The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

Among scientific men it is a commonplace that for accuracy and genuineness or purity, that is to say for complete abstraction, science must be (1) independent of "life," all the subjective interests, whether personal or social, the interests of politics, industry, morality, or religion, being science's most unsettling influences; (2) specialistic, the "Jack of all trades" in science being anything but persona grata among scientific men; and (3) agnostic or "positivistic," all conceits about what is beyond positive experience, and even all dogma about what seems really present to experience, being most arrant heresy; and every one of these ideals, besides being derived from the habits or instincts, commonly unrecognized and unappreciated, of the ordinary consciousness, is wholly in accord with the conclusions of the preceding chapter. The attitude of science, as there disclosed, involved a looking to an external world—the objectivism; a division of the field—the specialism; and an experimental, adventurous mind—the agnosticism or positivism. It involved other things, too, but these three are now selected, so to speak, as three determining points of science's circumference. Consideration of them, to whatever results it may lead, should meet all the demands of the present task. As for the results, these will show fundamental difficulties, very like to those of ordinary experience, to lurk in each one of the three ideals. The scientific consciousness is abstract and just for being in consequence objectivistic, specialistic, and agnostic it is artificial and unreal, though perhaps only relatively or not unmixedly unreal, and especially it is honeycombed with paradoxes and contradictions, with the translated but not transcended contradictions of ordinary life.

To the examination, therefore, of these difficulties, or limitations, we must now turn, taking the three ideals in order.

I. SCIENCE WOULD BE OBJECTIVE.

The ideal of a purely objective science is in many ways a great delusion, for it may effectually blind science to its necessary subjectivism, so far as it gets any substance or content, and to its necessary formalism, so far as it acts upon a merely external world. With regard, for example, to the last point, just so far as the ideal of objectivism is realized, science becomes merely so much technique. By technique here is meant everything that makes scientific work purely mechanical. A purely mechanical procedure is the inevitable, the natural and necessary method of a pure objectivism. Scientists have their formal etiquette about pre-empted problems or fields of research, their notions about originality as dependent merely on working a new field—hence the pre-emption to prevent transgression or theft of originality, their conceits about bibliographical information, linguistic proficiency and technical phraseology, their satisfaction over "publication," "contribution," "production," and "research," and an almost Gaston-Alphonse deference of each to each among the different branches of scientific inquiry; and under technique all these things, as well as the more familiar matters of method and apparatus and material, are here included. Physicians, we are told, and not infrequently also their patients, suffer from a professional ritual and etiquette, but they are far from being alone in their misery. Scientists, would-be objective scientists, and all who appeal to them, are a close second. Technique must have its real uses, but plainly it has its limitations. It is one of the enabling conditions, a sine qua non of science, if science is to be objective, but it takes the life out of science. A science that gets no further, that is only "objective," that is, "pure" and "inductive" is wholly vain, being like a domestic animal which is only a pet, or rather like a vigorous plant that runs luxuriously to leaves, never bearing either flowers or fruit. Its much vaunted observation and experiment may fill a good many pages and a good many volumes, but material, even material in books, and experiments, even carefully, minutely reported experiments, are neither roses nor apples.

A fruitful science relates itself to something more than a mere independent object. A fruitful science involves synthesis, not formal, but real synthesis, as well as analysis, its decomposed object being also only the separated details of some organizing activity. Indeed, however unconsciously, or even however against its own avowed interest and desire, science has that organizing activity in the real life. The "real life" has seemed aloof, but science is truly an integral part of this life. Science's very genesis in social evolution, in spite of, nay, even because of its abstraction by a distinct class and the assumption of a professional garb, is witness to this relationship. Again, fruitful science is practical invention, not abstract discovery, and the real life of a person or a society or a race is as important to it, as much a warrant of its conclusions, as any object, however mathematically described or describable, with which science was ever concerned. As for the thing invented, the tool or the machine, in general the instrument of adaptation to environment, this sometimes takes visible, wholly material form; sometimes it appears as a method in the practical arts or in the fine arts or in education or government; sometimes it is only an atmosphere or point of view, a habit of mind; but whatever it is, it is useful, incalculably useful, and its invention as something that is widely distinguished from mere receptive observation, if this be even possible, or from mere accurate description, is science's primary justification.

But this, objects somebody, is sentiment, and sentiment of the sort that quite destroys science, making real science, serious and accurate science, quite impossible. Well, it does of course dispense with a purely objective science. It suggests the idea, perhaps the uncomfortable idea, that, as in some other departments in life, so in science, death is a condition of success. Science must die to its objective self before it is saved; it must lose its whole world to gain its own soul. Or, to put the same idea differently, if the assertion be not too much like verbal play, a subjective science is not hopelessly unscientific. Is a man less interested in having a proper edge on his razor because eventually he must use it on himself? Nothing but a keen edge can ever ensure a "velvet shave," and nothing but the truth, the more accurate it be the better, can ever set anybody free.

