive is something very different. Much, of course, must be attributed to insensitiveness, as we see when we turn to psycho-analytic explanations of works of art. The extraordinary force of the psycho-analysts’ complex is well shown by the sort of arguments they find convincing. Thus they may profess to show that artistic tastes never exist without suppressed sexual desires. Their way of establishing this fact, which is chiefly by asserting it, is comparatively rational. But they then proceed to the statement that a taste for art is merely a disguised form of sexual desire. They might as well say that it is a disguised form of hunger, since artists are quite as notorious for being hungry as for being erotic, and artistic tastes are never found to exist in a man who takes no nourishment.

Not only much modern psychology, but some other modern sciences such as comparative religion, are prone to a certain fallacy that may be called the fallacy of “explanation by origins”. This kind of explanation has been made popular by the theory of evolution, and the fallacy consists in supposing that to give the historical antecedents of a thing is to give an analysis of that thing. Thus, some authorities suppose that by showing that religion has developed from primitive magic rites, they have thereby proved that religion is nothing but a disguised form of magic. One might as well say that an oak-tree is a disguised form of an acorn, or that a man is a disguised form of an amoeba. But this error is too glaring to be committed by more than a small percentage of our modern “thinkers”. A much more insidious danger is that this type of explanation leads one to under-estimate the complexity of the thing to be explained. There is a tendency to neglect those factors in the final product which cannot be traced in its historical antecedents. This is one form of the widespread error of undue simplification. No human mind can deal exhaustively with concrete facts. Every natural entity, whether it be a flower or a nation, contains far too many factors for thought to grasp it completely. The art of human thinking is to make useful abstractions. Any man is a very complicated creature. All the artists and scientists of the world could not describe him exhaustively. But for the purposes of war every man under a certain military rank was regarded as a physical structure supporting weapons and a stomach on two legs. This abstraction was useful for the purposes for which it was invented. A somewhat different abstraction is required when a man is considered as a voter. When a man is considered as a “hand” or a “worker” it is found that slightly more complicated abstractions are required. In fact, the great fault of economic theory has been that its “economic man” was too simple an abstraction. The economist left out certain factors in his conception of man, with the result that his plans, when applied to real men, do not work. I am suggesting that the sciences which ape physics suffer, amongst other things, from inadequate abstractions. This is not surprising, for there is every reason to suppose that the extraordinary difficulties experienced by physics itself, at the present day, are due to the same cause. An analysis of this position will show us the direction of the probable future development of science and help us to see in what consists the importance of the arts.

5

Many people, including some scientific men, take science too seriously. They think that science gives a far more comprehensive picture of reality than it really does. There have been philosophers who have gone so far as to suppose that those factors of experience that science does not find it necessary to talk about do not really exist. This is the basis of the belief that colours, sounds, and scents have no “objective” existence; they exist only in the mind, whereas such qualities as mass and extension are supposed to exist independently of the mind. It is true that science does not find it necessary to refer to colours, sounds, and scents in giving its description of nature, whereas it does find it necessary to refer to mass and extension. But that does not prove that the former qualities are not as real as the latter, are not as indubitably part of the universe. The scientific concepts have by no means proved themselves adequate to account for the whole of experience. Nearly everything of real importance to man lies at present outside science. The fact is that science was undertaken as an intellectual adventure: it was an attempt to find out how far nature could be described in mathematical terms. Certain primary conceptions――time, space, mass, force, and so on――all of which can be defined mathematically, were adopted, and it became a highly absorbing game to find out how much of what goes on around us could be described, mathematically, in terms of these conceptions. The success of this effort has been so astonishing that some scientific men have forgotten to be astonished. They have come to take it for granted that a complete mathematical description of the world should be possible. This assumption is not a rational one: it is a pure act of faith. The great founders of the scheme made no such mistake: they were quite aware of the precarious nature of their enterprise. Thus, Newton, the greatest and most successful of them all, says that, if they find the mathematical method does not work, they must try a different method. The mathematical method, which is the very essence of modern science, has, however, worked splendidly. From the time of its origination in the seventeenth century until the present day it has had no serious rival. The ancient æsthetic principle, which led to the conclusion that the planets moved in circles because the circle is the only perfect figure, is still used by theosophists, but not by men of science. Similarly the old moralistic principle, which explained the fact of water rising in a pump by saying that nature abhorred a vacuum, possibly lingers on only in such superstitions as that sunlight puts the fire out. In more modern times the only notorious rival of the Newtonian method was the dialectic method of Hegel, who evolved the laws of the universe from his inner consciousness. But the best-known result of this method, that there could not be more planets than were known to exist, happened to be published on the very day that a new planet was discovered. The mathematical method, then, is at the present day without a rival. But, although we cannot at present imagine what could replace the mathematical method, we must be careful not to exaggerate the significance of the results that have been achieved by it. For these results depend not only on the method, but also on the material the method has to work with. And there is good reason to suppose, in the present state of physics, that the material with which science has worked hitherto is turning out to be not quite satisfactory.