Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

II

Now to consider the more personal qualities of the scientific spirit, that is those that affect human relations. Naturally it is not pretended that all scientific men have these personal qualities, any more than the qualities already indicated. Men of science are human like the rest of us, and eminently liable to the weaknesses that the rest of us have. Sometimes even they seem more liable, perhaps because the impersonality of their occupation makes the personal weaknesses stand out. But such weaknesses are obviously not a result of the scientific spirit, but obtain in spite of it, and its higher tendency should be to diminish or restrain them.

It is interesting, in this personal and human connection, to see how the scientific qualities develop into virtues to some extent akin to the Christian ideal. For example, the recognition and admission of ignorance, on which we have been insisting, must carry with it, should carry with it, the eminently Christian virtue of humility. When you are oppressively aware how little you know, how far your information is from being adequate and your conclusions from being final, it is impossible to maintain a spirit of arrogance or self-assertion. You turn to others for their agreement and support, in the tone of Goethe’s remark that he felt immensely strengthened in a conclusion if he found that even one other human being agreed with him. Or, as Darwin puts it: ‘Though I, of course, believe in the truth of my own doctrine, I suspect that no belief is vivid until shared by others.’[140] The truly scientific worker should be ready to defer to the opinion of his fellow-workers and instantly to surrender his own when convinced that theirs is based upon wider observation or more valid arguments.

Closely connected with humility is tolerance, and this virtue also flows from the admission of ignorance almost as a necessity. If you appreciate your limitations and that your knowledge is as incomplete as your deductions are hazardous, you will be at all times ready to recognize that others may be right and you may be wrong, and you will have a gentle forbearance toward even what appear to be their errors. ‘True science necessarily carries tolerance with it,’ says Voltaire.[141]

To be sure, the mention of Voltaire in connection with tolerance rather makes one smile, for if he fought for tolerance as for other things, he fought hard and bitterly, and he was always fighting for something. And in general it may well be urged that the history of scientific thought shows anything but tolerance and gentleness. Indeed it sometimes seems as if scientists were a peculiarly waspish and petulant generation, apt to fly out, and to fly at, with what to the ordinary mind hardly appears sufficient excuse. Darwin himself appreciates this unfortunate tendency, and frequently deplores it: ‘How strange, funny, and disgraceful that nearly all ... our great men are in quarrels in couplets.’[142]

But here again, it is human nature, in its inborn weakness and self-satisfaction, that does the quarreling, and the scientific spirit, taken in itself, certainly tends to quiet and lenify. In one of his very latest letters Darwin wrote: ‘You have shown how a man may differ from another in the most decided manner, and yet express his difference with the most perfect courtesy. Not a few English and German naturalists might learn a useful lesson from your example; for the coarse language often used by scientific men towards each other does no good and only degrades science.’[143] But it is difficult for humanity to learn, and when it is learned to remember, the profound truth expressed in the saying of Edmond Scherer in regard to tolerance: ‘The fundamental dogma of intolerance is that there are dogmas, that of tolerance is that there are only opinions.’

And tolerance, the mere recognition that others may be right and we wrong, even as to our most cherished theories, when it is enlightened by clearness of intelligence and warmed by sympathy, easily passes, as we have seen with Darwin in an earlier chapter, into that most delightful of all virtues, or more properly that root of all virtues, the power and the instinct of putting ourselves in others’ places, of entering into their lives. It is not quite enough to respect others’ opinions, or even to defer to them. One should go further, and endeavor to understand how they arrive at them, and to do this, one should be ever alive to the vast community of human nature, and the infinite threads and strands that bind together our hearts and the hearts of even those who appear most different from us. It is this power of comprehension, this effort at comprehension, of others’ point of view, which leads to the wonderful gentleness of tone that makes a great part of Darwin’s charm: ‘You are mistaken in thinking that I ever said you were wrong on any point. All that I meant was that on certain points, and these very doubtful points, I was inclined to differ from you.’[144] It is evident that in arguing, in discussing, Darwin always sought to understand his adversary’s position, and in order to do this, to put himself entirely in his adversary’s place.

The nature of science in itself tends to foster and encourage this disposition to enter into the lives of others, because by its abstract character and its larger aims and interests it inclines to reduce as much as possible the elements of self, and of self-interest and self-assertion. Indeed, here again it is curious to see how, when the pursuit of scientific truth rises to its highest intensity and white heat of ardor, it brings about a sort of self-abnegation, which approaches and suggests the mystical self-abandonment of Christian ecstasy. He shall leave all and follow me, says religion. And we have seen something of the same spirit in Darwin’s apparently colder declaration that the man of science should have neither wife nor child, but a heart of stone, and a brain altogether free for the vast, abstract researches which make the whole of his life.

There is indeed something almost religious in the passion with which the true scientist casts aside all personal considerations, often all considerations of comfort and ease and indolent enjoyment, in the absorbing effort to attain the pure truth which he is seeking. With what intensity of delight does one fling an old delusion behind him. As Darwin puts it: ‘To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.’[145] With what rapture does one become aware of the progress of scientific thought: ‘How grand is the onward rush of science; it is enough to console us for the many errors which we have committed, and for our efforts being overlaid and forgotten in the mass of new facts and new views which are daily turning up.’[146]

It is needless to say that thousands of others besides Darwin are infected with this rapture, and to quite the same or an even greater degree. In the dawn of scientific thought we have Lucretius, than whom none was ever more ardent, exulting in his passionate effort to dart the beams of intellectual day through the swirling, smothering mist of error and delusion. Or again, in our own time we have such excitement as is described by Pasteur, so nearly the correlative of Darwin in many ways, when he feels himself to be on the brink of discovery: ‘I was so happy that I was overcome by a nervous trembling that made it impossible for me to bring my vision again to the polarizing apparatus.’[147]

So the pursuit of pure truth, and the giving one’s life to the achievement of it, elevates, and clarifies, and chastens, almost like the pursuit of virtue, and the two tend even to merge in one another, as in Goethe’s noble saying: ‘The real love of truth shows itself in this, that one knows how to find and cherish the good everywhere.’ Or to conclude with another of Darwin’s sentences, all the more impressive for its simplicity and restraint: ‘For myself I would however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of something the same nature as the instinct of virtue and our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.’[148]