Still, all questions of sentiment or of sharp razors or of the accuracy that liberates aside, we can get support for our scepticism about a science that, if purely objective, must be also empty and mechanical from science itself. The consistent evolutionist is obliged to deny pure objectivity to any scientific knowledge, just as in general he is obliged to think of all consciousness as never something by itself, but one of the positive conditions of organic development. To be an evolutionist, and at the same time to think of consciousness as only an external ornament of life, or in its higher development as the exclusive privilege of a distinct class, to think of it as an aside in life, perhaps a sudden result without in any way being also a condition of development, to suppose science to be solely objective and for its own sake, is nothing more or less than simply to stultify oneself completely. Even for the historian, whether avowed evolutionist or not, whose great business is to remind us that what is here or what is now is not all, the devotion to science for its own sake, which also in other times has possessed the minds and hearts of certain men, can be at best only a local and a passing phenomenon. Finally, apart from the standpoint of evolution or history, it is to be said that human society at large is sure to resent what may be styled the aristocratic temper which pure, objective science is all too likely to acquire from the exclusiveness of its ritual or technique, or say from its abstract and academic dress, and the resentment of society is important evidence always. Aristocratic temper, whatever its direction, is certainly as desirable in social life as it is necessary; it is incident to the development of all institutions—political, ecclesiastical, industrial, ceremonial, educational, and, to add to the familiar list, epistemological; but the resentment which it is sure to awaken is not one whit less serviceable to society, ensuring as it does, among other things, the extension of science, the translation of science into life.

So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties have now appeared as affecting the objectivism of science. The first, that of burial in technique, gave us our starting-point, and the second has come to light with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a would-be objective science, through its bondage to technique, made formal and empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a would-be objective science materially—that is, for its scientific doctrines—and formally—that is, for its motives and methods—is always in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and so not purely, or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be empty, a matter merely of dead rites and dry symbols and irrelevant ideas, or it must be pertinent and practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence is gone. A purely objective science seems to get only subjectivity for its pains.

Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is far from denying any meaning to such words as object or objectivity. The object is denied only as an external independent existence. The object still remains to experience as possibly of mediative value to its beholders, mediating between the actual in their life and the possible, between the partial life and the whole life, the old and the new, the social, which is always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or, conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is an independent, wholly external world, but that there is a whole or a possible or a personal. "Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona Macleod. "It is a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its own whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of man its word, and the heart of woman its silence." We are all one. Man and nature, which man beholds, or the subject and the object, of which the subject is conscious, are one; but an objective science would hide this from us, not tell it to us.

But besides burying science in technique, and besides involving it in an only disguised, albeit a socially significant subjectivity, the ideal of wholly objective knowledge has also made science conservative in a way that must have peculiar interest here. Reference is not now made to the double truth or the double life which an objective science sanctions so cordially that men can hold so-called advanced scientific ideas without feeling them in any serious conflict with the traditional teachings of religion and morality, but to something else perhaps not wholly unrelated to this, and certainly not less suggestive of contradiction. While science is commonly supposed to be advanced and radical and up to date, if anything is, it is so only in a way which calls for a very important qualification, for it manages to perpetuate, not indeed the letter, but the spirit of old views. At its best a purely objective science can give only a new material content, or a new arrangement perhaps of an old content, to existing and time-worn forms of thought; it cannot possibly do that in which real progress must always consist, namely, develop, recognize, and adopt new forms of thought, new categories; it cannot do that without betraying its own ideal of mere objectivism. Objective science—to give a commonplace example—has said relatively to a certain doctrine of creation that spirit did not precede matter, but instead matter preceded spirit, and—except for the excitement of the drawn battle which such a startling declaration has precipitated—this can hardly be said to have involved any great advance. Cause and effect have indeed been made to change places by the new deal, and perhaps in common fairness it was high time that a change be made, but no new conception of causation itself has been recognized. The new creationalism, the materialistic, has no essential advantage over the old. Again, while deposing the First Cause, an objective science has made all things causes after the same plan—individual, arbitrary, antecedent causes; and this is only to multiply indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, the offensive creationalism. "Not so," says some one; "there is a splendid democracy in it, and it implies a great deal more than mere multiplication. Indefiniteness, or at least infinity, transforms anything or everything to which it is applied. By making all things causes one forces into science the important principle of the equation of action and reaction, everything being seen as acted upon as well as acting, and this principle, as if by turning creationalism fatally against itself, yields a new standpoint, that of mechanicalism." Granted, and granted cordially, but has a purely objective science any right to change its standpoint?