11. The Attainment by Man of the Knowledge of his Relations to Nature.
But to many the greatest result achieved by the progress of Natural Knowledge seems not to have been so much in its practical applications and its material gifts to humanity as in the fact that Man has arrived through it at spiritual emancipation and freedom of thought.
In the latter part of the last century man’s place in Nature became clearly marked out by the accumulation of definite evidence. The significance and the immeasurable importance of the knowledge of Nature to philosophy and the highest regions of speculative thought are expressed in the lines of one who most truly and with keenest insight embodied in his imperishable verse the wisdom and the aspirations of the Victorian age:—
‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies:
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’
To many the nearer approach to that ‘understanding’ has seemed the greatest and a sufficient result of scientific researches. The recognition that such an understanding leads to such vast knowledge would seem to ensure further and combined effort to bring it nearer and nearer to the complete form, even if the perfect understanding of the ‘all in all’ be for ever unattainable. Nevertheless, the clearer apprehension, so recently attained, of man’s origin and destiny, and of the enormous powers of which he has actually the control, has not led to any very obvious change in the attitude of responsible leaders of human activity in the great civilized communities of the world. They still attach little or no importance to the acquirement of a knowledge of Nature: they remain fixed in the old ruts of traditional ignorance, and obstinately turn their faces towards the past, still believing that the teachings and sayings of antiquity and the contemplation, not to say the detailed enumeration, of the blunders and crimes of its ancestors, can furnish mankind with the knowledge necessary for its future progress. The comparative failure of what may be called the speculative triumph of the New Philosophy to produce immediate practical consequences has even led some among those prejudiced by custom and education in favour of the exclusive employment of Man’s thought and ingenuity in the delineation and imaginative resurrection of the youthful follies and excesses of his race, to declare that the knowledge of Nature is a failure, the New Philosophy of the Nature-searchers a fraud. Thus the well-known French publicist M. Brunetière has taken upon himself to declare what he calls the Bankruptcy of Science.